Picasa

» see picasa.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

picasa launched on 15 october 2002 from lifescape, a company incubated by idealab. the pitch was that desktop photo organization in 2002 was awful. windows xp shipped with a folder browser and that was your option. picasa scanned your entire hard drive on first run and laid every jpeg you had ever saved into a date-sorted browser. you could fix red-eye in two clicks. you could crop and color-correct without launching photoshop. it was meant for people who owned a digital camera but did not own image editing skills.

google bought picasa in july 2004 and made it freeware. it became the photo app that lived on every windows machine in homes for years. by 2008 google added face recognition built on the neven vision acquisition. picasa would group your photos by who was in them, even across dozens of folders, with no effort on your part. for the era this was striking. nothing else on the desktop did it. then it added geotagging, then it added a web albums service so you could share to a url.

i used picasa heavily between roughly 2006 and 2012. ttnet broadband at home in ankara by then. i had a small canon point-and-shoot, then a dslr later. picasa was the thing that made the camera dumps manageable. you came back from a weekend trip with 200 photos. you plugged the camera in and picasa picked them up sorted by date. you flagged the keepers. nothing else on windows worked the way picasa worked.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it died ~

google announced the shutdown on 12 february 2016. the post on the official google blog was titled "moving on from picasa." the company wanted everyone on google photos, the new cloud-first product launched in may 2015. the strategic logic was that google photos lived on phones and the cloud while picasa lived on desktops. google had decided desktops were no longer where the user was.

the picasa desktop app stopped getting updates on 15 march 2016. it kept working on your machine if you already had it installed but it would not be supported. picasa web albums shut down on 1 may 2016 and the user data was migrated to google photos automatically. the desktop app remained downloadable from a few mirrors for a while, then those went away.

~ what remains ~

the desktop photo manager category. picasa was the last serious entry. nothing has replaced it on windows or mac since 2016. apple photos is the closest analog on mac and it is purely cloud-tethered. there is no successor that scans your hard drive and sorts your photos locally without uploading anything. that workflow died with picasa.

the local-first principle. picasa stored your photos on your machine. it did not upload them by default. when google killed it for google photos, the implicit deal changed. the new model was that your photos lived on google's servers and you accessed them through any device. it was a cleaner experience and it gave google more data. for users who valued the local-first model, picasa was the last working option.

the face-recognition feature, ahead of its time. picasa shipped facial grouping in 2008, four years before facebook tagged faces automatically. the technology came from the neven vision acquisition. google folded the same engineering into google photos eventually, but picasa got there first and got there on a desktop, without uploading the photos to identify them. that was unusual then and would be more unusual now.

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