For my research I have scripts that scrape various sites, downloading images and encoding the web page info into the JPG IPTC metadata fields. Upon opening Picasa, it automatically detects the newly scraped photos and imports them along with the IPTC data, which can then be searched. Picasa is amazing for its speed, indexing, and use of metadata. I wish Google had open-sourced it. I have no interest in loading these huge libraries of photos to the cloud. I'm wouldn't say I'm a data hoarder, but I have 4TB of images and don't want to pay Google or anyone else $x/mo. to store them. As more software moves to the cloud and requires us to also move our data to the cloud, I'm afraid options like Picasa will disappear.