Picasa's flow is still the best quick-edit system I've used. I am comfortable with Lightroom & Photoshop, and they're great tools. But Picasa did a stellar job of balancing simple/lightweight/fast/useful in a manner I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.

I'm glad somebody said this. I totally agree. I still use the Picasa desktop software. It's brilliant for picking out best pics and tweaking them. The web interface just doesn't compare.

When they announced that the desktop software was going away, I immediately downloaded the final version and archived it away. More than likely I will use it until Windows no longer supports it... unless someone "makes a better Picasa".

It probably has only gotten more responsive by virtue of being made to run fast on hardware from the early 2000s

You're not wrong. I'll be genuinely sad when Windows eventually drops whatever API support allows it to keep running without emulation.

Microsoft is famously unwilling to let software stop working. Picasa will probably work forever.

Dropping Win16 was a bad sign. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... talks about the back compat faction losing power at Microsoft.

Interesting read. A lot has changed in the almost 15 years since he published it. Has he done any followups?

Why isn’t there a move TO tagging photos with text? That rocks!

This is all so depressing. Picasa desktop was great. They killed it. Picasa Web albums were great. They killed it.

Why are they making everything worse?

Because the number of not-willing-to-pay, enthusiast, micro-managing, photo-organizing users is likely tiny, and not enough to support a product with Google costs.

The market is splitting more and more into consumers who take too many photos to organize it themselves and pros who need robust workflow management solutions.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Picasa, and was very sad when they stopped supporting.

I particularly miss some features, such as creating a time-lapse of all photos of a certain person with the face aligned, which was awesome to show how friends and kids change.

To be fair, I've had surprisingly good luck at searching for photos in Google Photos by text. The AI there seems pretty solid.

I've had the opposite luck. Even typing something as simple as dog misses a ton of photos with a dog in them. Perhaps I missed a switch in configuration along the way to allow aggressive AI recognition. :)

It's very inconsistent. Sometimes I search for dogs and get dog fursuiters, but not actual dogs. It does pull up fursuits if I search for them though. Shout out to the furries working on the Google Photos team.

It's not free, but Lightroom is the canonical software for this purpose.

I used lightroom too. I'm on the last version that isn't subscription based. Since I didn't upgrade my camera, I could stick with the old version (Adobe doesn't back port new cameras into the old version of its software). I noticed the "view photos on map" feature is now broken.

and since my new desktop is linux I've been looking for alternatives. "DarkTable" seems promising but I haven't really got the hand of the UI.

Darktable is a bit laggy (sadly), but it has a whole bunch of amazing filters that not even the latest Photoshop or Lightroom has, so it is well worth diving into. The equalizer tool is incredibly powerful and flexible, for example[0].

That linked video is by Robert Hutton, he makes really good tutorials for Darktable so that might help you.

Anyway, for non-realistic stuff you can add G'MIC for more filter-options and you are pretty much set for life[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVXK4eAM5E

[1] http://gmic.eu/

I want to use and like Darktable, but it just feels so foreign after using LR for over a decade at this point. I keep giving it a try, so maybe one day it will stick :)

Oh believe me, I totally get the feeling - muscle memory can backfire like that. Especially if neither old nor new interface is perfectly intuitive, and also just similar enough to be confusing where they differ.

I can't stress enough how good Robert Hutton's tutorial videos are though! They often contain little nuggets of behavior that I missed when first learning a new tool. For example, until I watched his videos I didn't know double-clicking on any curve resets it. Knowing those kind of little things adds up over time.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvlUro_Up1NBX7VK8UUu...

Flickr, the progenetor of photo tagging, remains a great place to do that.

Desktop in 2019? good luck. Adobe or Apple.

digikam is the closest I have found. UI is not nearly as clean and simple.