Most photographers who like to organize their photos in an intuitive and easy-to-use way may have heard of the excellent Picasa. This was one of the best programs out there as far as managing and even editing images is concerned. The interface was sleek, the operation was smooth, and the system requirements weren’t too much either. The editing portion of the software was definitely limited, but for quick editing needs, it had enough going for it.
However, this excellent software was recently killed off and people looking for well-performing photo management programs were left wondering what they should use instead. Lightroom has always had great image management capabilities but not everyone wants to use such a heavy piece of software unless they’re using it to edit their RAW photos all the time. So, what other photo editing and management tools are out there that you can use on a budget?
Top 3: Picasa Photo Viewer. Picasa is another great solution for viewing images on Windows and Mac (Intel only). The photo viewer is able to import images in a fully automated process and put photos in chronological order. You can you can create folders, use tags, categorize by collection and share your Picasa Web Albums. For those of you who want a combination of serious photo editing chops and a powerful.
1. Luminar 4
For those of you who want a combination of serious photo editing chops and a powerful image management system, Luminar 4 should be at the top of the list. Luminar 4 is a photo editor that rivals the likes of Lightroom and Capture One – both of which are much more expensive than Luminar 4. It offers a wealth of image editing capabilities, including RAW processing, in a package that is slick and performs excellently. With Luminar 4, you can use layers, curves, masks, and a lot more of such advanced tools to ensure that your photos are exactly the way you want them to be.
For those who want to use Luminar more as a Picasa alternative than a fully-powered image editor, there are quick and easy to use options as well. The excellent presets and filters that Luminar 4 offers are second to none, making it easy to perform some instant changes to your photos. Luminar 4 also offers a robust image management system where all your photos can be sorted in various ways. This makes it much easier for you to sift through your countless images in a clean and intuitive interface. You can filter your photos by Favorites, Recently Added, Recently Edited, and more. This kind of flexibility and the addition of very powerful image editing tools make Luminar 4 kind of an older brother to Picasa rather than a direct alternative.
You can get Luminar 4 for a one-off price of $89, which is far cheaper than some other equivalent editors.
2. Google Photos
Google Photos is perhaps a more direct alternative to Picasa in the sense that it is more of a photo management service than an image editor. The best part of using Google Photos is that all your images and videos are backed up to your account online so you have a lot of flexibility in terms of accessing your images on different devices. Google Photos can work on your desktop as well as on your phone. For the desktop version to work, you need to get Google’s Backup & Sync app and install it on your computer. From within this app, you can specify which files from your PC you want to upload to the online account.
The smartphone app for Google Photos works pretty simply. You just let the app know which device folders you wish to be backed up and that’s pretty much it. Google Photos also gives you the option to delete all those files from your device storage which have already been uploaded, making it easy to clean up your storage. Once everything is uploaded, you can search for your images in various ways. You can also use the Photos app to edit your images in a light manner, which is something akin to what you could do in Picasa.
The best part of Google Photos is that it’s free if you’re okay with Google compressing your images without a noticeable loss of quality. If you want to upload full-sized images, then you would need to buy additional storage since you get only 15GB for free.
3. ACDSee Photo Studio
Another program that combines the power of RAW editing with a strong photo management feature, ACDSee Photo Studio is designed for slightly experienced users. We say that because the interface of the software is a little too complicated for beginners to be at ease with. Other than the interface though, the program is a very good alternative to Picasa if you’re looking for a larger focus on image editing capabilities. ACDSee Photo Studio works quickly thanks to being well optimized. You can use convenient modules like Manage, Photos, View, Develop, and Edit to get your work done quickly.
Your images can be easily managed in the Manage module. Here, you can add labels, index scores, categories, and more to your images. Once you do these things, finding a particular image from countless ones will become much easier. In the Develop module, you can make edits to your photos using various tools that are also found in the likes of Lightroom.
All in all, ACDSee Photo Studio is a good choice if you’re willing to spend $8.90 per month or $99 once.
4. Adobe Lightroom CC
For the most demanding photographers who don’t mind spending $9.99 per month to use it, Lightroom CC is one of the best image editors available. It has been around for a very long time and has been improved with every iteration. Lightroom CC allows you to edit your RAW files in a lot of detail within a very slick interface that works well. Its integration with Photoshop means that you can easily share images between the two programs and edit to your heart’s content.
What makes Lightroom CC a good Picasa alternative is its excellent photo management tools. Lightroom CC does most of the work in this regard itself, with little to no input needed from your side. You can search for your images in various ways and also sort them how you like. You can also make custom albums to keep a certain type of images in one location. Overall, the management capabilities of Lightroom CC are some of the best you’ll find.
5. Zoner Photo Studio X
Zoner Photo Studio X is a software that’s suitable for all kinds of photographers, from casual to professional. It offers a good range of editing tools from basic ones like Crop and Rotate to much advanced ones like RAW processing. Some elements that would attract professionals include the cloning tool, the possibility to create HDRs, and the use of layer masks. For beginners, the software also comes with 38 creative presets and filters which can be your fix if you were reliant on the effects offered by Picasa.
The software also offers a strong photo management library that categorizes your photos by folder, keyword, date, and more. You can search within such parameters to find the images you want quickly and with ease. You can use Zoner Photo Studio X for a price of $4.99 per month.
6. Windows Photo Gallery
If you want a free program to help organize your images and also edit them a little, look no further than Windows Live Photo Gallery. The program has been improved vastly by Microsoft and can now go toe to toe with similar free image viewers. Windows Live Photo Gallery takes help from facial recognition technologies to tag people in your images so you can easily search for them later. Images can also be geotagged with this program for even more ease in looking for them. The program looks and feels like a more powerful image editor rather than just a simple photo viewer. You can use the various features like cropping, rotating, and exposure control to make edits to how your images look. However, you can also dive deeper to edit highlights, shadows, and color temperature. There’s also a histogram here!
Other than these, there are other tools such as panorama stitching and Photo Fuse, which can be very fun and helpful to use. Sharing images from within the program and printing them is also very easy. All of this has made Windows Live Photo Gallery more of an image editor than it ever was, and that makes it an excellent free alternative to Picasa.
7. Phototheca
For Windows users, an option to manage their photos on their computers is Phototheca. This app has been designed keeping in mind the design cues from macOS, but it’s available for Windows which is kind of ironic. The app helps you organize your images, lightly edit them, and even share them easily. The idea behind Phototheca is to help you organize and sort your images more than anything else.
The free version of the software allows you to store up to 5000 images, which are quite a lot. You can sort images based on events, tags, dates, and locations. You can also have the software create Smart Albums itself so you don’t have to work too hard. One helpful addition to Phototheca is the Protected Photos feature by which you can easily lock certain images under a password for your privacy.
8. Photoscape
Photoscape is a free image editing software that is ideal for beginners and enthusiasts alike. The software allows you to preview images as well as edit them by adjusting exposure, colors, and more. You can also use the software to create GIFs. Some other notable features of the software include the ability to convert RAW images into JPEGs and to edit a batch of multiple images to save time. All of these features combined with an easy-to-understand design make Photoscape a useful piece of software to have on hand especially if you like making quick and simple adjustments to your photos before sharing them.
9. IrfanView
One of the fastest image viewers you’ll ever use, IrfanView has a cult following thanks to its versatility. It’s an image manager, photo viewer, and image editor all in one. The system resources this program uses are very small and that is why it works so quickly and easily. It works with various file types and helps you organize your images very well. It also comes with image editing tools that are sure to fit your needs if you’re looking to get some light editing done. You can make use of the batch processing engine to edit multiple photos quickly.
The only con we have regarding IrfanView is that its interface looks very dated and doesn’t fit well with modern OS designs. Despite that, it’s one of the best Picasa alternatives you can use today if you want some neat image organization and an image editor packed with features, in a package that’s free to use.
10. FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is yet another free program that is designed to provide stable and fast operation as far as viewing images and managing them is concerned. It also comes with many editing tools that are great for quickly adjusting images before sharing them online. FastStone Image Viewer doesn’t work too well with RAW files but is great at managing and editing JPEG images. You get various tools like red-eye removal, resizing, crossing, curves, heal, clone, sharpening, noise reduction, and color adjustments to make sure that your images are just the way you want them before you print or share them. It may not look as sleek as Picasa used to, but it sure is a worthy alternative.
11. macOS Photos
And lastly, we have Apple’s free Photos software that comes pre-installed on macOS. After Apple killed off iPhoto and Aperture, it created Photos which is a middle ground between the two older programs. Photos allows you to manage all your photos and view them easily. Finding your images is easy since the program plays very well with the OS and categorizes photos in various ways. The thing that makes Photos a great Picasa alternative is that it is packed with a lot of editing tools as well. When you open an image, you see a very clean UI with options like Light, Color, and Black & White visible on the right-hand pane. When you click on the small arrow next to each category, you get a whole lot more options to edit your images to your heart’s content.
Photos also supports plugins that turn it into a fully capable image editor for all kinds of images. This capability makes it an ideal choice for people who are currently not bothered with a lot of advanced editing tools but also want to have the option of expanding the usability of their current image editing program. Photos is a software perfect for that.
So, as you can now see, there are many great image editors and managers that can easily replace Picasa. Some of them have lesser features than Picasa while others can do much more. Whichever program you choose highly depends on your personal priorities so unless it’s free, always get your hands on the free trial first before you spend any money.
When I switched from Windows to Mac nearly a year ago the only thing that I really missed from Windows was Picasa, Google’s free photo management software. I’ve struggled getting iPhoto to work the way I wanted it to. I had used it for years and since I take a LOT of digital photos I have a pretty extensive photo library for a non-professional (25K photos, 55GB of disk space that span the past 8 years). Today Google released the beta version of Picasa for Mac and I immediately set about installing it and checking it out.
Picasa Mac Download
Here are my first impressions of Picasa for Mac.
Picasa is very comparable to iPhoto in terms of functionality. It indexes all of your photos and presents them in a scalable film strip interface. You can double click on a picture and it will zoom in to it. When I first loaded up Picasa and had it index my photos it took about 25 minutes to find them all; on my dual processor Mac Pro the CPUs barely moved while this was going on. The quality of the thumbnail image in the film strip on Picasa is not nearly as good as it is in iPhoto; I haven’t figured out if this is a setting, standard behavior in Picasa or simply a function of it being beta software. Here’s an example:
Not long after I created this comparison image I checked it again and the Picasa version is now much clearer. Again, this may be a function of the beta or a delay in the update process for the quality of the thumbnail.
You can do many of the same photo retouching jobs that you would in iPhoto with Picasa, though the approach is a little different. In iPhoto you can see a traditional profile of levels; Picasa does not display a profile, just buttons and sliders to manage the effects.
One button that Picasa does have is the 'I’m Feeling Lucky' button, which will auto-adjust lighting and colors and has an uncanny knack for making pictures look great quickly. In addition the Red-Eye removal tool will first make an automatic pass to try and pick out the red eyes in your photos. Though the automatic mode doesn’t catch everything all the time it does a nice job with the obvious ones, making it very quick to run through lots of night shots.
Switchers Have It Easy
If you have switched from Windows to Mac and used Picasa in the past you will be immediately comfortable with Picasa on OS X. The interface is markedly similar to the Windows version, including the quirky scroll bar that Picasa uses in the main viewing area.
If you happened to copy your original photo folders from your Windows machine to your Mac then you’ll be pleased to note that the Mac version recognizes your old settings (tags, stars, descriptions, etc). I kept my files in their original state, simply moving them to the large hard drive I have in my Mac Pro so it recognized everything immediately.
The reason I like the idea of having my photos stored on a separate disk and stay there is pretty simple: I share my photos with the rest of my family. So I have a 1TB data drive that has a Photo folder and within that are sub folders for the year / month-day that I took the pictures. This Photo folder is then shared on my network and my wife and kids can get to it easily if they want to grab photos and place them in Facebook, etc. Even my son, still running Windows XP, can get to them.
If you edit a file in Picasa (adjustments, red eye, etc.) the new version replaces the old version on your hard drive. A hidden folder is created under the folder where your originals are contained. This folder (labeled .picasaoriginals) contains a .picasa.ini file and the original copy of your picture. Again, this is hidden so unless you have enabled the ability to see hidden files in the Finder you will not see them.
Where the Pictures are Stored
One of my favorite features of Picasa is that while it can recognize when a camera is plugged in to it and import those pictures it will also allow you to monitor folders so that if photos are placed in them (or their sub-folders) then they will be automatically added to Picasa:
Just select the folders you want to monitor, set it to Scan Always and you don’t need to worry about importing the pictures into Picasa; all you need to do is copy the pictures from your camera over and they will automatically be picked up.
Interface Oddities
There are a couple of things about the Picasa UI that take getting used to. First off, double clicking on a thumbnail pulls up a large view of the photo. If you then click and hold the mouse button it will zoom the photo to 100%. When the image is zoomed don’t expect to use the scroll wheel to move around within the image like in iPhoto; in Picasa that will jump you to the next or previous image. If you want to scroll around in zoom mode you need to click and drag or use the thumbnail viewer to position the viewing area. A single click pulls you back out of zoom mode.
Even with the little zooming quirks this method is FAR superior to zooming in iPhoto; the only way you can zoom in on the current version of iPhoto is to place the photo in Edit mode.
Picasa For Mac Viewer Software
The software is still in beta so there are problems; as an example when I tried to remove a folder from Picasa (Right Click, Remove from Picasa…) I got the spinning beachball of death and had to Force Quit Picasa. That said, having played with it for several hours I was comfortable with it pretty quickly and am looking forward to using it more in the coming days.
If you decide to give Picasa for Mac a spin note that it only runs on Intel based Macs; PPC based Macs are out of luck. The Picasa for Mac Forums are also an excellent resource for getting questions answered.
Visit DavidAlison.com