Picasa#
Picasa is a Google product that helps you manage photo libraries. It has a very friendly interface and does a great job at facial recognition so you can associate pictures with people in your contacts. Makes for a nice search experience.
In recent times it appears that Google is trying to replace Picasa with its “Photos” app. A lot of the functionality appears similar. I haven’t converted over to Google Photos for three key reasons:
It’s user-centric, not family-centric. I have pictures, my wife has pictures, and we want to keep them in a single place. Right now, my wife can open up Picasa under her Windows user account and see the same set of pictures I see in the same groups. Google Photos would make one of us the “owner” of the photos and we’d lose that single, central “picture repository” we currently enjoy.
Picasa has great print control. If I want to print photos, Picasa has really nice control over print preview, resizing to fit paper, and all of that; with Google Photos, it’s all web-based so the print mechanism is up to the browser. No good.
Picasa associates people with contacts, Google Photos doesn’t. I like that Picasa can say, “This face belongs to this person in your contacts list.” Google Photos just groups similar faces. I’d like to put a name to the face, as it were. No can do.
In 2016 Google dropped Picasa support and went entirely to Google Photos. At that time I switched to PhotoDirector.