Friday, December 5, 2008

Picasa 3 Sucks

I'd gotten quite used to using Picasa. That's Google's freebie photo management program that does all sorts of good things. I'd use it to quickly process a lot of photos. Picasa made it very easy to crop and to enhance a photo. It'd become one of my favorite programs and one of my most frequently used.

Until today. Picasa is no longer on my computer.

When I closed Picasa, yesterday, a window popped up telling me that an upgrade would be installed the next time I started Picasa.

I took some pictures this afternoon of the new Dallas Cowboy Stadium. I took them off the camera and started up Picasa, which, without asking me if it could, began upgrading it. I had no input.

When it finished the upgrade, Picasa re-started. With a whole new look. I instantly did not like it. But went ahead cropping and enhancing the photos. Soon my the Windows Task Manager was telling me that Page File Usage had gone to 100%. And then the overheating fan came on.

I closed Picasa and my computer calmed down.

I then tried to re-start Picasa, but the start up icon said it couldn't find the .exe file. I then saw a new program had been installed. Picasa 3 had replaced Picasa 2 and removed the Picasa 2 files.

There was an un-install option. Since Picasa 3 was worthless to me, I thought maybe if i un-install Picasa 2 would be restored. That did not happen. So, I am now Picasa free.

I need to find a replacement.

3 comments:

Gar said...

Irfanview is really good. It doesn't do automatic updates though.

It does cropping and if you ever have to convert or crop a large selection of files in the same way it'll do that.

There is also something called The Gimp. It's a bit fancier. I used it to create my banner and my thumbnail pic here. It allows you to do a whole slew of image editing.

Durango said...

I've used Irfanview for years. I'd been using Picasa to make pics look better and to easily crop them and then Irfanview to resample and save. I re-installed Picasa and the same problem occured, though not as bad. I must look into this Gimp thing. I also use Image Composer a lot. It's all a matter of habit and what I get used to.

Anonymous said...

Try PicaJet - it's free, fun and not aggressive, and you can store on Fotki or any other site.