5 reasons why Google Picasa will be missed

The announcement was expected, but also a shock: Google will end its support of Picasa this March in order to focus on Google Photos. Today we will look back at five reason why will miss Picasa.

1: Geotags

Current cameras, but mostly smartphones showed very early the possibility to tag photos with their current GPS location. Once tagged, the coordinates are found in the Exif metadata of pictures. And of course you are also able to manually add the GPS data.

By with having all your pictures in the database you can see all the places in the world where you've taken geotagged photos. It looks similar to the map in Facebook, but I'm sure you won't post everything online only to have a proper view of these locations.

I don't know any better way to do just that.

2: Face recognition and tagging

At the beginning there's a bit of work to do: You have to give the faces names, but with more and more data Picasa helps you recognizing persons to connect them with their name profile.

These name tag are also added in the Exif metadata of the picture file, but as far as I know only Picasa can use them properly in a database.

And even if the face recognition doesn't work, you can also add faces manually.

3: Database

The database itself has a lot to offer: You can chose a folder or drive to be scanned and Picasa shows you all pictures and videos from it - the subfolders are even sorted by changing date.

The database is stored in the following location:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums

By copying these folders you can transfer your Picasa profile to another computer.

4: Automatic scan of specified folder

You can select to have an automatic folder scan after starting the application.

All new photos and even videos will be added to the database in that procedure and the face recognition might has already done its job.

With a little trick you are also able to scan the entire hard drive...

5: Offline

As mentioned before: Despite there was an option for an online connection, you can use it completely offline.

Obviously for that reason Google decided to drop the tool, because they don't seem to have much interest to invest in offline applications any further. They say the Picasa users can switch to the online service Google Photos but there are all the important features missing....

That's also the reason why the end of its support is not really the end: You can still use it as long as it's installed. You better save the Setup file - just in case.

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A few words about Twitter

Twitter made a tons of headlines during the past week. The reason: The shrinking user count and the idea of changing the order of the tweets depending on relevance for the user.

It's an amount of 320 million users but if you compare with Facebook it looks like nothing. Especially when these numbers don't increase unlike other networks. It seems that the successful period of Twitter was a long time ago.

Controversial changes on it's way?

And now they're trying to apply new ideas which are changing the uniqueness of this network. First, they considered an idea of removing the restriction of 140 characters. In my view it's the reason I like Twitter in the first place: A few lines, maybe an additional link or media file and that's it. It makes it what it is. 

Second, the latest optional addition to use an alternate way of the timeline: 'Show me the best tweets first.' Even if it's only optional, people fear it could be a basic setting in the future and complained by using the hashtag #RIPTwitter. The Twitter boss reassured it won't be like that.

Twitter is live. Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. And Twitter is here to stay! By becoming more Twitter-y.

— Jack (@jack) February 6, 2016

That's an even more important thing to remain the same - else it would be like Facebook. That's what Twitter is about: To see everything from the people you follow and in the chronological order! And
that's how it should be like. Even to see the less important tweets.

Other new features

Interestingly, Twitter has included other interesting features during the last year: The possiblity to not only favourite a tweet - also to 'like' a tweet with the icon of a heart. Some people love, some people hate this feature, but I think it's a good addition.

Also, they added the opportunity to start a poll. It's a good way to get some answers quickly (maybe something for WhatsApp in the future?!). And for someone who has a huge amount of followers - not a bad idea.

The future?

The future is a tough question. They don't think about solutions to make Twitter more attractive to users only because it's all fine. On the other hand I recently read an article that the problem of shrinking users doesn't count for every country: In Japan the Twitter user are even gradually increasing. Half of their social media activities are on the blue bird network.

But why? The reason could be the anonymity of the user accounts which is the exact opposite to Facebook. In other countries people got used to represent themselves with their full name in the internet. And some people even do that on Twitter...

They may need a trailblazing idea to remain in the future, but it shouldn't change the entire system.
Maybe other small steps help: Like adding a wished feature to be able to edit a tweet.

On the other hand we need to keep waiting - I mean it's not like 320 million users is nothing. And it's not like nobody uses it. It'll continue. Don't panic.