We understand why you are looking for apps like Picasa. It is said that THE BEST image organizer and viewer, reached its end-of-life phase in March 2016. After being acquired by Google, in 2004 from ‘Landscape’, it gained loads of popularity and eventually made it to the top of the list due to the improvements and features that were added. So I am here to help you find the best Alternatives For Picasa

metaSave is an example utility using the picasa3meta package to extract and save the metadata from a Picasa library. It will walk a photo tree (specified by --photos) and create a duplicate tree (either in the current working directory or a directory specified by --dest) and for each image found in the original photo tree create a new file with a .meta extension in the destination tree containing the pmp, ini and exiv2 metadata.

picasa3meta is a library of functions for accessing the Picasa3 metadata. See metaSave for an example application.

See docs

After looking at a variety of image management desktop applications, the one that seemed the most versatile is digikam. I haven’t found any other tools with as much power to inspect embedded metadata, and its UI is fairly similar to Picasa’s. It also doesn’t care how you organize the files on disk; it even has nice support for accessing your images over a network share. And I don’t think I’ll have problems with metadata lock-in; it can write metadata to the image files if you want, and its databases are sqlite3 databases, which means I’ll have no problems exporting data from them someday if need be.

From within Picasa:

Turn on the “show only starred images” filter. Select all images in your entire library, and add the tag “pstar” to them.
For each of your albums, select all images, and add a tag based on the album title, e.g. “palbum-architecture” or “palbum-wildlife”

Once I got the metadata into Picasa tags, I needed to find a way to read the metadata from the Picasa database files. Luckily for me, Wayne Vosberg has built a library to read these PMP files: picasa3meta. I was able to leverage it to build a tool to traverse my entire photo directory structure and extract tags for each file. The tool can then call exiftool to write embedded metadata to the image files. My tool is here: picasa_tags_to_exif.py. My script is very rough, and is intended to serve more as an example than a finished product. I can explain a few things about it.

Sharing Picasa Between Multiple User Accounts on the Same Computer

Move your photo library to a public location

Move Picasa’s internal databases to a public folder

Trick Picasa into finding the new database location

PicasaStarter enhances Picasa and adds the following features:

• You can create any number of Picasa databases and sets of pictures. This allows you to have separate pictures /database sets for different projects or uses. For instance separate databases for vacations, hobbies, and jobs.
• Databases can be created in any location, including network drives, and can be shared by multiple computers and users.
• It is very easy to create a portable solution where the pictures and database are on a portable or USB drive. The only thing that must be installed on the computer is Picasa itself. This makes it possible to show and work with your pictures on any computer.
• You can create Shortcuts on your Desktop to start Picasa with each database. This gives one step access to any photo / database set.

NOTE: Unfortunately Picasa is a single user application and is not designed to share databases or pictures. This means even with PicasaStarter only one user at a time can be accessing each database and it's pictures. PicasaStarter warns the user if anyone else is accessing the same database.

To add customized buttons to the Picasa3 program, your computer needs to have a PicasaScripts folder for .BAT (batch command) files and an ExifTools.exe file, plus a separate Picasa database "buttons" folder for .PBZ (PicasaButtonZipped) files. Follow the directions below to set it up on your computer.

I created a button that you can add to Picasa that opens the selected images in ICE. It’s available for automatic installation or manual installation. If you choose manual installation copy the file to <your user folder>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\buttons. If you want to remove it from Picasa you can delete the file from that directory. The pbz file contains two zipped files; one XML-file and one icon file. See Picasa Button API for more information about Picasa Buttons.

Prerequisites:

• Picasa Installed. I used the version 3 beta.
  • Microsoft ICE installed. Note! It must be installed to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor

ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2019, ACDSee Photo Studio Professional 2019, ACDSee Photo Studio Standard 2019, ACDSee Photo Editor 10, and SeePlus all come with a full set of features to help you manage, view, edit, create, and share photos and documents. Use this chart to see which product is right for you.

To move photos in a Picasa album into ACDSee, I open up Picassa and add a tag corresponding to the album name to all files in an album. Then in ACDSee, I search for all photos with this tag and group them into an album. Unfortunately, you cannot preserve the same sequence you had in Picasa – so you will have to manually drag and drop to recreate that sequence. (Note: With Picasa, I never used tags, but now with ACDSee, I am experiencing how my workflow can make use of them quite extensively)