Where Did All My Photos Go On Picasa When The Transition Was Made To Google. This Is For Mac.5/9/2019 This transition to Google's new photo sharing application came last week after the search engine giant made it official that it is going to cut the support to its popular photo organiser - Picasa. Jun 26, 2017 How to Use Picasa. Picasa is a free program from Google that you can use to organize and edit your digital photographs. Mac, or Linux when you arrive. When you first open Picasa, you can choose to scan your. ![]() By Are we too reliant on Google’s services? As long-time readers know, I love Google’s products and use them daily, as they’re absolutely the best I’ve tried in their categories: Google search, Gmail, Google Chrome browser, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, mostly. But is it dangerous to give all our information and to rely so completely on one corporation? Should we be worried? Should we be looking for alternatives? Should we be moving our data out of Google as soon as possible? Another thing that concerns me is the commercialization of every aspect of our lives. It’s bad enough that advertising is already so pervasive — in television, in newspapers and magazines and blogs, on billboards and in our mail. But if it’s also in our email, calendars, maps, search, and basically everything we do every day, then there’s no hiding from it. I’m not convinced that using amazing software is worth giving a corporation complete access to my life and my attention. I’ve been thinking about this for some time. I don’t have answers. However, last week, I decided to try an experiment: could I go (mostly) Google-free? How hard would it be? How much would I like the alternatives? It took me one day. Here’s how I did it, and how it’s turned out so far. First, Overall Principles Remember that my main reasons for doing this are that 1) I don’t want all my data in one corporation and 2) I don’t want everything I do to be pervaded by advertising. So the main principles I chose when seeking good alternatives were to find services that: • are not Google (whether it’s a corporation or not) • are pretty good to use And in an ideal world, those alternatives would also be: • free, open-source, using open-standards • free of advertising • non-corporate (small businesses are OK) • as good as or better than the Google services they’re replacing These last few ideals are not necessary, but would be great. In most cases, I didn’t achieve them. Google Search The all-pervasive app that we can’t live without. There aren’t really good alternatives — there’s Google search, then there’s everyone else. Bing gets talked about a lot, but I don’t much like the results and Microsoft isn’t any better in my mind than Google. Same with Yahoo. The alternative I chose: so far it’s a split between,,. A word on Scroogle — actually it uses Google’s search, but sets up an intermediary (Scroogle) that sits between your computer and Google’s servers. Google places its cookie on Scroogle’s computer, and then Scroogle deletes it, and also deletes any logs of your anonymous searches. So the results are as good as Googles, but ad-free, without Google’s tracking, and 100 results per page (instead of the frustrating 10 results that Google has). Update: Be sure to go to, not Scroogle.com, which is completely different and NSFW. Still, it seems like cheating, so I’ve been alternatively trying Clutsy and ixquick. Both are decent, not the best, but also sometimes have ads. The transition so far: I set up each of these as my browser’s default search engine for a little while. They all work fine, but I’ve been finding Scroogle finds the results I want more often. Other alternatives I looked at:,,. ![]() Gmail I absolutely love Gmail, so giving this up has been as hard as Google Search. It’s by far the best email program, period. And I’ve tried almost all. Luckily, I’m far less reliant on email these days — mostly it’s just for family and a few business partners. The alternative I chose:. It’s not as pretty as Gmail, but it’s fast and secure and has a lot of great features. Most importantly for me, it has great spam filters (as Gmail does) and keyboard shortcuts. If you pay a nominal fee ($5 for a year, or less than 10 cents per week), you also don’t get any ads. The transition so far: It was easy to set up, and I forwarded all incoming Gmail emails to Fastmail. Eventually I’ll delete my Gmail, but for now I’ll leave it. I like Fastmail almost as much as Gmail, especially now that I’ve set up a few key folders (like Archive) and filters and learned the keyboard shortcuts. A couple things I really miss: Send & Archive (in one button or shortcut), automatic adding of email addresses to the address book (Fastmail does it but you have to confirm each time), and threaded conversations. Other alternatives that look good:,, and (self-hosted, but similar to Gmail but for command-line geeks). I may eventually use Sup once I get a better command of the command line.
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