Picasa Replacement Project - Update 4 - Roadmap + Component Breakdown

The other day, I went through and did an initial breakdown of the components that would need to be developed as part of my "Picasa Replacement" project, in order to have a workable alternative.

I made this breakdown as a way of going in more level-headed about what exactly I was about to lock myself into (and hopefully convince myself against rashly diving into headfirst), as I was definitely getting "the itch" to just dive right in and build "just the basic photo management tool" part (i.e. "part 4", with "part 1" thrown in to have anything to show, and part 2 inevitably having to be done to before I could even contemplate setting up part 4), with the idea that the actual non-destructive image editing engine would be more of a slow burn afterwards (i.e. the exposure + colour edits would then be ported over as-time-allows, once I had the functional media management tool that I needed first)

(*) I must admit, I have also been slowly digging through Darktable's source code, trying to figure out how much of the iop code can be harvested + refactored into powering the core of my own pipeline  (as some of those operations are really powerful in the ways I want, but simply using the sidecar files to pass data to it doesn't seem as viable an option as I had though, given the horrid way it handles storing state - i.e. obscure hashed / binary-dump data in the sidecar files, coupled with only the database actually having the most recent settings once it loads a file once) 

Anyway, here is the breakdown notes from my notebook, in case anyone else would like to attempt this (or join in the efforts at some point).

 (TBH:  Seeing this breakdown is and should be very sobering... It is probably a decent 4-5 years of man-effort - assuming semi-consistent progress at a fast rate gets made even - to get to a somewhat useful point.  Hence why I wouldn't really recommend anyone attempts this on a whim!) 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 3 - Some Easy Wins

In the latest installment of my ongoing series of posts about my current "Picasa Replacement Project", a few days ago, I managed to make a few more easy wins:

1) First, by applying some of the simpler manipulations to a "calibration" image, and trying to match the results - This has quickly revealed some starting points for working with the "Tilt" and "Color Temperature" sliders (even if the values obtained still seem a bit odd / weird, and may still need some fine-tuning)

 

2) It turns out that during an earlier search session, I had in fact managed to dredge up a bunch of very useful posts about the various formats used - especially for the on-disk thumbnails / preview images databases (which will prove useful for having a way to batch-test some of these filter calibrations later  (i.e. the thing apparently uses the standard Windows "Thumbs.db" format, for which libraries do exist !!!)

However, to protect all this info, I'm gonna have to make sure I save off all of it on the various archive sites (in addition to having already grabbed copies for my own stash, in case they disappear before I manage to do even that)... So yeah, I'm not going to publish the list of links until I have secured them. 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 2 - Initial Working Parser

It's taken a few more days than originally planned, but I've just reached a first concrete milestone:

The rudimentary parser for Picasa.ini settings file is now able to fully parse the settings file for the test folder I chose from my collection!   (Albeit, this was one of the newer ones that I haven't applied as heavy edits on as some of those in the full collection... but it's still a starting point!)

There's lots more to do still to make it actually useful, including:
* 1) Set up a Git repo for this project, so it can be used by others  

EDIT:   The code can be found here            https://github.com/Aligorith/picasa_lib_utils 

* 2) Need to unpack how a handful of other filters I've sometimes used on other photos have their parameters done too

* 3) Figure out what the pixel-level operations some of these were actually doing (i.e. most critical is the "finetune2" filter though that is the hardest; but even something like the "tilt" filter will need translating into a concrete rotation angle)

Picasa Replacement Project - Day 1 Status Report

Following Monday's incident, I have decided to urgently bring forward + accelerate my plans to start developing a replacement solution to my Picasa-based Photo Management workflow. As this incident had highlighted, I do somewhat urgently need to find a reliable automated solution to migrate my almost 2 decade library of non-destructive edits over to a future-proof solution I fully control!

As a result, I made a bunch of promising progress on my Picasa Reverse Engineering project last night - i.e. the first night of a new journey!

Fixing Picasa3 suddenly freezing on Windows10 (July 2025)

This evening, Picasa suddenly started freezing on Windows 10 here.  (Yes, it has been officially discontinued for years now... but for my workflow, it is still much better than many of the alternatives I've tried, and so, until I manage to get my own self-built alternative up and running, I'm continuing to use it...)

After a whole bunch of sleuthing (including deleting my old DB and rebuilding it, in case of some database corruption there), it turns out that the culprit was Windows Defender!

TLDR:  To fix this, add an exclusion for the following setting (i.e. "Block Untrusted Fonts") for Picasa3.exe 

EDIT:  Posted too soon!  While doing that gets things moving a little at least, a few seconds later, after letting you scroll, it will again lock up, while it now starts another batch of CPU activity.  Doh!   (Trying again with disabling a whole lot more to see what sticks...)

EDIT 2: Tried a bunch more stuff, but annoyingly each "fix" only seems to last about 5 seconds before Windows Defender catches on and locks down even harder!

Things that didn't go down well:

* Going through disabling *every* checkbox in that infernal program-settings-override dialog.  Doing that just makes it worse it seems!

* Switching "Compatability Mode" to "Windows 8" - This worked for about 5 seconds (i.e. longer than when just doing "open + scroll" tests, but still it locked right up!

Ultimately, after an hour of testing this crap, I'm going have to call it a night on this here, and have ended up filing a bugreport with MS about this... hopefully they do resolve it!  Gah!

(PS:  The project to again try to migrate my personal workstation to Linux ahead of October just got another massive boost again tonight!)

Post-Picasa Replacements - Followup Notes #1

As a followup from yesterday's post/rant about Picasa things, I've started doing some digging around about ways to achieve the "Fill Light" technique, as well as started the process of auditioning potential replacement systems.

This will probably be the first of several post about this topic (though how many there will be I don't know yet), and will just be a way for me to keep track of my notes and findings about what works, what doesn't, and what may potentially be useful information.