Impending Demise of Picasa

Today Google announced the imminent demise of Picasa - both the web albums AND the desktop tool. My short reaction is this: Booooooo! Not this again Google!

 
My second reaction (and perhaps the most important point of this post) is this:
It'd be great if Google could open source the desktop editing app - that thing has a lot of very useful stuff going on there that would be a shame for the world to lose.   (I know, it's a long shot for that to actually happen... but, it's better to have tried and failed, than to never have tried!)



Failing that, what I really actually care about far more are the answers to the following technical questions:
1) How do the 3 exposure correction sliders - "Fill Light", "Highlight", "Shadow" - actually work?   In particular, I'm most interested in knowing about the "Fill Light", since that's one of the tools I use quite heavily, but have been unable to find a full replacement for (not close equivalent, but exact replacement) in any other package I've tried to date.    (In fact, I'm seriously considering putting a bounty on getting source code + running binaries for an implementation of this tool, to be obtained using any means necessary - be it reverse engineering the relevant code, or R&D of a replacement, or perhaps just getting the original devs to secretly leak the relevant code snippets for the public good)

2) What is the format of the metadata used to store the sequence of edits that Picasa performs on each file? These metadata files are stored in each directory, and seem to use some kind of encoded/compressed representation of the sequence of operations + parameters that get applied to files.    (Knowing this will be important for being able to port the non-destructive edits made to large numbers of photos in my library to whatever future tools I end up using)

3) I wonder how its UI toolkit was put together - especially for handling the scrolling of the view, as well as the rendering + storage of all the image thumbnails.  There's clearly some nifty engineering going on here, but most of us will never get to find out how it was all done! :(

(If any of the original Picasa app devs see this, feel free to send a private mail to my GMail or Hotmail - aligorith - accounts with more details of how these things work. I promise that I will not disclose the details of who provided me with this information... given the likely NDA's that some of this stuff may be under :)


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4) How can I efficiently duplicate all albums, their content, and all metadata attached to all of those to another online storage solution?  It's clear that I'll need to start looking for a better online storage solution for these things, as the new Google Photos seems critically flawed in quite a few ways :/

Lo and Behold - 4 Years On

According to the archives, I've been running this blog for 4 (!) years now... yay?

As regular readers may have noticed, the number and frequency of posts here has been falling for the past year or two. A number of reasons have contributed to this decline: notably the factors mentioned in my previous post, but also things like having something like 2 years of backlogged photosets after it took longer than expected to finish writing up my trip notes from HK 2012 (which ended up getting a bit out of hand in the end).

Fear not though. I've still got quite a bit of content lined up - including several on the Depsgraph refactor, NLA/Animation development plans, some proposals for fixing some big-issues in Blender, Windows hacking tips, and a backlog of collections of some of my favourite shots from the past 2 years. Working through the backlog and getting these put together is currently the bottleneck though (admittedly, the burgeoning length/complexity of some of these has been complicating this). So, in the coming months, I'll be experimenting a bit with new ways of getting these out, even if it means that some of these may only be partially complete when first published, and having these update over time as live blogs or as a series of smaller posts? We'll see...

Woops!

Apologies for any broken/missing images on some of the posts here.

Apparently I managed to accidentally clobber them when adjusting the wrong settings somewhere when trying to figure out why the heck the folder associated with these had just jumped all the way up to the top o the list all of a sudden (it should've been at the very bottom and out of sight!). Gah!

In the meantime, I'm going back through trying to restore broken links (by manually re-adding the offending pics). Fortunately they're all still there, though annoyingly there's no one-click "link them all back up again" magic button  :/

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EDIT (2am):  Phew! I've just finished going through checking for broken image links and getting everything fixed up again. Along the way, I took the chance to make a few images a bit larger too for good measure :)

If you do find any broken image links/placeholders, please let me know and I'll try and fix them. Strangely, there were still a few images which I seem to have uploaded, but don't seem to be attached to any posts with broken links (at least the ones I've checked)...