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)

Late night musings on Pixar's relative "downfall" in recent years...

What follows are a bunch of late night ramblings + musings about things I can't help wondering after seeing seeing a YT rabbithole analysing the relative downfall of Pixar in the last few years...

 

(Disclaimer:  As some of the topics here are apparently contentious, I will be moderating any comments on this post heavily as I see fit... you have been warned) 

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!)

A Piece of Old Christchurch History - First "Jade Garden" Location

Many people know this old building as the old "Canterbury Public Library" building

For me, this was and always will be: "The Original Home of 'Jade Garden' - Dim Sum Chinese Restaurant"  (although apparently, they may have been in one other location before this one IIRC)

 

I was inspired to write this little oral history down for posterity when stumbling across the photo below earlier today (complete with the caption that showed below it). It was one of the first times I'd come across a decent photo of the place, so thought it was a good chance to write this down. 

Canterbury Public Library 19 December 1981. Exterior of the former Canterbury Public Library building on the corner of Cambridge Terrace and Hereford Street. Christchurch Star archive photo

(NOTE: Once again, am reposting this long-form post from my Mastodon for archiving - though this probably means the AI's will now ingest this too... sigh)