Google Releases Picasa for Linux 486
chrisd writes "Hi, everyone. Today I'm pleased to announce that we're making Picasa, our photo management application, available for Linux. This is a pre-beta labs release and since we're still learning on how to best make software for Linux, we're asking that you submit your bugs as you find them. Picasa for Linux uses Wine internally; this shows a bit in the interface, but it works even better than we had hoped. Download it and check it out! A list of supported distributions can be found in the FAQ. We hope our patches to Wine will help make it easier for everyone to run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Thanks to our pals at CodeWeavers who did much of the heavy lifting, and to Marcus Meissner, whose libgphoto support patch was a welcome surprise."
Files available in US only (apparantly) (Score:5, Informative)
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/ [nyud.net]
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/faq.
Chris, looks good so far, big thanks.
Re:Files available in US only (apparantly) (Score:1, Informative)
(*.google.com transparently redirects to localized versions based on your IP, if you don't force it to do otherwise..)
Who said it was free? (Score:1, Informative)
In case you didn't know, propietary applications can and do run on Linux.
If you don't want to use propietary apps, simply don't use them.
And btw., at least the porting of this app has given back an enourmous amount of code to wine, a free software project, which is great imho.
Re:Why US only? (Score:5, Informative)
Deb: http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/pi
RPM: http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386/picasa
Binary installer: http://dl.google.com/linux/standalone/picasa-2.2.
Re:not free (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!!! (apparantly) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:suprise? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!!! (apparantly) (Score:2, Informative)
404 Not Found
Error
Not Found
The requested URL
and the comments in the google groups [google.com] page discovered its not working outside the US made the "apparantly" there.
I'm glad it works for you in Asia, but it doesn't work here in England.
Re:not free (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All very well, but... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:not free (Score:3, Informative)
First impressions (Score:5, Informative)
One or two problems remain (and I'm sure more will pop up after I play with it for more than 10 minutes). It doesn't integrate into any desktop environment at all - its very much a Windows application hacked to bits so it runs smoothly in Linux, and it shows at points. With the exception of Desktop, it does not remember stored folders from either Konqueror or Nautilus, and maintains meaningless links to "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" and other folders which don't exist in the file requesters. This could use some work.
Works in Gentoo (Score:3, Informative)
And before someone says something, no, I didn't try to compile it from source...
Re:not free (Score:5, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)
http://f-spot.org/Main_Page [f-spot.org]
Re:suprise? (Score:2, Informative)
Lots of cameras use PTP [wikipedia.org], rather than USB Mass Storage. My Canon IXUS 55 is one example. I'm not sure why they do. =) Anyway, libgphoto is what's generally used to speak to such cameras.
Re:suprise? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why US only? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Regarding the open source complaints... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Recommendation (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, the Picasa for Linux product is far more tailored for Linux than that would be; it doesn't give you drive letters, it knows how to integrate into your file system, it knows how to connect to your desktop environment; it has a whole raft of other Linux specific features. I think it's even reasonable to hope that as it matures, it will become even more fully tailored to Linux.
But the bottom line is simple - try it. You may be surprised at how handy it is. And today you have one more application on Linux than you had yesterday. I'm not sure how anyone can be upset by that.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Re:I found a bug already! (Score:2, Informative)
That's because the FAQ appears to be only accessible from the US.
The coralized link works (for me):
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/faq.h tml [nyud.net]
Re:not free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:suprise? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:story title wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
None do (Score:4, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)
(I know, it's from Novell and Mono is Miguel de Icazza's little pet project. It's a fine app and runs plenty fast for me to not care one way or the other. Mono is Free, f-spot is Free, and the OS is runs on is Free, so that's all I care about.)
Re:What are you smoking? (Score:4, Informative)
Windows version
md5sum Picasa.exe:
b8806a095619d3327e7e415af8b72d48 *Picasa2.exe
Linux version
md5sum
b8806a095619d3327e7e415af8b72d48
Yeah, its pretty much the same.
Poorly designed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:photo management software... (Score:3, Informative)
But here's my experience. I use iPhoto to "manage" (very ugly word for the funfactor involved) about 10.000 pictures from the last six years.
I import them by way of connecting the camera to my computer. It's literally a one button process. The pictures are kept in filmrolls (directories with cute filmroll icon and useful metadata), and I can then do a number of things to the pictures, like creating albums.
An album is like a virtual directory. I can manipulate pictures inside an album, throw them out even without ever altering the original picture.
Then I can do things with my albums, like create slide shows, order prints, export them(e.g. to have them printed by someone else than kodak), send them by mail (with neat time and effort saving reduction) etc etc etc.
This all sounds like an apple fanboy convert session.
But while I'm hooked on iPhoto, I actually divert my PC-brethren to Picasa or the Adobe (non free) equivalent which does pretty much the same things.
So forget about this "managing" word, it's ugly. It's about cataloguing your pictures and then doing stuff with them in an environment that is just that bit more adapted to typical picture manipulation (and related) tasks than your desktop and directories.
Hoping this clears it up.
"managing"... really takes the fun out of the concept...
Re:suprise? (Score:5, Informative)
Second, Windows has several methods to interface with digital cameras. One of the is direct filesystem access (works just fine). The second is TWAIN. Originally just for scanners it is also used for digital cameras. On third, WIA (Windows Imaging Architecture).
WINE already had a TWAIN implementation (written by Corel during WordPerfect 2000 times) but it was only able to use SANE, and not really able to use libgphoto2 in a good way.
So what I did was to just add the lowlevel libgphoto TWAIN driver to WINE, and CodeWeavers provided a gphoto Import GUI for it. My part of work was small compared to the stuff the CodeWeavers people did.
Voila - importing from any kind of cameras into Picasa.
Btw, I think all of this is in regular WINE 0.9.14.
Ciao, Marcus
Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)
These softwares are still improving too.
And guess what, programs like Digikam actually integrate well with a KDE or even a Gnome desktop, are native apps that don't need Wine libs to run, and don't appear like a sore point on your desktop.
Re:not free (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck MP3, then. Use Vorbis, which is Free of royalties, patents, etc.
Fuck video codecs that require licensing, then. Use Theora, which is Free of royalties, patents, etc.
All in all, Google didn't do their homework here, I think. There are plenty of ways to overcome the mentioned restrictions. If it were open source, I'd write the patch myself.
Sadly, it's all closed up, and is useless to everybody. Too bad.
Google offers this to everybody (Score:3, Informative)
This has nothing to do with Google policy. One of the download servers had a problem which was resolved. Please download and enjoy, wherever you are.
Site now up worldwide? [google.com]
Picasa Linux version also in Europe [google.com]
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!!! (apparantly) (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking as a Googler, this is incorrect. One of the download servers had a problem which was resolved. Please download and enjoy, wherever you are.
Site now up worldwide? [google.com]
Picasa Linux version also in Europe [google.com]
C:\NGRDLTNS.W95 (Score:3, Informative)
This means they are 100% constricted by the Win32 ABI. There is no way to escape the worst of the Windowsisms, and no way to bypass things that are badly emulated.