Google is shutting down Picasa

[StarGeek]

Moving on from Picasa

tl;dr

No more Picasa updates (not surprising), online photos should automatically be moved to Google Photos, Desktop program should continue to work, but the link to download the program if you need to re-install is probably going away.

[Phil Harvey]

I can't say that I'm sorry about this.  Picasa was a bit of a problem when it came to corrupting metadata.

- Phil

[joakimk]

I'm working on an app to annotate JPEGs through EXIF tags, and a while back (last year?) whatever version of Picasa was current then had the neat feature of displaying the UserComment (or maybe it was ImageDescription) text automatically, during a slideshow of the images. That was really practical!

However, as you say, Phil, Picasa does seem to wipe large parts of the EXIF directory (tags), especially if you type some text in the "Caption" field in Picasa.

So, what's a good alternative (free?) image viewer? One that doesn't enforce some control over your image directories on your laptop/HD, like what iPhoto is doing

[joakimk]

Picasa 3 (at least) uses the APP13 segment (IPTC) to store the caption in the "Caption-Abstract" field (tag):

JPEG APP13 (88 bytes):
  + [Photoshop directory, 74 bytes]
  | IPTCData (SubDirectory) -->
  | + [IPTC directory, 33 bytes]
  | | CurrentIPTCDigest = ...C......w.....
  | | -- IPTCEnvelope record --
  | | EnvelopeRecordVersion = 4
  | | CodedCharacterSet = .%G
  | | -- IPTCApplication record --
  | | ApplicationRecordVersion = 4
  | | Caption-Abstract = yoyoyo
  | IPTCDigest = ...C......w.....

[StarGeek]

So, what's a good alternative (free?) image viewer? One that doesn't enforce some control over your image directories on your laptop/HD, like what iPhoto is doing

For just image viewing?  Or for image management?  And what OS? 

Picasa 3 (at least) uses the APP13 segment (IPTC) to store the caption in the "Caption-Abstract" field (tag):

That's the normal place for Caption-Abstract.  It also stores the Caption in XMP:Description, and will store "Tags" as IPTC:Keywords and XMP:Subject.  If allowed, it will write faces to MWG regions (XMP-mwg-rs).    When writing metadata to a file, I believe it will delete Nikon makernotes, but leave Canon makernotes.  I still need to do more testing on various makernotes.

Eventually I'll have all this info in a thread in the Metadata subforum.

[joakimk]

Sorry, the question was a bit vague.

I'm working on an app to write comments to jpegs, so I need to know what is the most relevant tag to use, which many (most?) image viewers (on Mac, Windows etc) will understand and display. Like picasa did.

So, what's the right tags, and what's a good software to test against my app?

[Phil Harvey]

I would suggest maybe going with the MWG recommendations (see this page)

They recommend writing all of EXIF:ImageDescription, IPTC:Caption-Abstract and XMP-dc:Description.

- Phil