For my personal taste Google hit the absolute sweet spot with Picasa:

  • light on resources
  • snappy
  • didn’t mess with original images
  • stored modifications in a sensible way
  • amazing face detection

So much so that I never looked back. I must confess that every couple of years I look around and check if there is something that better fits my particular needs. As of now, Picasa still rules and runs brilliantly on Windows 10.

from the incredibly talented mati.land

While I would recommend extreme caution in downloading software from parties you don’t trust (myself included!) I’ve provided a link for those who didn’t backup Google’s latest version.

Picasa 3.9.141 (final version)

Picasa keeps an internal map with folders to monitor/display.
Every time you edit an image it saves the edits in a .picasa.ini file on image path and stores the original file in a sub-folder (relative to the image path) called .picasaoriginals.

This means that if you’re putting all your images on the c:\photos\  when you backup that folder you’ll get the original file and changes for free. You just also need to backup Picasa’s database!

Don’t forget to backup the database!

Picasa stores tags, faces, etc on a database. The way Picasa is organized a DB failure would mean that image data stays exactly where it is, you would even get to keep the changes to originals as explained above, but faces, tags, etc would be irreplaceably lost – possibly costing endless hours of work.

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums

If you are using Picasa, it’s imperative that the above folders are part of your backup.