Pico — a photo organizer in the spirit of Picasa

Google stopped Picasa in 2016, but millions of photo folders still carry its .picasa.ini files with stars, captions, albums and edits. Pico is a new photo organizer written from scratch in Rust that reads and writes those files, so a library built in Picasa years ago opens in Pico as it was, and keeps working the other way round.

Pico is small (a single file, no installer needed) and works completely offline: nothing is uploaded anywhere, and originals are never touched until you press Save.

Library

• Folders, albums, timeline and places in one continuous ribbon: where one folder ends, the next begins, with its title and description.
• Places without the internet: photos with GPS are grouped by the nearest town, otherwise by country, sea or continent. The place names (GeoNames, Natural Earth) are built into the program.
• Stars, captions, tags, albums with your own order, search, filters for starred photos and videos, duplicate finder.
• Drag and drop between folders and albums, selection with a rectangle, context menus, kinetic scrolling.

Editing

• Basic fixes: crop with ready-made proportions, straighten, I’m Feeling Lucky, auto contrast and auto color.
• Tuning: fill light, highlights, shadows, color temperature, with a live histogram.
• Effects from Picasa and the Creative Kit of Picnik: sepia, B&W, warmify, film grain, soft focus, glow, Lomo, Holga, HDR-ish, Polaroid, pencil sketch and more.
• Every edit is non-destructive and stored the way Picasa stored it; Original shows the photo before edits while the button is held.

Properties for the curious

Pico shows every metadata field: EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ICC, PNG, WebP, video streams, and the camera makers’ notes of Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Sony, Apple, DJI and others. Fields that should agree across metadata kinds but don’t get a ! mark — an easy way to tell an edited file from one straight out of the camera.

Create

• Collages: mosaic, frame mosaic, grid, contact sheet, multiple exposure.
• Movies from photos: MP4 in 720p or 1080p with smooth transitions and music (with FFmpeg installed).
• Slideshows that play videos too, export with downsizing and a choice of JPEG quality.

Everything else

• Light and dark themes that follow the system, English and Russian interface, ready for more languages.
• Linux, Windows and macOS builds; the source is open under the Apache 2.0 license.

Download: latest release on GitHub

Source code: github.com/miamibc/pico

The photos in the screenshots are from Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain (CC0).