Picasa

A local-first photo & video organizer in the spirit of Google's old Picasa.
Rust backend (Tauri 2) + vanilla-JS frontend. No cloud, no accounts, no telemetry — your files never leave the machine.

Download

Installers for macOS (.dmg), Windows (.msi / -setup.exe), and Linux (.AppImage / .deb / .rpm) are on the Releases page.

ffmpeg is bundled — the installers ship with static ffmpeg/ffprobe builds, so video features work out of the box with no setup. If the bundled copy is ever missing, Picasa falls back to an ffmpeg found on your PATH (or Homebrew on macOS).

What it does

• Library folders — point it at any folders; it scans photos & videos (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, TIFF … / MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI …), reads EXIF (date taken, camera, orientation) and video metadata via ffprobe, and keeps a fast SQLite catalog.
• Albums — select items → New Album. Creates a real folder (default ~/Pictures/Picasa Albums/<name>), converts/copies the files into it, and writes your description into album.md alongside the media. Originals are never touched.
• Presets — Web/Blog, TV/Big Screen, Email/Compact, Archive/Standardize, Original. Photos → JPG with size/quality caps; videos → MP4 (H.264/AAC) with resolution, CRF, bitrate and fps caps. A ~200 MB one-minute phone clip becomes ~20 MB on Web/Blog. Presets are editable; duplicate a built-in to customize.
• Non-destructive edits — rotate / straighten / crop for photos. Stored in the catalog, rendered as previews, baked in on export. One-click revert.
• Organizing — star ratings (0–5), tags, search, timeline grouping, sort, filters, virtualized grid with size slider, marquee + keyboard selection.
• Lightbox — zoom/pan photos, play videos, EXIF panel, edit mode.
• Duplicates — exact-duplicate finder (BLAKE3 content hash) with one-click resolve.
• Safety — deletions go to the system Trash (or library-only removal); album items can be removed from an album without touching the original.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
/	focus search
arrows / shift+arrows	move / extend selection
Enter / Space	open viewer
← → (viewer)	previous / next
E (viewer)	edit photo
I	info panel
0–5	set rating
⌘A	select all
⌘⇧N	new album from selection
Delete	remove…
Esc	close / clear

Development

npm install          # Tauri CLI (uses public npm registry via .npmrc)
npm run dev          # run with hot reload-ish (reload webview with ⌘R)
npm run build        # release bundles in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

Requirements: Rust ≥1.77, Node 18+, the Tauri v2 system prerequisites for your OS, and ffmpeg/ffprobe for video features (a PATH install is fine for development). HEIC decoding uses macOS's built-in sips.

Releases are built automatically by GitHub Actions (release.yml) whenever a v* tag is pushed. The workflow downloads static ffmpeg builds into src-tauri/bin/ before bundling, so the shipped installers are self-contained.

ffmpeg resolution & bundling

The app resolves ffmpeg in this order:

1. PICASA_FFMPEG / PICASA_FFPROBE env vars
2. bin/ inside the app bundle (src-tauri/bin/ at build time)
3. /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, then $PATH

To make a local build self-contained, drop static builds into src-tauri/bin/ffmpeg and src-tauri/bin/ffprobe (.exe on Windows) before building — the folder is bundled as a resource. Static build sources used by CI: martin-riedl.de (macOS), gyan.dev (Windows), johnvansickle.com (Linux).

The bundled ffmpeg/ffprobe are GPL-licensed static builds invoked as separate processes; Picasa's own code remains MIT. See the linked sites for their sources.

Data locations

• Catalog + thumbnail cache: ~/Library/Application Support/com.gapp.picasa/ (macOS)
• Albums: ~/Pictures/Picasa Albums/ (changeable in Settings)
• album.md format: title, your description, then a --- footer with date/count/preset.

Removing a folder from the library never deletes files on disk.

License

MIT