I am leaving Picasa

As mentioned in the previous posting, the usability of Picasa has been heavily degraded for serious photographers. A discussion in the Picasa forum shed some more light on the issue. Picasa now applies something called "auto enhancement" on every picture. Just to demonstrate one last time, what Picasa considers enhancement, let's compare this original image

with this one, after is has been "enhanced":

It is possible to turn this feature off - if, and only if you are a member of Google+! I have not the slightest interest in becoming a member of any social network, neither Facebook, nor Twitter, and not Google+. So turning off this crap is not possible for me.

Although a few people have commented on some of my images, I have never really used any of the "social" features of Picasa, like sharing images. Why should I "share" an image if I can send the link to the image instead??? After all, that's what the web has been about for the last 20 years.

With plenty of unused disk space left on my personal web server www.oe-files.de, I decided to leave Picasa behind and host all images myself. I wrote some scripts to handle uploading the images, creating thumbnails and arranging the images by tags. The gallery should look unchanged, only the links to Picasa are now missing. If you feel like commenting on a image, just send me an email.