Fauxcasa

Fauxcasa shows you your Picasa photo library again: the same folders, albums, people, stars and captions, on your own computer. It is a free program that reads the photo folders and Picasa files you already have. It never changes your photos or Picasa's files.

The release notes have more pictures: the photo viewer, face boxes, an album, a person, search, the Info panel and the slideshow.

Fauxcasa is early software. Version 0.1 is for looking, not changing: you can browse, search and view your photos, but not edit, tag or export them yet. It is not a replacement for Picasa in daily use, but it is safe to try on your own photos and easy to remove again.

Try it

1. Download the current version, 0.1.0-rc2, from its release page. Windows 10 or 11: the file ending in windows-x64.zip. Linux: the file ending in linux-x64.tar.gz. (The "x64" means a 64-bit computer, which is almost every PC made in the last decade.)
2. Windows: right-click the zip, choose Extract All, open the new folder, and double-click fauxcasa.exe. Keep the folder together; the program needs the other files next to it. Linux: extract the archive and run the fauxcasa program inside the extracted folder. The folder can live anywhere you like.
3. Choose the folder that holds your photos. If Picasa is installed on the same Windows PC, Fauxcasa also offers to open the folders Picasa watched.

The window opens right away. Thumbnails fill in while Fauxcasa looks through your folders. A big library takes a while the first time and is fast after that.

The release notes explain what works, what does not work yet, the keyboard shortcuts, and exactly which files Fauxcasa keeps on your computer.

Windows will warn you the first time

Windows shows a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen for programs that are not signed with a paid publisher certificate, which this one is not yet. That is normal for a small free program. Click More info, then Run anyway. Do this only for a copy downloaded from the releases page above.

If you prefer, right-click the zip before extracting, open Properties, tick Unblock, and Windows will not ask.

Your photos stay untouched

• Fauxcasa only reads your photos and Picasa's files. Browsing, searching and viewing never change, move or delete anything in your photo folders.
• Because it only reads, a crash cannot damage your photos. At worst Fauxcasa has to rebuild its own thumbnails.
• It has no online features. It never connects to the internet: no accounts, no uploads, no update checks, no usage reports. A firewall that asks per program will never ask about it.
• Everything it makes for itself (a list of your photos and their thumbnails) lives in one folder of its own, away from your photos. On Windows, paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Fauxcasa into the File Explorer address bar to see it; on Linux it is ~/.cache/fauxcasa. You can delete that folder at any time.
• One small exception: if you choose Use Picasa's watched folders on the first start, Fauxcasa leaves a tiny bookkeeping file called .fauxcasa-root in each of those folders so it can recognise them later. It never touches the photos themselves.
• To remove Fauxcasa completely, delete the extracted program folder and the Fauxcasa folder above.

One caution. Any photo viewer can be crashed or misled by a deliberately malformed image file. On Windows, Fauxcasa opens the common photo formats in a locked-down helper process to limit what such a file could do. That protection does not yet cover camera RAW files, Photoshop files or videos, and does not exist on Linux yet. Open your own photo collections, not folders of files from people you do not know.

Later versions will let you change things. The plan is to save your changes next to your photos, in files Picasa itself understands, never in a private database that locks you in. The product spec has the details.

Help and bug reports

Report problems on the project's issue page. A free GitHub account is needed to post. Please do not attach photos, Picasa files, names or real folder paths; the release notes list what a useful report contains.

For developers

Fauxcasa is written in Python with Qt (PySide6). The app lives in apps/desktop-python/, and its README describes the architecture and the measured performance numbers. scripts/ holds tooling and research utilities. docs/ holds the product spec, design notes, research and release notes.

To run from source, install uv, then:

uv run apps/desktop-python/main.py ~/Pictures     # run against a folder
uv run apps/desktop-python/test_tracer.py          # the app's test suite
uv run scripts/preflight.py                        # every check CI runs

If you have just installed, just py ~/Pictures and just py-test are shortcuts for the first two; just --list shows the rest. Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request.

License

Fauxcasa is free software and will stay that way. The code is licensed under the GNU AGPL v3 or later and the documentation under CC BY-SA 4.0. You may use, study, share and improve it. If you distribute a changed version, or let others use one over a network, you must share your changes under the same terms. The Fauxcasa name and logo are reserved as trademarks. Archived research material under docs/research/ keeps its original sources' terms; see docs/research/NOTICE.md.