Picacino

Picacino is an offline-first photo manager for Mac and Windows: point it at the folders you already have, and browse, organise and tidy up your whole library without anything being copied, moved, or uploaded.

The folder on your disk stays the source of truth. Picacino's database is only a cache - delete it and rescan, and you lose nothing but the time it takes to read your photos again. Rotating or flipping a photo never touches the original: it is stored separately, so the file on disk is left exactly as your camera wrote it. The one deliberate exception is correcting metadata, which is written into the file itself, because a wrong capture date or a missing lens follows the photo into every other program you own.

Highlights

1. Your folders, untouched - browse the exact folder tree you already built, with a photo count on every branch. No import step, no catalog to commit to. Drop a new photo into a folder Picacino is watching and it appears on its own.
2. Built to stay fast - the grid only ever renders what is on screen, and thumbnails are generated in Rust, prioritising whatever you are looking at right now. Scanning runs on its own thread, so a hundred thousand photos indexing in the background never freezes the window you are scrolling.
3. Two ways to look - a grid with a size slider for finding a photo by eye, and a Finder-style list with sortable columns for name, date, dimensions, size and rating. A detail panel on the right describes whatever you have picked, in either view.
4. Search that knows your photos - full-text over file names, cameras, tags and folders. Type a word, or narrow it with camera:, tag:, folder: and file:.
5. Tags and stars - stars are the "I like this" mark, so there is no second favourites list to keep in step. A handful of useful tags is there on the first run; delete the ones you do not want and add your own.
6. Rotate and flip that the rest of your Mac agrees with - turn a photo in the detail panel, check it, then Save. It writes the orientation tag the photo already has room for, so the picture is upright in Finder, in Preview, and anywhere you send it - not just here. Lossless: the pixels are never re-encoded.
7. Correct the metadata itself - the capture date for a camera with the clock set wrong, plus camera, lens, exposure, location, author, copyright and description. Written into the photo itself, one photo at a time, so every other program sees the correction too. The write goes through a staged copy and swaps it in, so an interruption leaves the original exactly as it was.
8. Your work outlives the database - stars, tags and rotations are the only things a rescan cannot rebuild, so Picacino saves them to a single file you can back up, carry to a new machine, or restore from. Lose the library index and you lose nothing but the time to read your photos again.
9. The people in your photos - Picacino can group photos by who is in them, name the groups, merge two that turned out to be one person, and take a face back off somebody it filed wrongly. It reads every photo once on your own machine: the models ship inside the app, nothing is uploaded, and it only starts when you ask it to. Switch it off in Settings and it leaves entirely. This one feature needs an Apple Silicon Mac or a 64-bit Windows PC - the face models have no build for Intel Macs - and everything else in Picacino works the same on every machine.
10. Copy and paste with the rest of your Mac - copy a photo here and paste it into Finder, or copy one in Finder and paste it into a folder in Picacino. It is the ordinary clipboard, with the ordinary shortcuts, and a paste makes a real file on disk rather than a private reference only this app understands.
11. Drag photos where they belong - drag from the grid onto any folder in the sidebar to move the real files. The stars, tags and named faces travel with them, and anything that cannot move - a name already taken in the destination - is reported by name and left where it was.
12. Find identical copies - compares files by content, not by name, so the same photo saved twice under different names is still caught. Grouped side by side so you choose which one stays.
13. A trash that is not a trash - removing a photo takes it out of your library and leaves the file on disk. Put it back whenever you like; deleting for good is a separate, deliberate step.

How it works

Add a folder and Picacino walks it, reads each photo's EXIF for its date, camera and orientation, and builds thumbnails in the background. Browsing works within seconds - the slow part continues behind you and picks up where it left off if you quit. It reads JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF and BMP everywhere, and HEIC on macOS - on Windows that one needs Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions installed.

Pick a photo to see it full size with its details; scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and use the filmstrip underneath to move around a shoot. Press 1-5 to rate, 0 to fit the photo back to the frame, arrow keys to step, Esc to come back. Any view can be played as a slideshow.

Your library index lives in ~/Library/Application Support/cafe.getapps.picacino/ on macOS and %APPDATA%\cafe.getapps.picacino\ on Windows, alongside the thumbnail cache. Both are disposable - your photos are not in there, only what Picacino learned about them.

Perfect for

1. Anyone who misses Picasa - the same idea of reading the folders you already have, rebuilt as a native app for current machines.
2. People leaving cloud photo services - you have exported a decade of photos into folders and want to browse them properly, offline, without another subscription reading them.
3. Photographers with an existing filing system - you already sort by shoot and date, and want a fast browser that respects that instead of imposing its own catalog.
4. Anyone tidying a messy drive - find the duplicates, rate the keepers, and rename in bulk.