The Picasa drama

With the arrival of my new phone several months back I suddenly noticed that I had a number of albums in my gallery that I could not immediately place. I finally realised, also thanks to the tiny icon on top of every album, that these were all Picasa pictures having been placed into my phone.
It was like Google was dry-humping my phone, randomly downloading old content because I was one of the lucky ones to have an Android OS.

I finally took the time to load Picasa and delete all of this old content, most from my attempt at Google+ and therefor no longer relevant. It might break a few images, but I have no idea why Google would want to save all this old junk anyway, since the original content should have been deleted when I deleted my Google+ account.

Picasa, being a royal pain in the ass, is not accessible to Linux, which is why it took forever for me to get around to deleting this in the first place.
Eisirt went to the Picasa website. It prompted him to download a client for Windows 7. We just had to hope it was compatible with Windows 8. Picasa, being released into this new wild jungle of Eisirt's laptop, started roaming around. "I shall find some wonderful pictures you made to share with the world!" it said enthusiastically; "where shall I look?"
There was no option not to look for pictures, so we grudgingly selected a folder it could find only one image in. Eisirt immediately blocked it from being uploaded to the internet.

I clicked the link to log in with my Google profile. Picasa opened a browser pop-up, allowing me to log in, and subsequently showed me everything of Eisirt's that was now online thanks to Picasa. I logged Eisirt out manually and re-logged in as myself.
If this looked like a lot of work, then you don't know half of it. The interface of Picasa web was horrible. I had to manually select a folder, then click to an album, then click - Actions - Delete Album.
All of the pictures were stored in albums titled the date they were taken. So only if I took a few pictures on the same day they were stored in the same album.

The Picasa interface is almost as user-friendly as a house on fire. "Explore" does not mean a handy Windows Explorer-type application is opened, where you can easily move and copy your images to a single album, so you can delete everything in one go. No, "Explore" means "look at what other people have stored online!"
"Organise" also doesn't mean what it implies. It doesn't have anything to do with organising your albums. It seems impossible, but Picasa prides itself on making the impossible, possible. You can organise a single image! Rename it, give it topical tags or a location, or tag a person! But you can't "organise" as in copy, move, delete.

So I clicked the folder. Then I clicked the album. Then I clicked the Action button and selected "Delete Album". A pop-up appeared, warning me that the content would be deleted from Google FOREVER and that links might break and that it might take 24 hours to actually be deleted. I clicked "OK" and was taken back to the first screen.
And then I clicked the folder. And again the album. And the action button. Over and over and over again.
It's true what they say about the internet: nothing ever truly disappears. Especially if you want it to.

Finally, all the albums, all the images deleted and the folder miraculously disappearing as well, I rebooted my phone. The gallery view was blissfully devoid of anything Picasa related. Eisirt quickly followed suit, uninstalling the Picasa program from his hard-drive (Will you tell me why you wish to un-install meeee?).

Clippy would be vast friends with this little thing, I can tell you.