Photos messed up Picasa big time

Photos, and for that matter Image Capture, are independent applications. They have nothing particularly to do with each other and absolutely nothing to do with Picasa.

Image Capture saves your imported photos to where you tell it to save to. Most users create a folder on the desktop, so it's easy to locate after the import.

If you have not expressly disabled this function, it's likely that Photos launches when you connect a camera. Check your Photos preferences. If you want to manage your image library manually with Picasa, make sure that both, My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library is turned off.

If you recently updated to El Capitan, that's a more likely cause of your issues with Picasa. But that's not due to El Capitan. It's due to the fact that Picasa is a very, very old app, that Google doesn't even support any more. Read this Google article on how to move from Picasa to other Google photo-centric apps. Or you could give Photos a look.

https://picasa.google.com/

I do not use Picasa but I have read that it does not operate correctly under El Captain - you need to address your Picasa issues with Google support as it is not an Apple product and is not and never has been supported by Apple and there is no expectation that using unsupported software will work the same after any upgrade

LN

Just FYI, Larry.

Picasa was a Google app. It's been abandoned by Google years ago, so your directives away from Apple are correct.

Thanks - fixed my error 🙂

LN

I now have to open Image Capture, which imports them to god knows where.

God doesn't know because because he has nothing to do with it. It's you who tells Image Capture where to download the image files to:

If Picasa doesn't appear in the dropdown menu you'll have to download to a folder on your Desktop and then add them to Picasa from there.

If you're using Picasa then Photos should not be involved in the workflow at all.