With Google's simple (yet powerful) photo editor Picasa no longer available, what are people using for processing their travel photos?

I'm interested in the retouching / improving side of Picasa, not the photo storage side.

Google Photo has editing capabilities.

Lightroom is great, but it's not free.

My favorite features of Picasa are adding outlined text to photos, cropping to preset aspect ratios and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

I use Lightroom for cataloging and Photoshop for processing.

Lightroom has an excellent editing engine, but if you only want the editing capabilities and not the cataloging than I suspect LR may not be what you're looking for since it's a digital asset management tool first and an editor second.

Paint.net is a freeware program that might meet your need.

I still use Picasa, not for editing but for organization.

I have a convoluted workflow:
1. Take photo on phone
2. Edit on phone (adjust curves, or google photos auto)
3. Copy to computer (syncing via drive or just cable)
4. Edit on computer (mostly just noise ninja)
5. Organize photos into folders/albums
6. Picasa Upload (The only way I could figure out to upload them all at original quality and maintain the albums is using Picasa.)
7. Goto Google photos and click Recover Storage (I upload as "Original", then after uploading, I click on "Recover Storage" to make sure everything remains "unlimited". I have to do these steps since Picasa does not support the new larger unlimited size.)
8. Folder sync to sync photos back to phone

This comes from a few requirements/goals I have that no one service seems to support:
1. I want to keep a copy of everything (in original quality) on my PC as backup (hence copying everything to my computer)
2. I want all my photos accessible from the web and my phone also but without having to use data on my phone to redownload everytime I want to see something or if I have no signal. The only way I can see to do this is to keep a second copy on my phone. (Picasa uploads to the web, FolderSync copies it back to my phone although I have to manually reset the folder and file date stamps)
3. I want the folders on my phone to dicate the albums. I have old photos with no EXIF location or date/time so auto doesnt always work. (Picasa takes care of this)

Google photos has "auto_backup" but that copies everything to google with no organization. I also dont get a backup copy on my phone. The copy stored on google is also "compressed" if I use unlimited so I still need to copy to my computer.

When Picasa completely stops working, I'm not sure what I'll do.

Very good online editor:

https://pixlr.com/editor/