Google shuts down Picasa to shift its focus to the new Google Photos service launched less than a year ago.
“Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos.”
Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos.
Perhaps Google was waiting to see if its Photos caught on. It has. Google said the service crossed 100 million monthly users in October. Its main distinction from Picasa is the advanced machine learning feature that can automatically tag and organize images, something Google likes to talk about incessantly. Photos will now pick up Picasa’s users.
Google notes that the easiest way to access, modify and share the content from a Picasa Web Album is to log into Google Photos, as photos and videos will already be there for you, automatically.
Google shuts down Picasa:
But if you aren’t ready to say goodbye to yesterday, Picasa isn’t disappearing immediately. Google will phase out the desktop app and Web Albums feature in the coming months. Google will retire the Picasa desktop app on March 15th; you’ll be able to download it until then and the app will continue to work, but come March 15th, Google will no longer support the app. Web Albums will stick around a little longer—until May 1st.
“As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates.”
Until then, you’ll be able to access your Web Albums as you can now, and after that point, the company will provide “a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data,” according to the blog post, just in case you don’t want to make the move to Google Photos but still want to access and save your Picasa data.
“One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today—if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.”
Of course, Picasa is not the only ‘Google’ product to meet its death in recent times. We’ve seen products like Buzz, Orkut, get shut down lately.
For Google Photos: https://photos.google.com/
For more details about shutting down of Picasa:
http://googlephotos.blogspot.in/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html
