Alphabet Inc’s Google has announced that it is retiring support for Picasa and will slowly transition users to Google Photos, the company’s relatively new photo service application.
“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. We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products.”
– Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos
Picasa, an image organising application that was acquired by the technology monolith 12 years ago, has seen sparse updates over the past year as Google worked on it’s Photos app; the end was coming even if its users denied it. Support for the Picasa desktop album will end on March 15, though it will continue to work for users who already have it installed and for users who may want to install it now; however no updates will be rolled out and some functions may be retracted from the developer API. Uploaded Picasa photos will be transitioned to Google Photos on May 1.
If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there.
Google Photos has seen remarkable growth in the over it’s first year as a photo service application, gaining over 100 million active users last October according to Google.
Source: Google Blogs
