There can only be one photo service from Google and the battle has ended with Google Photos knocking out Picasa with a bruising Kimura. Google is finally sending the old warrior into retirement and is shutting down Picasa May 1st 2016. The shuttering of Picasa will likely be a blow to many who have come to love the service and its tools and have spent hours editing photos with them. While Google Photos offers some great options, Picasa was a little more powerful and offered up advanced tools Google Photos does not have. There is some level of comfort though, while Picasa is dead, your photos will survive and wil be migrated to Google Photos without having to do anything.
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.
We know for many of you, a great deal of care has gone into managing your photos and videos using Picasa—including the hours you’ve invested and the most precious moments you’ve trusted us with. So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content. We’ve outlined below some of the changes you can expect.
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. Using Google Photos, you can continue to upload and organize your memories, as well as enjoy other great benefits like better ways to search and share your images.
However, for those of you who don’t want to use Google Photos or who still want to be able to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. That way, you will still be able to view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums (you would now do this in Google Photos).
The desktop application will be shut down March 15th, 2016 so your tools will be gone after that. This will be a bitter moment for many who have grown to love Picasa and have become proficient in using its tools. While this may offer little comfort to those folks, you can use other tools such as GIMP, Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity Photo.
What do you think of Picasa being shut down? Did you use the service a lot? What other photo programs besides the ones we mentioned would you recommend to old Picasa users? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
[button link=”http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Google[/button]Last Updated on January 23, 2017.
