Picasa, the popular web photo album service by Google is finally going to be turned off by the company. Google has recently announced to move on from Picasa and focus entirely on single photo service i.e. Google Photos.
The company believes to create a better experience by investing its time and resources on one service that is loaded with more functionalities and works across smartphones and desktops.
Since the launch of Google Photos there was question about the future of Picasa and does it really makes sense for Google to divide efforts on two different products designed for one common purpose.
In between Google+ Photos was the “photos” section available on Google’s social network. It was officially discontinued and replaced with Google Photos in 2015 and now Google has made up his mind to replace Picasa with Google Photos.
Migrating from Picasa to Google Photos
Most Picasa users have invested hours in organizing their photos, keeping this in mind Google has provided options and ways to access Picasa content to make right changes.
Users having photos and videos on Picasa Web Album today still have time to reach, change and share most of that content. All you got to do is log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there.
On Google Photos, you can continue your photo uploading process and manage everything enjoying other benefits like better ways to search and share images online.
However, the ones who don’t want to migrate to Google Photos but want to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, the team will be creating a new place to get access to Picasa Web Albums data. Hence, you will be enabled to view, download, or delete your photo albums from Picasa, but it won’t allow you to create, organize or edit albums.
You still have so much time to decide as noting is happening today. The company will start rolling out new changes on May 1, 2016.
You should also know that Picasa Web Albums and Google Photos folder on Google drive are just different interfaces for the same photos and there is no relationship between the two interfaces outside the existence of the photos.
No future updates to Picasa application
As of March 15, 2016, the company will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. Though the application will continue to work for those who have downloaded it or planning to download before the deadline.
But there will be no development and no future updates will be given. You may choose to switch to Google Photos and continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps.
Some Picasa API functions are also to be retired soon
This one is for developers, the company is also planning to retire some functions of the Picasa API. You can learn more about such changes here.
Difference between Picasa Web Albums & Google Photos
Picasa is a program that can be installed on a computer to let user edit and organize digital photos and videos on Windows & MacOS operating systems. It also offers some easy to use features to upload pictures to photos.google.com.
And Picasa Web Albums aka Picasaweb is a webservice to browse the same pictures that appear in Google Photos and share them with friends and family. But no enhancements have taken place since 2012, and now finally the company has decided to completely kill Picasa and focus on one single photo sharing service i.e. Google Photos.
Google Photos comes both for desktop and mobiles. Google Photos for desktop is a webservice where one can upload pictures from computer into “Albums” to share them with friends, relatives and family etc. It also provides basic editing features and functions that reduce the workload in organizing photo collection such as automatic tagging, auto-enhancing photos and videos, stitching panoramic pictures, etc.
Google Photos for mobile is an app for Android and iOS smartphones. It offers similar features as Google Photos for desktop.
Google Photos has many more advantages
On Google Photos you don’t have to worry about the limit quota in GB or TB. You are free to upload as many photos you want and photos with more than 16 megapixel resolution including the ones exceeding 1080p will automatically be compressed by the software. Although, it can keep photos uncompressed but that will affect your storage quota on other Google apps, such as Gmail etc.
With Google Photos you simply upload your photos & videos and they are automatically shared across your devices.
Google Photos not only provides you photo editing features but it can automatically produce stories, panoramas, GIF animations, and other stylized effects on your photos. It has more advanced image recognition feature to help you find pictures having you or someone else in them.
New changes will start rolling out from May 1, 2016
On February 12, 2016, Google officially announced that the Picasa desktop application would be discontinued on March 15, 2016, followed by the closure of the Picasa Web Albums service on May 1, 2016.
While support for the desktop version of Picasa is going to end, Google has stated that users having this software installed or who install it before March 15th will be able to use the functionality, albeit with no support from Google.
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