Google announced this week that they will be shutting down Picasa. In 2004, Google acquired Picasa from a company called Lifescape and began offering it free of charge. Last year, Google launched a new product called Google Photos and both applications have been maintained by the company. I suppose it was inevitable that one of them had to go.
In May of this year, Google will begin to archive the Picasa albums and it is encouraging all users of Picasa to convert over to Google Photos instead.
Picasa has developed a solid base of loyal users and currently there are hundreds of millions of people who use Picasa for a lot, if not all, of their digital image storage and management. Google will no doubt be expecting a large backlash from these users and I’d imagine they will have been working hard to come up with a way of making the transition as easy as possible.
The Google blog post for this announcement states:
“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.”
They continue by reassuring all the Picasa users that all they need to do to begin using Google Photos is simply log in with your usual Google details and all your photos will be there.
“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.”
I must admit, I have never used Picasa and after having a quick look at Google Photos, I doubt I would have any need for it either. However, I have noted that Google does allow unlimited space for storage of all your digital images. This may be a useful and free way to backup your mobile phone images but I doubt it would not be practical for those of us who have a large collection of RAW files.
Let us know what you think of this announcement. Do you use Picasa or Google Photos?
This stinks. Photos doesn’t have all the cool photo manipulating tools that Picasa has. I will continue to use Picasa as long as my computer will support it.
I have to agree that photo editing is very simplified within Photos. Is Picasa your main editing program? Also, have all your images been transferred over to Photos as Google promised? I’ve never used Picasa so I had no way of checking this.