Google closes picasa photoservice

Another Google service has become less. Yesterday, the company announced the closure of Picasa Web Albums from May 1, 2016 and the cessation of the development / distribution of the Picasa desktop program from March 15, 2016. They repeat the sad fate of Google Reader and dozens of other free services from Google.

Picasa was created by Lifescape in 2002, acquired by Google in June 2004, integrated with photo hosting, as well as Blogger, Gmail, YouTube and Google+. “Since the launch of Google Photos, we have been asked a lot of questions about how this will affect the future of Picasa. After long deliberations and meetings, we decided to abandon Picasa and concentrate fully on the Google Photos unified photo service, ”the official blog reported.

What will happen to photos and videos in Picasa Web Albums? It’s enough for the user to log in to Google Photos - and they will automatically be transferred there. The functionality of the two services is different. There are no tags and comments in Google Photos, as well as online galleries with GPS information. It is not clear whether these features will appear in the future or not.
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For those who do not want to use Google Photos, a separate service will be created with the ability to view, download and delete albums, but there will not be editing functions or creating new albums. But at least the photos will not be lost forever, like those RSS feeds from Google Reader. Picasa albums can be downloaded now.

Support for the Picasa desktop client ends March 15, 2016, but the already installed software will continue to work as before.

Google warns web developers to stop supporting some features of the Picasa API.