Google announced on Friday that it will be retiring Picasa over the coming months as it commits its focus to Google Photos. Perhaps the only thing surprising about this is that it hasn’t already happened.
“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,” says Head of Google Photos Anil Sabharwal. “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,” Sabharwal adds. “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 changes will go into effect on May 1. Picasa Web Albums can be used in the meantime.
On March 15, the Picasa desktop app will no longer be supported.
On May 1, Google will roll out changes to the Picasa Web Albums Data API and no longer support Flash, community search, mutation operations other than uploads, or tags, comments, or contacts. More on the API changes here.
Image via Google