Picasa web albums pioneered photo storage for Google, and lead the creation of Google Photo’s. While Google Photo’s and Picasa offered similar functions, Google kept Picasa around for well over 5 years. Starting May 1, 2016 the team behind the products will begin pulling the aging photo storage tools life support plugs. Picasa pre-dated Flickr, making the service older than most of the online startups and mega companies around.
Google Photo’s is the best photo storage platform with lots of free storage and amazing enhancing features. The photo service creates gifs, videos, and auto enhances the images, along with amazing search features.
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.
If you’re still using Picasa, you’re more than likely still one of the few hold outs using Windows XP. Savage. Google is creating a new place to “view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to use your Picasa Web Albums data,” but users won’t be able to create any new memories within the service. On March 15, 2016 if you use the desktop client Google will no longer support it.
While Picasa was the first place I organized and stored photos, I’m not sad to see it go. I’ve completely switched over to Google Photo’s which does a spectacular job of organizing photos, and allowing me to search for items like “buildings” or “cameras.” Now the Google Photo’s team will have their full attention on making the service more powerful, and introducing even more amazing ‘magic’ features.
Tell us in the comments below if you used Picasa still or if you’ve switched to Google Photos!