Picasa being shutter in shift to Google Photos

In a blog post published Friday, the Internet giant announced the shuttering of the company’s older, more dated photo storage system, and by March 15, 2016, there will be no more technical support for Picasa. Google Photos is a new and smarter product, that offers a better platform for us to build wonderful experiences and features for you in the future.

Google’s Picasa photo service will soon be no more, as the company has made a decision to focus on Google Photos instead of working on both. Google Photos is a pretty nice service, so at least give it a shot.

Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa.

Picasa users may use Web Albums and the desktop application until they are retired. The company emphasized how much time it has invested in making sure it makes the transition as painless as possible for end users.

“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”. However, it won’t allow users to create, organize or edit albums – to do that, they would have to move to Google Photos or some other program.

The easiest route to that is if you’ve already been backing up your photos in the cloud; then, simply by logging into Google Photos, you should be able to see existing photos and videos in the new app.

Those who want a trip to Google web UI circa 2011 should head over to Picasa Web Albums site.

The changes to Picasa Web Albums won’t happen until May 1, 2016, meanwhile.

Google notes that it will also retire some functions of the Picasa API, affecting developers. Google improved the service with its trademark “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which automatically retouched photos with one click.