Google Shutting Down Picasa Photo Management Service

The desktop application will no longer be supported by Google beginning March 15, 2016, according to a company blog post, and in May the company will archive users’ Picasa Web Albums.

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. Most of us have probably moved on to Google Photos when it was first announced previous year. But if you don’t want to use Google Photos, you will still be able to view and access your pictures and data in the “new place” that Google will create for you.

In an effort to moot the flourishing of its Google Photos services, the Alphabet owned company has now chose to turn down the support for Picasa, a service that has captured the minds of people much before Google Photos and Google + made it into the scene. Google Photos is a great resource for backing up all of your images, with unlimited storage for free at a lower (but still very reasonable) resolution.

Anil Sabharwal, head of Google Photos, said in a blog post: “Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa”.

It was set up in 2002 with the help of entrepreneur Bill Gross’s Idealab, and it was acquired by Google in 2004.

Shared Albums allowed users to pool their photos and videos from friends and family who keep forgetting to share them via email or social networks.

Meanwhile, for the desktop app of Picasa, it will continue to work but it will not receive any updates or development after March 15.

Where do Picasa users go from here? “Adjusting contrast, cropping etc. The Google Plus tools are cumbersome, not as intuitive and lack the variety”, one Google user wrote.