Google has announced that it will shut down Picasa and will redirect users to try Google Photos for all their photo sharing needs. Google says all of the photos and videos from Picasa Web albums will be automatically available on Google Photos when users log in with their account. For those who don’t wish to use Google Photos, the search giants will be creating a new place to access the Web Albums data. Google announced a radically redesigned Google Photos application late last year putting a question on the relevance of Picasa. Now finally Google has made its verdict on the same.
Google has also announced that it will stop support for even the desktop application from March 15, 2016. The Google blogpost reads – as of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. This does mean that users will be able to continue using the software as they do now but without any support from Google.
While none of the changes to Picasa will come right away, the limited support will be visible going forward. Of course it is not the only Google product to meet its death in recent times. We’ve seen products like Buzz, Orkut get shut down. So, if you are a Picasa user, head straight to the Google Photos and login with your credentials. You should see a link to access all your web albums that you have stored on your account. You can then go ahead and explore the facilities that Google Photos has to offer.
Whether you find Google Photos better or worse than Picasa, feel free to let us know through the comments section below.