Picasa will be shut down as from May 1, 2016, Google has announced. The photo and video application has been running somehow in competition with another of Alphabet’s photo app, Google Photos.
Google Photos was released less than a year ago, but Picasa has been around for quite some time. But since the two applications offered kind of the same services, Google has decided to bring one down in favor of concentrating on the other.
“We believe that we can create an experience that is much better by shifting our focus to one service that provides users with more functionality as well as works seamlessly across all platforms, rather than divide our focus to two different products,” Anil Sabharwal, who is Google Photos chief, said in a statement, posted on the company’s blog.
Google Photos is less than a year old
As mentioned at the beginning, Google Photos is a new service that has less than a year into the market. Unveiled last year, the application will now serve as your home of photos, videos and albums. In short, all the photos and videos you have in your Picasa online albums will automatically be migrated to Google Photos.
Picasa already has volumes of followers and of course, this move will come as sad news to them. Google is aware of this and to help you through the transformation slowly, the company will be letting the service run for a few months. During this period, users will be able to view, delete as well as download any of their Picasa photos or videos from the online albums. However, be warned that Google will no longer be paying its engineers to maintain and roll out new updates to the Picasa application, instead, these efforts will be directed to the Photos app.
“To make it clear, none of this is going to happen from today. If you own a Picasa account or rather Web Album, you can keep using it as usual,” Sabharwal said. “We will start rolling out these changes as from May 1, 2016.”
Support for Picasa desktop app to end on March 15
In addition to announcing that it will no longer be rolling out new updates to the mobile version of Picasa, Google also announced that the desktop application of this photo and video application will no longer be supported beginning March 15, 2016.
While the Picasa desktop app will keep working as usual, no further developments will be added to the app as well as no future updates.
Google promises that this change is not for the bad, but for the good of the users as the company aims to provide the best photos experience possible.