Google Shuts Picasa, focuses on Google Photos

What was Google’s array into fighting Facebook’s photo sharing ability will soon be shut.

This isn’t good news if you loved Picasa and spent a lot of time uploading your photos. Google plans to shut Picasa and continue having the photo storage option under Google Photos.

On the Google blog, the Head of Google Photos Anil Sabarwal says, “We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products.”

It’s a move to shift away from creating stand alone digital properties on Google and using an umbrella brand for all its offerings. However there is a compromise in user experience and user convenience when this shuts. The pain of moving photos to Google Photos after hours of uploading photos on Picasa is not going to be easy.

Some of the changes that you need to know are as below:

– If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album, 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. So no worrying about the loss or deletion of your photos with Google Photos.

– More photos can be added by using the upload feature of Google Photos, thus making it easy to add to your existing photo album.

– In case you don’t want to add any more photos and want to delete you albums you can do so with Google Photos

Google Picasa will change to Google Photos on 5th May, on 15th March, the Picasa desktop app will no long be supported.