Google Photos Takes Over Picasa - Desktop App And API Support To Be Discontinued

Google announced on Friday in a decision favoring Google Photos, that it will no longer continue support for Picasa desktop app. Considering the widespread adoption of Picasa and the years of memories uploaded, Google has promised to make the transition seamless. When users sign into Google Photos using the same credentials, all uploaded photos and videos will automatically be transferred to Google Photos. In addition to product updates, Google is also pulling the plug on some APIs.

The transferring of all data to Google Photos is a good move and would ensure retention of Picasa fans. Picasa was a great way to organize photos and videos across devices, and the sync ensured all data was constantly backed up. Now Google Photos does the same, so there is no point in investing time and resources in 2 different products that serve the same purpose, Google says.

Moving on from Picasa will be available for download till March 15th 2016, and all Picasa accounts will function as usual till May 1st 2016. After that, creating new albums and importing photos will be disabled. However, the existing tags, albums and photos will be accessible as usual. Users can also download their Picasa data if they wish.

In addition to the desktop app, Google will also be discontinuing #-Link-Snipped-# for flash support, community searching, photo manipulation other than uploads, and tags, comments and contacts. Other functions such as reading photo albums and photos will continue to work fine.

Interestingly, Photos is Google’s own app, while Picasa was acquired in 2004. Google has ensured that its decision to unify the two photo services does not hurt users in anyway. The auto import is a good gesture, and saves a lot of data migration effort. But Picasa will be missed.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#