As of March 15, 2016, though, Google will cease support for Picasa on the desktop. Many Picasa fans have made heavy use of them as they organize and share their galleries, but they won’t show up in Google Photos. Instead, Google plans to “focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos”. Perhaps the biggest benefit for Google Photos comes in their free and unlimited storage and sharing platform, allowing photographers to have an offsite backup solution at no cost. Fortunately, you still have some time.
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Pictures or videos in Picasa online albums will be automatically available in people’s Google Photos accounts, according to Sabharwal.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but we want to assure you that we are doing this with the aim of providing the best photos experience possible”, Google says. Users will still be able to view, download, and delete their Picasa Web Albums long into the future. Google is practically going out of its way to address their needs, saying that it will create “a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data”. Google launched Google Photos in May 2015, providing a lot of overlap with the likes of Google+ Photos and Picasa. The application will still work on your computer, but Google will not be supporting it and there will be no future updates to improve it. Users won’t be able to add or edit anything, but giving them access to old data is a great move by Google. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.
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It’s somewhat surprising that it has taken Google this long to end support for Picasa, given how much more advanced and functional its newer Google Photos product is today.
