After 12 years, Google has decided to shut down its photo sharing service Picasa and focus entirely on Google Photos. The desktop application will not be supported starting from March 15, 2016 and Picasa Web Albums, a companion service will be shut down on May 1, 2016. The desktop application will still work, but it will not get any future updates.
“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. Google Photos is a new and smarter product, that offers a better platform for us to build amazing experiences and features for you in the future,” said Google.
Google said that it will be creating a new place to access your old Picasa Web Albums data, if you don’t want to use Google Photos so that you can view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, but you won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums. You can easily import Picasa Albums to Google Photos when if you are planning to move to it.
Google will also be retiring some functions of the Picasa API such as Flash support, Community search, Mutation operations other than uploads and All support for tags, comments, and contacts starting from May 1st.