14 DAY TRIAL // In less than three months, Google will be shuttering its Picasa Web service with the intention of focusing strictly on its newer toy launched last year, namely Google Photos.
The announcement has gone live today on Google's Picasa blog and via a notification bar all over the main Picasa website.
Picasa launched in 2002, and in 2004, Google bought it from Lifescape. The service was a success in the beginning, but as mobile took off, the desktop apps and the Web service fell behind, as more users started using Facebook or Instagram to manage photos, mainly due to their top-notch mobile support.
Google countered last May, when it released Google Photos, which, unlike Picasa, is a mobile-first application and with a lesser focus on the desktop.
The company now says that it does not make sense to allocate resources and human power to two different services that do the same thing, and it has decided to go with the newer, more apt service, as it would be logical to do.
There's an easy way to migrate photos from Picasa to Google Photos
Picasa users can migrate all their Picasa Web albums to Google Photos just by logging into the service at least one time. The Picasa Web albums service will be shut down on May 1, 2016, while development of the Picasa desktop application will stop on March 16, 2016.
Users can still download the app if they want to, but Google has said it will not be committing any resources for further development.
The app has rarely received new features, but many users have loved it nevertheless, being a solid image management solution and the perfect way to upload images to Picasa Web albums without using a browser.
The decision to shut down Picasa was expected by many, and it should not be a surprise that Google has finally pulled the plug on a project it stopped believing in a few years back.