Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com)

Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last years I/O developers conference. Today, Google announced that it will shut down Picasa. Starting May 1st, Google will start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup, moving over to Google Photos.

Comments

I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around.

[log0n]

March 1.. lame. It's a very useful photo library manager. Not much better out there, especially when you factor in the $free$ness of it.

Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Google. They are notorious for stripping away useful functionality and switching around entire services for no reason. I don't use Picasa or Google Photos, but you can be sure that whatever they took away will remain gone in the new service.

This is why I stopped trusting things like Google Drive. I have no confidence that tomorrow they won't say they are removing some key functionality or that they are migrating the service to something else or that they are shutting it down completely. This is why local storage will always be king. I can be certain that nothing is going to happen to my stuff.

The Cloud? No thanks.

[imidan]

I have been working on scanning and organizing our family photographs for a few years, now. I've enjoyed using Picasa for certain features, such as facial recognition. I appreciate geotagging. I haven't done much with the touch-up tools or anything. I'm mainly working on getting them all digitized, not on making them pretty. I keep them backed up on a separate hard drive that's not in my home. I organize the originals into a set of binders with the hope of never having to open them again and just making new prints of any photo that someone wants.

I have absolutely zero interest in uploading my family photos to Google. I don't know exactly why Google wants them. Presumably, as a corpus to improve their image processing technologies. I realize that nobody else cares about our photos. If they started leaking through my Google+ account or at any of the other various points where I interface with Google, it wouldn't be a grand disaster. Still, the idea does not sit right with me. Not everything has to be on the Internet. Storing my photos at Google doesn't make them better, it just means that I've lost control of them.

Now, get off my lawn!

Word: being bought by google actually sucks.

[acroyear]

Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).

They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.

So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.

At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.

Re:Word: being bought by google actually sucks.

[misexistentialist]

let's hope they buy twitter

Re:Word: being bought by google actually sucks.

[turbidostato]

"They've adapted the old Microsoft method (adapted, of course, to make it not evil):

Embrace, Un-extend, Extinguish "

No, that hasn't been the case because there has been no need for it.

Look: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is not chosen by chance and it only works on said order.

You first need to start with something already popular and with an obvious leader.

Then you first embrace the technology of your competitor so users can move from your competitor to you, and you do it in a funneled way: easy to move from your competitor to you, difficult to impossible to do it the other way.

After that you Extend your competitor's technology so users *do* migrate from him to you because of the added (or percieved) benefit. If the Extend step is working, after a no-return point you extend in non-compatible ways, on one hand just to follow your strategy from the Embrace step, and to take advantage of the network effect to put your competitor pinning for the fjords on the other.

Once your competition is not a risk any more, you enter the Extinguish step were you go where you really wanted from the beginning.

For the most perfected example of Microsoft's application of this model see what they did to Novell, starting in the days of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with its end on Windows 2000 Server.

But Google is not doing this (not here, at least): Google was not even trying to funnel users away from other photo albums, much less from Picasa. They just bought it and, since Picasa was a Google's competitor no more, there was no need for the Extend step, therefore there were no Extend step.

And everything of value was lost.

[Kwyj1b0]

I just logged in to Photos to see if it would serve as a replacement (I use and like Picasa), and was I unpleasantly surprised! TLDR: A half-arsed clone that misses all the good in Picasa.

My first reaction: material design is great and all, but a clean interface that is undiscoverable (or requires five clicks to get anywhere) is useless. I see my Picasa albums on the home screen, except they show a date instead of the album name (I get the idea, it is just a timeline of photos ignoring my organization). Because a date is so much more informative. Also, there is this thing called Collections - because they added some abominations called Stories and Movies, which are also types of Collections (?). Except that Stories and Movies don't show up in my list of Collections, so why bother creating something called Collections in the first place?

When I go to collections, I see all my Albums (with names). Clicking on one takes me to the page with all photos.The map is gone (I like seeing all the places I've been on the home page of picasa).

They do have something new called Stories, and something called Movies. They both look like slideshows, except Movies is a YouTube video, while Stories is a interactive slideshow with some map integration to make it cool. Except I don't see how I can make my own story if I wanted, and the defaults are terrible.

All of this wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't one clear problem: Google is killing off Picasa. And why? To make way for Stories? It seems like an internal politics issue to me ("Look, I spent 2 months building this piece of shit, and I want it shipped and adopted, and I'll kill picasa if I damn well have to."). I get that some people might like the new features, and I can learn to live with the UI changes. Except that the best part about Picasa (and what was truly great about flickr) was the simplicity. They understood that there was a group that was interested in photography, creating and sharing albums, and that's it. And while you can still do most of that (I have no idea if the Picasa client will still work - that would be a deal breaker for me), we have to be subject to a bunch of crap just because someone wanted their pet project to get visibility.