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

Posted by yaelk on from the google-updates dept.

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.

15 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. by log0n · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. by Solandri · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.

      But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.

    2. Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. by Bob_Who · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Absolutely true. The more you get to know Google, the less you like them.

      Apparently, the feeling is mutual, since once they've accumulated the exploitable data, they could give a shit about being useful to anyone. It's like all media that is funded by advertising - the user is the product, and whatever attracts us like moths to the light will be used to manipulate their asset. We are treated like human traffic by the evil pimps who eat us up and spit us out like a spent piece of used jet trash.

      Anyway, Picasa has been loosing support for over a year. The writing was on the wall, I suppose. They just want to shake loose all of the storage now that they have accumulated all of the photographic data that was required to put names onto faces for their facial recognition profiling.

      Google sure as hell is up to no good most of the time that they give a service away to anyone ever. - They are doing everything in their power to profile every living soul on the planet web.

  2. The Cloud? No thanks. by imidan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:The Cloud? No thanks. by imidan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And I guess I can understand that. But it somehow feels a little bit icky for me to upload my family to Google so they can improve their facial recognition to drive up profits. I don't know. I'm okay with being "the product" when I join services such as Facebook, but I'm not certain that I have the right to donate my family history the same way. Maybe that's crazy, but as I say, it just makes me feel a little... I don't know.

  3. So...anyone want to suggest replacements? by Sowelu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.

    1. Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? by Voyager529 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Photo organizers, locally installed, Windows:
      Zoner Photo Studio
      xnView
      Nero Mediahome
      Windows Live Photo Gallery
      Media Pro (Not Freeware)
      ACDSee (Not Freeware>
      Corel Aftershot (Not Freeware)

      Photo editors, browser based:
      Pixlr
      Polarr
      Fotor
      iPiccy

      Image Hosting:
      Piwigo (free to self-host; first party hosting available)
      Zenphoto (free to self-host; third party hosting available)
      JuiceBox (freemium; self-hosted only)
      Flickr
      Amazon Prime Photos (you have to be Prime)

      Okay, I'm tired of adding links...but depending on what functions of Picasa you're looking to replace, there are plenty of alternatives.

    2. Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? by graphius · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Lightroom is pretty good, and has a lot of other functionality, but Digicam is an awesome photo organizer. Works great in Linux, ok in Windows and kind of sucks on OSX.
      PS. I am quite a serious photographer and have worked professionally in the past. Picassa was always a joke for anyone who took a lot of photos.

    3. Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? by Sabriel · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think you meant digiKam, not digicam?

  4. Word: being bought by google actually sucks. by acroyear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
    -- Joe
    1. Re:Word: being bought by google actually sucks. by turbidostato · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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.

  5. Turn it OPEN SOURCE by martiniturbide · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...give us at least a chance !!!!

  6. I will never adopt another Google product by dpletche · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google Photos could be the greatest thing ever, but it's too late for that. No thank you, I will pass on adopting Google's latest momentary fancy.

    Google can't be trusted as a custodian of users' valuable data. Google has the attention span of a sleep-deprived toddler. In the past, it created amazing products, which I wove into my life. Then Google got bored and dropped those products, replacing them with other products I didn't like as much, again and again.

    The incentive to destroy and replace products is baked in to Google's performance management ritual. I'm weary of the resulting churn and refuse to be burned again. In addition, I'm fed up with Google's fixation on low-contrast designs. I'm patiently disentangling myself of all Google dependencies.

    Disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Google for four years. Hello to a friend who still works on Google Photos...

  7. Two kids and their toys by ErnoWindt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Larry and Sergey run their company like two kids on Christmas morning. They're initially enthused, open package after package, play with their new toys for a while, then lose interest and move on. Let's hope they don't decide to arbitrarily pull the plug one afternoon on driver-less cars while millions of them are on the road.