Moving On?

Received this ominous message on my Picasa (photo-hosting service) dashboard last Friday:

Moving on from Picasa

Friday, February 12, 2016 10:00 AM

Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos. 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.

We know for many of you, a great deal of care has gone into managing your photos and videos using Picasa—including the hours you’ve invested and the most precious moments you’ve trusted us with. So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content. We’ve outlined below some of the changes you can expect.

Picasa Web Albums
If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there. Using Google Photos, you can continue to upload and organize your memories, as well as enjoy other great benefits like better ways to search and share your images.

However, for those of you who don’t want to use Google Photos or who still want to be able to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. That way, you will still be able to view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums (you would now do this in Google Photos).

One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today—if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.…


… Again, none of these changes are happening today, and we’ll continue to update you along the way. 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 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.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos

I always get a kick when these kinds of proclamations contain things that are simple lies:

If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there.

I've checked the new "Google Photos" site and I'm missing four albums- about 1000 pictures, including the important Laxness in Translation images. 

…enjoy other great benefits like better ways to search and share your images …

Instead of a neat and orderly array of thumbnails that I can scan in a few seconds, I'm presented with a river of images that is extremely tedious to scroll through. There is a "search" function, however. Here's an example of what turned up when I searched for an image of a "transistor":



Oddly enough, I actually have a picture of a transistor. I found it with a couple of clicks in the old Picasa—RIGHT WHERE I PUT IT!

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.

New? Yes. Smarter? Google Photos is a stripped down version of Flickr, a service I stopped using years ago!

As of today, I can still use the old Picasa site to store and access my photos. As of May 1st, if I won't be able to upload photos to Picasa, how will I be able to put them on my blog? Goggle Photos doesn't connect with Google Blogger! Trying not to be negative, I published a work-around to one of the forums and was surprised to see that it made it to the Picasa FAQ page!

Half a loaf is better than none.