The name was also registered by Google as an LLC. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Lifescape and began offering it as freeware.

An iPhoto plugin and a standalone program for uploading photos were available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and macOS were available, and for Linux, the Windows version was bundled with Wine compatibility layer. 'Picasa' is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the word casa (Spanish for 'house') and 'pic' for pictures. Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by Idealab) in 2002. Google notes that it will also retire some functions of the Picasa API, affecting developers.3.9.141.259 (9 October 2015 8 years ago ( )) ģ.9.141.306 (9 October 2015 8 years ago ( )) This part of the transition is coming after the end date for Picasa on the desktop, as Google says it won’t start rolling out these changes until May 1, 2016. However, it won’t allow users to create, organize or edit albums – to do that, they would have to move to Google Photos or some other program. There aren’t a lot of details about this new place yet, except that it will offer users tools to “view, download, or delete” your Picasa Web Albums. Google is practically going out of its way to address their needs, saying that it will create “a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data.” Google notes that the easiest way to access, modify and share the content from a Picasa Web Album is to log into Google Photos, as photos and videos will already be there for you, automatically.īut some Picasa Web Albums users don’t want to join Google Photos for whatever reason. It doesn’t sound like that metadata has made the transition to Google Photos, however.

Friends and family may have commented on some photos, as well. Specifically, users may have tagged their photos for organizational purposes, as well as added captions. Meanwhile, there’s likely more concern from users about the data collected on Picasa Web Albums, which includes very specific metadata about their photos. It looks much like it did years ago.įor those who want to make the switch to Google Photos, there’s a desktop uploader app available at /apps that can be used going forward. To be fair, the software hadn’t been updated much as it was – the desktop app may have received minor tweaks, security patches and bug fixes, but its overall user interface is incredibly dated. However, the software will no longer receive future updates. “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,” writes Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos on a blog post. “So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content,” he added.įor those who are using the Picasa desktop application, it will continue to work as it does today – and if you choose to download it before the shutdown date of March 16, that will also be the case. The company emphasized how much time it has invested in making sure it makes the transition as painless as possible for end users. It’s clear that Google is concerned about backlash from its devoted user base who still relies on Picasa, given the tone of today’s announcement. In addition, it will be archiving Picasa Web Albums data at a later date while encouraging those users to convert to Google Photos instead. And now the company is finally going to do something about that: Google announced this morning that it will no longer support the Picasa desktop application as of March 16, 2016. It hasn’t made sense for Google to continue to invest in two separate photo storage and sharing applications, as it has been doing with the newer Google Photos and the dated software Picasa.

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