Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

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Rudi
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Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by Rudi »

techsupportalert.com wrote:
Google will be shutting down Picasa Web Albums on May 1, 2016, and as of March 15, 2016, it will no longer support the Picasa Desktop application. Google appears to be dropping Picasa web albums in favor of Google Photos...

...read more here.
Regards,
Rudi

If your absence does not affect them, your presence didn't matter.

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HansV
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by HansV »

That's sad. While Google Photos works fine if you just want to view your photos, I liked the way Picasa Web Albums allowed you to provide captions for individual photos, to organize photos into albums and to specify very precisely if and how you wanted to share them. And the desktop Picasa application is much more convenient for uploading such an album than the web interface - it has more options

But it has been clear for quite a while that Google wanted to get rid of Picasa; it relentlessly tried to push users towards Google+ Photos, until that service bit the dust last year...
Best wishes,
Hans

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stuck
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by stuck »

This has been coming for a loooong time, e.g. the Picasa desktop application never officially supported Win 8/8.1, though I have it running happily on my mother's Win 8.1 laptop.

Also, one of the best features of Picasa Web Albums, the ability to share all your albums via a single link, got 'broken' when Google first merged PWA with Google+ Photos and yet despite howls of protest they ignored the users. It was the loss of that feature that led me to take down anything I had uploaded to PWA. The only thing that remains there is an album, created by Blogger, which holds all the photos I've posted on my blog. I wonder what will happen to that? Presumably it will still exist, as a holder for the blog post pics, I'll just not be able to log in to PWA and view it that way.

I have no use for Google Photos, I don't own a smart phone. Nor do I use the editing aspects of the desktop application but I do use it as the catalogue for my pictures. It is so simple yet effective.

Oh well, such is life as a dinosaur.

Ken
PS the official announcement is here:
http://googlephotos.blogspot.co.uk/2016 ... icasa.html

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HansV
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by HansV »

stuck wrote:This has been coming for a loooong time, e.g. the Picasa desktop application never officially supported Win 8/8.1, though I have it running happily on my mother's Win 8.1 laptop.
And the desktop application still works fine on Windows 10...
Best wishes,
Hans

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stuck
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by stuck »

HansV wrote:And the desktop application still works fine on Windows 10...
That's good to know.

So apart from the inevitable potential security issues of running an unsupported application, there's no reason why Picasa Desktop can't still be used for a while yet.

Ken

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HansV
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by HansV »

Yep, I plan to keep on using it until a Windows update breaks it.
Best wishes,
Hans

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BobArch2
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Re: Google is Shutting Down Picasa on May 1, 2016

Post by BobArch2 »

And, as stated in their Blog:

"Desktop application
As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps. "


The operative words being: "it will continue to work as it does today"
Regards,
Bob