Google is shutting down Picasa desktop app and Picasa Web Albums to focus on Photos

Picasa 3.9 for Mac (app icon, full size)

Google on Friday announced that the Picasa desktop app and its corresponding online photo-sharing service, called Picasa Web Albums, are soon going to be officially dead. This didn’t come as a shock: since the launch of Google Photos, Picasa’s fate was pretty much sealed.

As of March 15, 2016, Google will no longer be supporting the desktop Picasa application for Mac and Windows. After the cut-off date, existing Picasa installations will still work.

However, Google has said it will cease development of the app so there will be no future updates nor will the Picasa app continue to be available for download after March 15.

Focusing on Photos

“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,” explains the search giant.

“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.”

Picasa on desktop

Google is suggesting that Picasa users switch to its new Photos service and mobile apps. A desktop Google Photos uploader is available at photos.google.com/apps. Additionally, Google will be retiring some functions of the Picasa API.

Picasa Web Albums

As for Picasa Web Albums, its users have two choices at their disposal.

One, they can simply log in to Google Photos on the web where most of their Picasa Web Albums content will already be there; and two, people who don’t want to use Google Photos will soon have a new place to access their Picasa Web Albums data, including photo tags, captions and comments.

This yet-to-be-announced website will let users view, download or delete their Picasa Web Albums. However, creating, editing and organizing albums won’t be supported.

Changes to Picasa Web Albums will start rolling out on May 1, 2016.

“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,” cautions Google.

No matter how you look at it, it is perfectly clear that Google is steering Picasa users toward the Photos service, which may not be a bad thing at all.

Source: Google