Google Picasa Is Leaving to Make Room for Google Photos

Apparently the popular photo editor Google Picasa is leaving to make room for Google Photos, the other application made by the same company and released about a year ago. The reason? Google Photos Chief Anil Sabharwal believes that it’s counterproductive for the company to focus on two similar products at the same time, and each for different platforms.

Therefore, Google will give up Picasa and simply focus on developing and improving Google Photos to work better on both desktop and mobile.

While the public was given the date of March 15^th 2016 as the day when support for Picasa will be discontinued, Sabharwal did mention that anyone who has been using Picasa on their phone should not feel worried about losing their stored photos or videos in the Picasa online albums. They will be automatically imported from the app and into Google Photos accounts automatically.

The switch from Picasa to Google Photos will most likely not be the best received news that Android users will have to take and accept. The reason behind that is the fact that while Picasa as a standalone app may be easily exchanged with something else, there is a number of other third party apps that link to it and function based on it.

Surely, in due time, the apps in question should be updated to reflect the change in order to not render them unusable for an undetermined amount of time. However, depending on how popular and which developer is behind the apps in question, it may take between days and weeks, if not months for all of the apps to be updated to use Google Pictures instead.

Just like with any other piece of software that is past its time, it won’t simply just vanish off of our devices. The app will continue to exist indefinitely, but it will no longer receive any kind of update or further development. While that may not seem like a problem to some, it may end up exposing users to malware and other similarly malicious types of software as it is easier for attackers to go through older security signatures of software.

Not to mention that users will no longer be able to add pictures to the online album on Picasa anymore. Regardless, the changes and shift to Google Photos will be rolled out gradually and users will be notified to download all their photos from Picasa onto the other service beforehand.

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Roxanne Briean

I am a geek, a gamer and a writer. I have always been fascinated with the online community. At the moment I work as a full-time writer and study interior design. When I'm not scouring the net in search of interesting new gadgets and software I spend my time in MOBAs or drawing.