Google axes Picasa in favor of new app

Picasa users will have to bid farewell to Google’s old photo app in favor of a more recent product.

Google is finally getting rid of its old Picasa photo app in favor of something new. According to a report from Android Police, the company is ditching the old photo sharing and management app for its revamped product, Google Photos.

It’s been quite a while since Picasa was last updated, and many users have moved on to bigger and better photo management and sharing products. If you are a longtime Picasa user, however, you need not worry. Photos added to Picasa over the years will still be accessible in Google Photos, as both applications access the same image database.

If you’re not keen on the idea of using Google Photos, you can still access and download Picasa web albums along with their tags, comments and captions. While Picasa albums are still accessible on the web until May 1, 2016, users will not be able to add any new photos moving forward. Users that have downloaded the Picasa application can continue to use the program’s photo editing capabilities.

The last time Google updated Picasa was in 2011, but a number of loyal fans continue to use the application. The desktop app will officially lose Google support on March 1, 2016. If you’re still interested in using Picasa there is time to download it, but Google won’t be adding any new features or fixing any more bugs.

It’s unclear how the program will behave once Google makes web albums read-only this May, but it is certainly possible that people who continue to use Picasa will run into some weird bugs. But users that stick with Picasa may be missing out – Google Photos takes some of Picasa’s most beloved photo editing and sharing capabilities and continues to improve upon them.

A press release from Google describing the decision to drop Picasa can be found here.

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