Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has announced that it will shut down the image organizer and viewer, Picasa.
The company wants to completely focus on Google Photos, a service that is already used by more than a hundred million users worldwide.
The company led by Sundar Pichai said that the new objective is to offer more functionality to users, with mobile and desktop platforms of one single product. That being said, new features will be added to Google Photos, in order to make the transition easier for users who have invested time organizing their photos and videos.
Picasa Web Albums can be accessed from Google Photo, where users are able to modify and share content just by logging into their Google account. Moreover, the tech giant is going to create a database with all Picasa Web Albums, so users will be able to view their contents even when they won’t have the option to create a new album.
The new changes are going to take place during the first two weeks of March. Google remarked that the Picasa desktop application will not be supported anymore and it will not receive new updates. However, it will still work for users who have already installed it. Google Photos has also a desktop uploader that can be used as an alternative to Picasa.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but we want to assure you that we are doing this with the aim of providing the best photos experience possible,” wrote Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos, in a blog post on Friday.
Sabharwal added that Google Photos is a new and smarter product, that aims to offer a greater experience for users. Since the service was launched in March 2015, it has safeguarded the photographs of more than 100 million monthly active users.
According to a Google facts sheet, besides people, food is what users photograph the most. When talking about big moments, weddings, concerts, Christmas and birthdays are the most photographed events, respectively. Dogs, cars, Paris, New York City are also among the most photographed things, said the company.
The success of Google Photos has been huge, since it can save unlimited pictures of up to 16 megapixels, for free. The service compresses and resizes photos with the same system that the old Google+ Photo service used, which is really good as it maintains high-quality standards.
It appears that tech companies are very interested in maintaining an established base of users who like to upload their pictures to the cloud. Last year, Amazon Inc. presented unlimited photo storage for Amazon Prime users. On the other hand, Apple released its Photos app for MAC OS X, which can be sync with all Apple devices, but at a cost of $0.99 per month for 20 GB of storage.
“Every second of every day, people around the world are capturing their memories through photos and videos. Humankind has already taken trillions of photos and will take another trillion this year alone” wrote Google in a statement, last year.
Source: Google Blog Post