MY photo collection has always been a bit of a mess. The digital photos are scattered across several external hard drives and my smart phone. Under such conditions, finding one particular shot that I vaguely remember taking some time ago can be quite the challenge.
In 2006, I tried to bring some order to this chaos by using Picasa, a desktop PC application from Google that would let me organize my photos into albums, to add captions and to tag them so they would be easier to locate in search. Combining this with the free online service called Picasa Web Albums, I was also able to share these photos with friends and family—and to maintain a backup copy of my images in the cloud.
A portmanteau taken from the name of the Spanish painter Picasso and the phrase mi casa (Spanish for “my house”) Picasa was originally created by a company called Lifescape in 2002, and was sold to Google in July 2004.
Both the desktop application and the web service were updated from time to time, but when Google spun out Google Photos from its Google+ social network, the future of Picasa seemed uncertain. After all, it didn’t make sense for Google to maintain and develop two similar products.
Last week, the other shoe when Google announced that it would be retiring Picasa over the coming months so that it could focus its efforts on Google Photos.
“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,” wrote Anil Sabharwal, head of Google Photos.
The blog post also addressed the concerns of existing Picasa users.
“We know for many of you, a great deal of care has gone into managing your photos and videos using Picasa—including the hours you’ve invested and the most precious moments you’ve trusted us with. So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content,” Sabharwal said.
Picasa Web Album users who log into Google Photos today will find that all their photos and videos are already there. I verified this by signing into Google Photos, which I had never used before, and found that it had indeed copied all my photos and albums since I started using Picasa in 2006.
For now, users will have a choice of uploading their images using either service, but Picasa will become unavailable sometime after May 1, the Google blog post suggests.
Also, while all photos and videos on Picasa are automatically backed up to Google Photos, some data—including tags—are not.
Google promises to provide “a new place” for Picasa users to access specific content such as tags, captions or comments, but offers no specifics as yet.
The Picasa desktop application will continue to work after a fashion, but Google will stop supporting it by March 15.
You will still be able to use the Picasa desktop application to organize photos on your local hard drive, but links to the Picasa Web Album will no longer work, and you will no longer be able to upload photos using the program. Google suggests using Google Photos Desktop Uploader (https://photos.google.com/apps) instead—but like Picasa itself, the program is not available for Linux.
Back in the day, I used to run Picasa on my Linux box using Wine, and it did a pretty decent job. Unfortunately, the Google Photos uploader won’t even run when I try running it on Wine, so I can’t really say how well it works or doesn’t work in Linux.
Of course, Google’s lack of support for Linux users shouldn’t come as a surprise any more. Although the company uses the operating system internally, and uses the Linux kernel for its Android operating system, it has been notoriously unwilling to support Linux users on the desktop.
Almost four years after launching Google Drive, a file storage and synchronization service, the company has yet to release a Linux desktop client. If you try downloading it, Google will cheerfully tell you: “There is no Drive app for Linux at this time.” The phrasing suggests that there might be one at some future date—but I’m not holding my breath.
The looming demise of Picasa comes as no surprise. The writing on the wall was clear, even on its official blog. Before the announcement of its “retirement” this month, the last entry on the blog was posted more than four years ago, in December 2011, announcing an update to Picasa 3.9.
Picasa was a pretty cool application, even if I had to run it on Wine. It’s sad to see it go. Chin Wong
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