Picasa is dead - long live Google Photos!

Remember Picasa - Google's image organiser and editor which launched in 2002 and was generally kind of a pain to use? Well it's finally been killed off in favour of better products.

Google announced the news in a blog post and confirmed that the move was being made so that they could dedicate all of their resources to Google Photos, which launched in earnest in mid 2015 after being spun off as its own product separate from Google+. Google Photos is a great resource for backing up all of your images, with unlimited storage for free at a lower (but still very reasonable) resolution. It's the perfect way to curate everything you snap, and you can easily organise, share and check up on old memories.

Years on from its hey day, Picasa had become a sluggish mess, tied to an increasingly dated desktop application. The quick photo editing features were still somewhat useful but a significantly slicker version is now part of Google Photos, making it even more redundant.

"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. 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."

So what does that mean for the photos and videos you already have on Picasa? Well as it's all part of your Google account, all you have to do is log into Google Photos with the same ID and your web albums will all be there. If you're not interested in Google Photos you'll get more informtion on securing your Picasa content before the service shuts down on the 1st of May 2016.