A few days ago, the latest incarnation of their online photo storage and sharing service, now called simply, Google Photos. Before I tell you the good and the bad of this announcement, let me give you a little bit of history.
Picasa, Google’s photo storage service that you’ve probably forgotten exists, will officially die starting May 1. Which is fine by us, considering how great Google Photos is. “After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus. Is there another option to Picasa with similar ease of use and simplicity? But I installed picasa instead just to have a run on it. After few years and work. How to Use Picasa. Picasa is a free program from Google that you can use to organize and edit your digital photographs. This article will explain how to get started playing around with your digital photos!
Uploading tool that Picasa was using is rebranded as google photos uploader it. Support keeps trying to sell me on keeping them instead of helping find.
In 2006, Google offered an online photo storage and sharing service called Picasa Web Albums (PWA.) It worked in tandem with the Picasa software on computers and it was quite popular. In 2012 Google started the Google+ (Plus) social network and they totally reprogrammed the photo storage and sharing service to integrate it with the social network. They called it Google+ Photos. Picasa Web Albums continued to exist. If you used either of these services, your uploaded photos were stored in the same place, as part of your Google account. You could work with your photos using either Picasa Web Albums or Google+ Photos. These were simply 2 interfaces to the same set of online photos, but since Google+ photos was newer, it was the default.
Unless you used a very specific address to get to PWA () you would be taken to Google+ Photos every time. The Good Now, in 2015, we have a third interface. The Google Photos that was announced this week. Because Google is trying to get it right and, of course, to hold on to that huge market segment of people who care about their photos! Google learns and evolves. They learned that people didn’t like to be forced into the Google+ social network in order to use the photo storage and sharing service.
They learned that we all have way too many photos to manage them ourselves. In response, Google Photos is uncoupled from Google+ and it offers free UNlimited storage for photos in original resolution up to 16 megapixels. This was about Google+ and Google Photos: it’s become clear that while social networks are great for sharing images and video clips, they’re not where most people want to store all their private, personal photos and videos.
That’s one reason why Google has been hard at work building an entirely new photos experience from the ground up. One that works for the photos you want to share, as well as the ones you don’t.
Google Photos is a standalone app for Android and for Apple iOS, as well as a website – photos.google.com. These are all available now, for free. Probably the coolest new feature is found by using the Search feature. Tap the search icon (magnifying glass) in the mobile Apps, or click in the search field on the web. Instantly, you will see your photos categorized by People, Places, Things, and Types. I was amazed to see my pictures grouped under Things: Sky, Mountains, Flowers, Cars, Sunset, Boats, Kayaks, Caves, Camping, Lighthouses, and on and on. If I click (this view is private) on the picture labeled “Boats” I see lots of boat pictures that have collected in my photo library over many years.