Google announced today that “after much thought and consideration” they are retiring Picasa to focus on building “amazing experiences and features” around their Google Photos services. Picasa users will continue to have access to their photos for the foreseeable future. Google will cease supporting Picasa’s desktop application on March 15, 2016. Other changes to Picasa Web Albums will start rolling out on May 1, 2016.
Picasa Web Albums Data API Adjustments
Google also announced changes to the Picasa Web Albums Data API. They will no longer support features such as Flash, community search, mutation operations other than uploads and all support for tags, comments and contacts. The content included in responses and the operation behavior for the remaining supported operations may change as well.
What does this mean for Filestack customers?
Last month users uploaded 76,201 photos from Picasa using our file picker. This means Picasa accounted for at least 5% of the images we manage for customers. We want to ensure Picasa remains integrated with our picker for as long as possible. We’re also confident that the eventual transition from Picasa to Google Photos should be mostly seamless for our customers and their users since both services currently share a common API.
Tough Choices
Building a business is full of tough choices, even for a company as large as Google. Providing your customers with an exceptional experience is sometimes a matter of economics. Shelving one service to invest in another has lead to a lot of success stories. We hate to see Picasa go, but look forward to working with and supporting an improved Google Photos platform.
Filestack is a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing file uploads and management for web and mobile applications. Our user-friendly API seamlessly integrates with major cloud services, offering developers a reliable and efficient file handling experience.
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