Google to shut down Picasa

New York

After the launch of Google Photos service, internet search giant Google is shutting down its photo editing software Picasa, the company announced on Saturday.

"Since the launch of Google Photos, we have had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we have decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos," Anil Sabharwal, head of Google Photos, wrote in a blog post.

"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," he added.

 Picasa is software that enables users to easily manage photos on personal computers, transform them with effects and upload and share them online.

The company has said that the photos and videos, which are in the user's Picasa Web Album, could be accessed, modified and shared through Google Photos.

"For those of you who don't want to use Google Photos or who still want to be able to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data," Sabharwal noted.

 The company will start rolling out changes from May 1, 2016. However, the Picasa desktop application will no longer be in service from March 15, 2016. — IANS