Google told the world on February 12 it will no longer support, wait are ready for it?
If you said, "Picasa" you got it right (picasa.google.com). Now I will not yell too loudly about this one since I was not a big Picasa lover. It seemed a little convoluted to me; however, many people love(d) Picasa and are very upset to see it go.
Picasa is/was an image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos. And yes, it was named after Pablo Picasso and blended with "mi casa" ("my house" in Spanish) and "pic" for pictures. It was also linked to the cloud so that you could share your photos online with the world…if you wished. It was originally created by a company named Lifescape in 2002. Google purchased it in mid-2004.
As of March 16, 2016 it was removed from the web and is no longer "downloadable." If you downloaded the file before then, you may keep the installation file and install it at any other time. In addition, Google will be archiving Picasa Web Albums data at a later date while encouraging those users to convert to Google Photos instead. That means that if you still have Picasa you will not be able to upload to the Web Albums in the future since they will be gone. It also means that Google will not continue to update it for security and other features.
So, goodbye Picasa, I knew you well… a little bit. Google is providing a new application called, "Google Photos" (photos.google.com) which rolled out early last summer. This is the replacement which is lacking a few of Picasa’s features. One big plus is that if you keep your uploaded photos to HD quality of 16 megapixels (MP) or less per photo, you have unlimited storage. With higher quality it will use your Google Drive storage limits as did Picasa.
Now here is a discontinuation that really bugs me. A great application that I have supported willingly over the past several years is Copy (copy.com) by Barracuda. It is similar to Dropbox for storing any files on your computer in the cloud. It is a great backup solution which would allow a user to start with 15 GB of space (13 GB more that Dropbox).
Well guess what Barracuda announced February 1st? You guess correctly, it will be shut down as of May 1, 2016. They commented, "…our business focus has shifted, we had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the Copy and CudaDrive services and allocate those resources elsewhere."
There is no replacement with that much free space. Basically Barracuda says put your files somewhere else. Right this minute I am still a big Dropbox supporter ("rd.dblclx.com/use-Dropbox" for extra start up storage). Of course, who knows what the future holds?
