Google Picasa albums now redirect to Google+

Google’s Picasa photo sharing service has been a great platform for uploading photos and sharing them, but it looks like Google will be giving it the ax soon, as URLs of Picasa albums are now being redirected to Google+ URLs. This isn’t too surprising, since Google introduced some great photo features with their social network, but it’s sad to see Picasa slowly faded out.

Specifically, the URL “picasaweb.google.com” no longer takes users to Picasa Web Albums but instead redirects users to Google+ Photos. So if you want to sneak back into Picasa Web Albums, you have to enter the URL “https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1″ where the noredirect command will keep the URL from going to Google+.

You only need to enter that URL once, though. After you use it the first time, Google sets a cookie that turns off the redirection. So you can then go back to using http://picasaweb.google.com to access your Picasa photo album page.

Google has been touting Google+ as the "new home" for your photo albums. The search giant has already replaced Picasa Web with Google+ Photos in the navigation bar and has been redirecting individual photo albums to the Google+ interface, according to the Google Operating System Blog.
Picasa's days have seemed numbered for a while.

Last April, Google disabled the Picasa Web Album Uploader for the Mac and the Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto. It also put a halt to any future updates for Picasa for Linux. No new features have been added to Picasa Web Albums in general in quite some time.

Meanwhile, Google has been striving to improve the photo features in Google+. Last summer, it added new options that let you view another person's photo albums as a slideshow and download those albums to your computer.

But Picasa Web Albums still packs more photo features than does Google+. So Google may be keeping Picasa alive just long enough for it to bulk up Google+ Photos.


[via CNET]