from Hacker News

Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

by scarhill on 3/7/19, 7:32 PM with 90 comments

  • by CamelCaseName on 3/7/19, 8:09 PM

    In Google's defense:

    1. This was announced over 3 years ago [0]

    2. Photos/Videos uploaded to Picasa were transferred to Google Photos automatically (comments/tags/captions will be lost though) [1]

    3. Picasa was originally built in 2002! (bought by Google in 2004) -- Perhaps Picasa had a time and place?

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Discontinuation

    [1] https://picasa.google.com/

  • by scarmig on 3/7/19, 8:11 PM

    It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

  • by pgrote on 3/7/19, 8:12 PM

    Really miss picasa. I know the world is moving away from tagging your photos with descriptive words, but I still do it.

    As with any Picasa related subject: Does anyone have a viable alternative desktop software that allows tagging of photos, some mild editing and allowing photos to be kept in folders that are the albums.

  • by benatkin on 3/7/19, 8:16 PM

    Google may not be much worse than other FANGs, but the way it pretends to be friendly to open source and free culture communities and co-opts them is nasty.

    "Despite illusions in 2008–2009 that it was a fair player, Google is now trashing free culture by making all the Picasa Web images in Creative Commons vanish from the web.

    In fact, users and albums are often forced to "migrate" to Google Plus, without telling them that any Creative Commons marking will be irreversibly destroyed in the process. There's no way to mark Creative Commons images on Google Plus. There's also no way to search or browse Picasa Web by license, apparently (the feature used to exist in 2009)."

    https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Picasa

  • by ravenstine on 3/7/19, 8:04 PM

    I wouldn't depend on Google for anything.

    Maybe self-hosting needs to be made easier for the average person? The web has so much bandwidth now that there's no reason outside of potential security issues that people can't be posting more of their own stuff(like a web).

  • by rootusrootus on 3/7/19, 8:04 PM

    Add this to the list of reasons why you should not rely on cloud providers for anything you actually care about.

  • by etiam on 3/7/19, 9:32 PM

    On a slightly related note, what do people use to save local copies of valuable Google+ groups? If I understand correctly we're less than a month from shutdown?

  • by aboutruby on 3/7/19, 10:15 PM

    Maybe someone could maybe a domain like fixedgoogleplus.com (similar to rawgithub.com) and host people's Picasa/Google+ photos while keeping the same link

  • by laurynas-s on 3/7/19, 10:29 PM

    When Google will be shutting down Google Photos?

    Of course, it is going to happen eventually.

    However, I do have a dozen of photos there with no easy way to export hiqh quality photos in one go that worries me.

  • by monochromatic on 3/7/19, 10:28 PM

    Picasa was such a great project. Google ruined it.

  • by peterwwillis on 3/7/19, 8:15 PM

    As George Lopez would say, Why you crying? You chose to use someone's free platform to host and display your pictures with virtually no work on your part, and now you don't get the free lunch anymore.

    These scenarios are actually useful. They train people to use solutions that are open and portable, which will help them respond to unexpected disasters in the future. Use a self-hosted CMS to build, manage and publish your content so you can re-publish your content somewhere else.