It's always difficult when a much-loved program goes away. If you loved Google owned Picasa you may have been shocked to learn that it was being phased out. In a Google blog post we learned the following explanation:

Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos. 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.

If you are now wondering what to do with all those photos in Picasa, never fear!

Jennifer Wilson, from Simple Scrapper, has a video to explain what to do next.

 

http://www.simplescrapper.com/2016/02/how-to-get-your-photos-out-of-picasa/

But what about face recognition?

One of Picasa's landmark features was face recognition, and if you want to use those kinds of features, you'll need something more than your photo folders.

 

Google Photos to the Rescue

I now love using Google Photos to make a copy of my photo photos. It's fast and free for both iPhone and Android. You can learn all about it in Modern Photo Solutions free course. I find it handy to quickly search my photo library with Google's smart searching capabilities.

However, it's not the place I'll be trusting for as a photo backup.

A More Permanent Solution

As with any free service, Google will be looking to monetize the service and may or may not continue to support it into the future. So, you will also want a more permanent backup. If you want future-proof, guaranteed photo storage Forever is for you. It's now my recommended online storage as it's so straight forward to use and not only backs up your photos but makes them easy to share (or keep private).