From the Google Picasa Blog:-

 

 

 

Moving on from Picasa Friday, 12 February 2016 10:00

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.

We know for many of you, a great deal of care has gone into managing your photos and videos using Picasa—including the hours you’ve invested and the most precious moments you’ve trusted us with. So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content. We’ve outlined below some of the changes you can expect.

Picasa Web Albums
If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there. Using Google Photos, you can continue to upload and organize your memories, as well as enjoy other great benefits like better ways to search and share your images.

However, 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. That way, you will still be able to view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums (you would now do this in Google Photos).

One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today—if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.

Desktop application
As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps.

 

 

I was going to post the same thing a few days ago when the dooms day message appeared, but something distracted me. It's a real shame, they tried to push us out to Google+ a few years back, but didn't work (that redirect was a pain in the hole for a bit). Now I am shafted with my entire hosted pics collection on picasa. I like having the simplicity of it and the easy to edit URL's for size purposes, you can do this in google+/photos URL's, but it's splt into 2 values not 1!!!! Really not a happy camper about all of this tbh :( 

It's finally happened :( Earlier today I could use picasa site as per normal, but just went back in and :( :( :(

 

How the feck do I upload photos now :( I see it has archived google+ etc too?? FFS! 

 

OMFG I went to the google photos thing went to an existing album and added this screenshot then went to get a link to post in here to embed and it's just some donkey poo link to take you to the site to view it..... But as an existing album I go back to the 'archive' site picasa URL redirects to now and go into my album in there where I can get a link to the pic, not like the old picasa ones where I could change the size nice and easily, but more a google+ style one where I have to mess with the dimensions to do so :( THEN Brisky says "You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community."  Plus this google photos site told me I have only 7.6gb left of storage for pics WTF? 

 

Need more ideas on where to go next in utter disappointment

 

 

 

Edited 7 August, 20169 yr by FUBAR

Yep ran in to the same issues FUBAR, all my old images linked in my build thread for example still work but I can't seem to embed images stored on Google any more. Gave up as the whole interface seemed to have been redesigned to be tablet friendly (a trend which I really hate as to do any more advanced functions now needs more clicks than ever) and it isn't nice to navigate.

 

Have stored my latest images on FB in a private album instead and then linked them to my thread.

Flickr is great for this. 1tb storage as well