In its official blog, Google has just announced that it’ll shut down a number of services to focus its efforts on its core products.
For Mac users it is interesting to know that:
Starting today, the Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto will no longer be available for download. People can continue to use the uploader and plugin if they are installed. However, we’ll no longer maintain these tools. We strongly encourage people to download
I am a happy Picasa Web user and have happily paid for extended storage for the past three years. What bugs me most about this decision is:
- The announcement came without any warning. It is common practice in IT to announce the end of life of a product. I suppose that for Google, everything is just a joyful experiment eternally in beta stage.
- No further maintenance for these two tools means no OS X Mountain Lion and the next version of iPhoto support.
- If you want to use Picasa Web Albums from your Mac you will have to install another product, that will clutter even more your hard drive.
- In case you need to recover your pictures from Picasa Web Albums you will have to use Picasa for Mac. Until now, you could use the Uploader to do that.
I’ve got a love hate relationship with Google.
To me it seems more and more like one of those unhealthy relationships that you find yourself in sometimes in life. You know that you should break up but somehow, some mysterious force keeps you from doing it and you can’t think of your life without that person.
Eventually when you find the guts to do it, you almost feel relieved and life goes on as if nothing has ever happened.
They want to steer photo and album postings to Google+ directly. I don’t know why they just didn’t say so. Even though you can tie Picasa to Google+, they want photos and video posted directly. It’s a business strategy to increase traffic. I use Google+ as my online storage for all my video and photos. In reality, I’m not active on Google+ socially (use Facebook), but have an account and use it as an unlimited storage option. I find that my videos using music that is DRM blocked on Facebook, Vimeo or YouTube are never restricted or taken down on Google+. Not sure why, but it works!
Thanks for the insight Grafton. They certainly want us to use Google+ more extensively.
How do you feel about storing your pics on a platform that could make them visible to anyone if only Google thought it’d benefit them?
This is one of the reasons I prefer to pay upfront when I need some storage space.
Pietro
They need to get in nice with Apple then and add Google+ as an account type in Mountain Lion. They already have flickr (even right in iPhoto) and gmail, and full Facebook support is coming why not Google+?
Hi Jeremy,
I think you’re right. At the end of the day this rivalry between Apple and Google is all about money.
The day a deal that makes sense to both companies comes up I’m pretty sure that they will become “friends” again. It’s a shame that in these battles the only one that always lose are users. We loose in terms of time spent to reorganise our data, moving it to a different service and so on. Just a pain really.
Best regards,
Pietro
Here’s a hint. If you just want the plugin but not the bloatware such as Google Updater etc that is included in the package that is currently available at Macupdate, then right click on the installer and only run the Google Web Uploader package that you see under resources. This will install only the plugin and the plugin works just fine for 10.8 and iPhoto 11 (9.3.2).
Hi Vino,
Thanks for this hint! Very useful for people who use iPhoto with PicasaWeb.
Pietro
Where exactly can u download this?