Picasa Will Not Upload to Google Photos?

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Millions have downloaded and continue to use Picasa, Google'south complimentary and characteristic-rich photo management software that works on both Macs and PCs. But the app has seen almost no love from Google in recent years — in fact, the last major update happened more than five years ago, in 2011, and that update was the last i Picasa users will ever see. Google recently announced that it has abandoned the platform entirely in favor of its deject-based product known as "Google Photos," which launched final yr as a standalone product featuring much of same  functionality that was baked into Picasa and the company's social network, Google+.

More Google Photos: Google Photos "undo edits" update eliminates copies to reduce clutter

Then what does this hateful for folks who all the same employ Picasa?

How to stick with Picasa, for now

Google stopped supporting Picasa on March fifteen, 2016 . That means no more than versions will be released, no problems fixes will be issued, and no support will be offered. Nonetheless, if y'all already have the software installed, it will continue to work. No, your photos won't suddenly disappear and neither volition the software itself. If y'all want to go on using Picasa, y'all can absolutely do so. If y'all go this route, my advice is to re-download the latest version of Picasa (three.nine) for Mac or Windows right now and keep the installer somewhere safe — you never know when you may need to reinstall it and who knows how easy it volition exist to observe afterwards.

Here's what has changed. If you've been taking advantage of Picasa's free web Albums feature, as of May i, 2016 the only way to admission them is through Google Photos. If you're curious what that will look like, but log in to Google Photos with the Google business relationship y'all used to create the web Album — and voila — they're already there. You can view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums from the Photos interface, but as of May 1, you cannot create, organize, or edit them.

Yous may also find that Picasa functions which require web connectivity, like the Order Prints or Publish to Blogger features, may fail to work at some betoken. Google has been silent on exactly when or how this could happen, though.

How to drift to Google Photos

In that location'southward a reason why Google doesn't use the term "migrate" when encouraging Picasa users to encompass Google Photos. That'southward because — with the exception of the Web Albums feature described higher up — Google hasn't created a migration path from one product to the other. The company refers to it as "switching," because that's exactly how you have to recollect about it.

To begin using Google Photos, but download the Google Photos Backup tool, tell it where to look for your photos, and so let it do its thing. It will take hours (or days) for all of your photos to make it to the cloud, but it happens in the groundwork and doesn't require any intervention on your function. It's entirely effortless. Did nosotros mention that Google gives Photos users an unlimited amount of room on its servers? As long every bit your photos are under 16 megapixels in size, the compression that Photos performs should be nearly unnoticeable. If you prefer, y'all can choose an uncompressed choice, which lets y'all upload RAW files without whatever alterations. This option is not unlimited, though. Information technology will eat into your total corporeality of available storage for your Google account.

Like shooting fish in a barrel, just non painless

Equally easy as information technology is to get your photos into the cloud, it comes with a hefty price for Picasa users. Virtually all of the blood, sweat, and tears you've invested into tasks such as photo editing and captioning are ignored in the upload process. Because Picasa stores all of that data inside in its own database, it isn't embedded in your concrete photo files. That was the right way to practise things in society to keep changes from being "destructive," merely it also means that curt of Google uploading your Picasa database also, at that place'due south no way to include information technology in your Google Photos drove. It's like you're starting from scratch. It's not a big bargain for modest edits like cropping, but for others, it can be a huge loss.

And it gets worse. Although Google Photos offers a handful of Instagram-esque filters and a number of editing tools to cull from — including those for cropping, rotating, and making contrast adjustments, among others—  information technology's a paltry selection compared to what Picasa provides. It doesn't fifty-fifty offer the most useful tool ever invented: Red-eye.

Sounds terrible. Why would I want to switch?

Finding pics in Google Photos is much easier

Rockets. Rockets? I never labeled these photos as "rockets," notwithstanding somehow, Google Photos knew that's what they were.

Think when Gmail came along and suddenly it just didn't matter how well yous kept your e-mail organized? The same potent magic that made Google good at finding the right webpages was now available to assistance you find those buried messages. Google Photos essentially does for photos what Gmail did for email. Moreover, because Photos is a cloud-based platform, you can access all of your photos on every device, everywhere you go.

Plus, if yous utilise the Photos app on your smartphone or tablet, every new photo you accept is automatically added to the collection. That makes Photos much more than a backup service — it's a visual archive of your entire life that can fit in your pocket.

Inside Google Photos, all of your images are stored in a single, "flat" database — there are no folders at all. As the size of this database balloons cheers to that unlimited storage option, algorithms become more than adept at using metadata to help people notice what they're looking for and folder structures beginning to become unwieldy. Every bit with Gmail, the prominent search bar at the summit of the interface is the place to go. Enter anything you similar — Photos possesses that same uncanny knack for finding things. A search for "Florida" in my Photos turned up shots I took with my DSLR at the Kennedy Space Center even though these photos had never been geotagged. Presumably Photos uses Google'due south vast image index from the web to amend sympathize what'due south in your collection.

That machine-magic assistant rocks

Google Photograph's Assistant will automatically create Albums, Animations, Videos and Collages for yous. Whether you keep them or non is up to yous.

And then there's The Assistant. As anyone with a massive photo collection knows, the whole concept of "One day, I'll sit downwardly and do something really absurd with all of my photos and videos," is great except for the fact that "one day" never comes. With Google Photos Assistant, every mean solar day is that ane day. As you upload new photos and videos, the assistant analyzes the content and starts to create collages, stories, movies, and animations from them. It'due south all washed in the background without any help from y'all, and Photos notifies you when information technology has created a new ane.

Collages can comprise between three and 12 photos, and normally stitch together images that were taken on the same date or location. Stories are kind of like presentations that walk you through a serial of photos from an event like a vacation. These swing by the screen from right to left at your command, and are oft accompanied past small notes similar location and fourth dimension info.

Movies are perhaps the nearly astonishing, only from a time-savings signal of view. These curt clips — which hover between 30 and 60 seconds — are edited together from both videos and photos, stylized with a filter such every bit "Glamour," and accompanied by a piece of music. Sometimes it picks the perfect combination of style and music, creating a video vignette that is every bit delightful as it is surprising, while other times its choices are hilariously bad. There's no way to re-edit these videos from your Mac or PC using the Photos website, but if you download the Photos app to your iOS or Android device, you can modify the theme, the music, and the videos and photos used.

Animations are animated GIFs that Photos creates whenever it finds photos that are clearly part of a sequence (say a child playing soccer, or a jet taking off from a runway). These tin be awesome, especially when Photos has more than 5 images to piece of work with, just yous may find that the shorter ones with as few as iii frames are merely kind of meh.

Y'all can of class, still browse all of your photos as you would using Picasa. By default, they will be organized past appointment. It's non a bad way to do it, but unfortunately, it's currently the only style to do it. Photos doesn't offer any style to re-sort or filter your photos based on whatever other criteria.

You can create Albums, though

The one organization feature from Picasa that Photos preserves is Albums. Yous can create as many of these as y'all similar and they can be shared with others on a read-only footing or with contributor permissions, significant they can add their own photos.

Photos maintains its ain set of albums too, which are automatically created and updated every bit soon every bit you lot start uploading. These include People, Places, Things, Videos, Collages, Animations, and Movies.

People: Picasa users will exist immediately familiar with People; it's the same facial-recognition technology that blew minds when information technology starting time appeared. Photos will add "people" to this album as it detects new faces amid your images, but you still need to identify who they are. This task is made somewhat more pleasant if you utilize Google to shop your contacts (eastward.g. from Gmail) because Photos will prompt you with suggestions from this list as yous type. One big downside to the People album is that Photos chooses which image to associate with a person and there's no way to alter it.

Places: Picasa'south Places feature worked in one of two means. The plan could pull geotagging info from an image'due south metadata if it was created past a phone or other GPS-enabled device, or, y'all could assign the location data manually. In Photos, geotagging is however used, just at that place's no way to add together a location to a photograph manually. Only as noted above, Photos is even so able to assign locations to photos that have no geodata whatsoever.

Things: This is the album that really shows Google Photos' value when it comes to finding specific photos from amid your drove. Photos analyzes your shots and comes up general groupings based on objects or scenes that it recognizes. For case, it can tell when at that place's a cat in a shot and adds that image to the "Cats" album. Information technology does the same with labels such equally waterfalls, cars, sunsets, forests, playgrounds, and fifty-fifty not-so-thing-like categories like Independence Mean solar day and Halloween. Photos even provides a handy "selfies" category. The algorithms aren't perfect — our Christmas tree was filed under "nutrient," while a photo I took of a treadmill was lumped in with "boats" — but when a photo drove has an upward of 10,000 images, any help we tin get is appreciated.

Videos: Cocky-explanatory — your videos are here.

Collages: This where Photos keeps all of the collages created by the Assistant, besides as any you make yourself.

Animations: Same as Collages, merely with animations.

Movies: You guessed it. But in this instance, information technology's only the movies that the assistant has created. In that location'due south no pick to add your own.

How to avert using up Google Drive infinite, and fix images

The biggest gotcha when it comes to uploading photos that you've been managing with Picasa is the orientation problem. Because all photo edits stay inside Picasa's database until yous determine to export an edited prototype, if you lot but upload all of your photos, they'll join the cloud in their original state, which often means they'll be rotated the wrong way. This is a detail trouble with older digital cameras that don't record orientation as office of the EXIF information.

If you lot forget to export your modified photos in Picasa, you'll accept to prepare them manually in Google Photos.

The only workaround is to export all of your photos from Picasa into a new location. This will take a lot of fourth dimension — and a lot of disk infinite — but information technology has the benefit of preserving all of your edits (not just orientation changes) and then that at least Google Photos is working with an optimized set of images. Goose egg is more frustrating than to meet all of those assistant-generated collages, movies, and GIFs using images that are sideways when they should exist vertical.

If y'all're a Google+ Photos user, y'all've probably already noticed that your library of photos has already been automatically migrated to Google Photos. At least the transition was a painless one!

If you're a Google Bulldoze user, there are some things you should know well-nigh how this product interacts with Google Photos.

Kickoff, you tin can cull to admission your Google Photos every bit a single binder within Bulldoze. To exercise this, become to Bulldoze > Settings > General > Create a Google Photos folder, and check the box. In one case you see the Google Photos binder appear in your folder list, yous can share access to information technology just similar any other Drive asset. Doing so is a slap-up fashion to share all of your photos, but beware, as these invitees get to see all of your current snaps and each new 1 until you revoke their share privileges.

Also, the Drive view of photos is pretty basic and doesn't include whatsoever of Google Photos' native options for searching or viewing albums. Other than sharing, the big benefit to using this option is that you tin re-introduce folders to your photo collection. Folders you lot create from the Bulldoze view won't in whatsoever way be visible within Google Photos itself, simply if you miss having them from Picasa, it's the simply way to get them back.

If you're using Bulldoze as a storage location for photos, they count toward your overall storage limit, which is 15GB unless you purchase more. However, photos stored as "high-quality" in Google Photos do non. And then now you take an choice to move all of your photos from Drive to Photos in social club to proceeds dorsum storage space, without sacrificing utility — Google Docs treats the Google Photos binder the same way as whatever other folder in Drive. It'south actually super handy.

One thing to keep in mind with this relationship is that deleting individual or multi-selected photos from the Google Photos folder within Drive volition delete them in Google Photos likewise, and vice versa. However, whatever sub-folders that you've created within Drive's Google Photos binder can be deleted and their contents volition remain safety. This fifty-fifty goes so far as the deletion of the tiptop level Google Photos folder itself. They'll exist gone from Drive, but remain in Google Photos production.

Should I keep Picasa?

Yeah. Later on all, it'due south a very powerful program for editing photos and for now at least, it has way more than editing options than Google Photos.

Editing in Picasa. Y'all won't observe these options in Google Photos.

Even though there's no fashion to directly manage photos between the two products, there is a workaround if you're feeling adventurous. Once yous've chosen to add together Google Photos as a folder within Drive, this folder will sync to your PC or Mac via the Google Drive app, just similar every other binder in Bulldoze. Thank you to Photos' unlimited storage chapters, this could quickly kill whatsoever remaining space you lot accept on your computer — not to mention the duplication with any photos you lot already have there — but it too means you tin now admission your cloud-based photos from Picasa for the sake of its editing tools. Proceed in listen, any changes you make will need to exist exported (every bit mentioned earlier) in guild for them to show up in Google Photos.

It's non uncomplicated, unfortunately, and not a very skillful solution. It does work, though.

If you don't want to work that way, you'll need to download specific photos from the Google Photos interface and so work on them locally earlier re-uploading them.

Ultimately, Google Photos is a powerful and, at times, delightful fashion to fill-in and share your memories with a limitless storage that is unrivaled past any other platform. But Picasa users will discover that transitioning to Photos comes with a lot of compromises. Hopefully, now that Google has its focus set squarely on a single photo product, it volition develop it into a platform that leaves no Picasa user behind.

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Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/how-to-transfer-photos-from-picasa-to-google-photos/

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