Why Cant I Upload My Picasssa Photos?

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Millions have downloaded and continue to use Picasa, Google'due south free and feature-rich photograph direction software that works on both Macs and PCs. Merely the app has seen most no dear from Google in contempo years — in fact, the concluding major update happened more than five years agone, in 2011, and that update was the last one Picasa users will ever encounter. Google recently announced that it has abased the platform entirely in favor of its cloud-based production known equally "Google Photos," which launched last yr as a standalone product featuring much of aforementioned  functionality that was baked into Picasa and the visitor's social network, Google+.

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

So what does this mean for folks who still use Picasa?

How to stick with Picasa, for at present

Google stopped supporting Picasa on March 15, 2016 . That means no more versions volition be released, no bug fixes will be issued, and no support volition be offered. Yet, if you already have the software installed, it will go along to piece of work. No, your photos won't suddenly disappear and neither will the software itself. If you lot desire to go along using Picasa, you tin absolutely do so. If you become this route, my communication is to re-download the latest version of Picasa (three.9) for Mac or Windows correct now and keep the installer somewhere rubber — you never know when you lot may demand to reinstall it and who knows how easy it will be to find later.

Hither's what has changed. If you've been taking advantage of Picasa's free web Albums feature, as of May 1, 2016 the merely fashion to access them is through Google Photos. If you lot're curious what that will look similar, simply log in to Google Photos with the Google business relationship you lot used to create the web Album — and voila — they're already at that place. Y'all can view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums from the Photos interface, but as of May 1, you lot cannot create, organize, or edit them.

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

How to migrate to Google Photos

There's a reason why Google doesn't use the term "drift" when encouraging Picasa users to embrace Google Photos. That's because — with the exception of the Web Albums characteristic described above — Google hasn't created a migration path from one production to the other. The visitor refers to it as "switching," because that'southward exactly how you have to think well-nigh information technology.

To brainstorm using Google Photos, simply download the Google Photos Backup tool, tell it where to await for your photos, and and then permit it do its matter. It will have hours (or days) for all of your photos to make it to the deject, only it happens in the background and doesn't require any intervention on your role. It's entirely effortless. Did we mention that Google gives Photos users an unlimited amount of room on its servers? As long as your photos are nether 16 megapixels in size, the compression that Photos performs should be virtually unnoticeable. If yous prefer, you lot can cull an uncompressed option, which lets you upload RAW files without any alterations. This option is not unlimited, though. It will consume into your total amount of available storage for your Google business relationship.

Easy, just not painless

Every bit like shooting fish in a barrel as it is to go your photos into the cloud, it comes with a hefty price for Picasa users. Virtually all of the claret, sweat, and tears yous've invested into tasks such as photo editing and captioning are ignored in the upload process. Because Picasa stores all of that information within in its own database, it isn't embedded in your physical photo files. That was the right fashion to do things in club to keep changes from being "subversive," but information technology also means that short of Google uploading your Picasa database besides, there's no way to include it in your Google Photos collection. Information technology's like you lot're starting from scratch. It's not a big deal for minor edits like cropping, but for others, information technology tin can exist a huge loss.

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

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," still somehow, Google Photos knew that's what they were.

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

Plus, if you use the Photos app on your smartphone or tablet, every new photo you lot take is automatically added to the drove. That makes Photos much more than a fill-in 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 unmarried, "flat" database — in that location are no folders at all. As the size of this database balloons thanks to that unlimited storage option, algorithms go more than adept at using metadata to help people observe what they're looking for and binder structures start to become unwieldy. As with Gmail, the prominent search bar at the top of the interface is the identify to go. Enter anything you like — Photos possesses that same uncanny knack for finding things. A search for "Florida" in my Photos turned upwards shots I took with my DSLR at the Kennedy Space Center even though these photos had never been geotagged. Presumably Photos uses Google's vast epitome index from the web to better empathise what's in your collection.

That automobile-magic assistant rocks

Google Photograph's Assistant volition automatically create Albums, Animations, Videos and Collages for you. Whether you lot proceed them or not is up to you lot.

Then there's The Assistant. As anyone with a massive photo drove knows, the whole concept of "One twenty-four hours, I'll sit downwardly and exercise something really cool with all of my photos and videos," is corking except for the fact that "one day" never comes. With Google Photos Assistant, every day is that one day. As you lot upload new photos and videos, the banana analyzes the content and starts to create collages, stories, movies, and animations from them. Information technology's all done in the background without any aid from you, and Photos notifies you lot when it has created a new ane.

Collages can contain between iii and 12 photos, and usually run up together images that were taken on the aforementioned date or location. Stories are kind of like presentations that walk you through a series of photos from an outcome similar a vacation. These swing by the screen from right to left at your command, and are oftentimes accompanied by small notes like location and fourth dimension info.

Movies are perchance the most astonishing, but from a time-savings indicate of view. These brusque clips — which hover between 30 and 60 seconds — are edited together from both videos and photos, stylized with a filter such as "Glamour," and accompanied past a piece of music. Sometimes it picks the perfect combination of manner and music, creating a video vignette that is every bit delightful as information technology 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, simply if you lot download the Photos app to your iOS or Android device, you lot can modify the theme, the music, and the videos and photos used.

Animations are blithe GIFs that Photos creates whenever it finds photos that are clearly role of a sequence (say a child playing soccer, or a jet taking off from a runway). These tin can be crawly, specially when Photos has more than five images to work with, only you lot may find that the shorter ones with as few every bit three frames are just kind of meh.

You can of course, still scan all of your photos as you lot would using Picasa. By default, they will be organized past date. It's not a bad fashion to do it, only unfortunately, it'southward currently the only way to do it. Photos doesn't offer whatever mode to re-sort or filter your photos based on whatever other criteria.

You tin create Albums, though

The one system feature from Picasa that Photos preserves is Albums. You can create every bit many of these as yous similar and they can be shared with others on a read-only ground or with correspondent permissions, meaning they can add their own photos.

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

People: Picasa users will exist immediately familiar with People; it'due south the same facial-recognition technology that blew minds when it first appeared. Photos will add together "people" to this anthology as it detects new faces amidst your images, but you still demand to identify who they are. This task is made somewhat more pleasant if you utilize Google to store your contacts (e.g. from Gmail) because Photos volition prompt you with suggestions from this list equally you type. One big downside to the People anthology is that Photos chooses which image to associate with a person and there's no mode to alter it.

Places: Picasa'due south Places feature worked in one of ii means. The program could pull geotagging info from an image'southward metadata if it was created past a phone or other GPS-enabled device, or, you could assign the location data manually. In Photos, geotagging is still used, but there'due south no way to add a location to a photo manually. Simply equally noted above, Photos is still able to assign locations to photos that have no geodata whatsoever.

Things: This is the album that actually shows Google Photos' value when it comes to finding specific photos from amid your collection. Photos analyzes your shots and comes up general groupings based on objects or scenes that it recognizes. For instance, it can tell when in that location's a cat in a shot and adds that prototype to the "Cats" anthology. It does the same with labels such equally waterfalls, cars, sunsets, forests, playgrounds, and even not-so-affair-similar categories like Independence 24-hour interval and Halloween. Photos even provides a handy "selfies" category. The algorithms aren't perfect — our Christmas tree was filed nether "food," while a photo I took of a treadmill was lumped in with "boats" — but when a photo collection has an upwards of ten,000 images, any help we can become is appreciated.

Videos: Cocky-explanatory — your videos are here.

Collages: This where Photos keeps all of the collages created past the Assistant, as well equally any you make yourself.

Animations: Same every bit Collages, but with animations.

Movies: You lot guessed it. But in this case, it'due south just the movies that the banana has created. There'south no option to add your own.

How to avoid using upwardly Google Drive space, and gear up images

The biggest gotcha when it comes to uploading photos that you've been managing with Picasa is the orientation trouble. Considering all photo edits stay inside Picasa's database until yous decide to export an edited image, if you lot merely upload all of your photos, they'll bring together the deject in their original state, which often means they'll be rotated the incorrect way. This is a particular trouble with older digital cameras that don't record orientation equally office of the EXIF data.

If you forget to export your modified photos in Picasa, you'll have to fix them manually in Google Photos.

The simply workaround is to export all of your photos from Picasa into a new location. This volition take a lot of time — and a lot of disk space — merely information technology has the benefit of preserving all of your edits (not just orientation changes) so that at to the lowest degree Google Photos is working with an optimized prepare of images. Nothing is more frustrating than to see all of those assistant-generated collages, movies, and GIFs using images that are sideways when they should be vertical.

If you're a Google+ Photos user, you'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 Drive user, there are some things y'all should know most how this product interacts with Google Photos.

First, you lot can choose to access your Google Photos equally a unmarried folder within Drive. To do this, go to Drive > Settings > General > Create a Google Photos binder, and check the box. Once you lot run across the Google Photos binder appear in your binder list, yous can share access to it just like any other Bulldoze nugget. Doing so is a great way to share all of your photos, simply beware, as these invitees become to see all of your electric current snaps and each new i until yous revoke their share privileges.

Also, the Drive view of photos is pretty bones and doesn't include any of Google Photos' native options for searching or viewing albums. Other than sharing, the large benefit to using this pick is that yous can re-introduce folders to your photo collection. Folders you create from the Drive view won't in whatsoever way exist visible within Google Photos itself, merely if you miss having them from Picasa, it's the only style to get them back.

If y'all're using Drive as a storage location for photos, they count toward your overall storage limit, which is 15GB unless you buy more. Withal, photos stored as "loftier-quality" in Google Photos do non. Then at present you lot have an option to movement all of your photos from Drive to Photos in order to gain dorsum storage space, without sacrificing utility — Google Docs treats the Google Photos folder the same fashion as any other binder in Drive. Information technology's actually super handy.

1 thing to go along in heed with this relationship is that deleting individual or multi-selected photos from the Google Photos folder inside Drive will delete them in Google Photos too, and vice versa. However, any sub-folders that you've created within Bulldoze'southward Google Photos folder can be deleted and their contents will remain safe. This fifty-fifty goes so far every bit the deletion of the tiptop level Google Photos folder itself. They'll be gone from Drive, but remain in Google Photos product.

Should I keep Picasa?

Yes. After all, information technology's a very powerful program for editing photos and for now at least, it has way more editing options than Google Photos.

Editing in Picasa. You won't notice these options in Google Photos.

Fifty-fifty though in that location'southward no mode to directly manage photos between the two products, there is a workaround if you're feeling adventurous. One time you've called to add Google Photos equally a binder within Drive, this folder volition sync to your PC or Mac via the Google Drive app, just like every other folder in Bulldoze. Thanks to Photos' unlimited storage chapters, this could quickly kill whatever remaining space you lot take on your computer — not to mention the duplication with whatsoever photos you lot already have there — only it likewise means you tin now access your cloud-based photos from Picasa for the sake of its editing tools. Keep in heed, whatsoever changes you brand will need to be exported (as mentioned before) in society for them to show upward in Google Photos.

It'southward not simple, unfortunately, and not a very good solution. It does piece of work, though.

If y'all don't want to work that way, you'll need to download specific photos from the Google Photos interface and then piece of work on them locally before re-uploading them.

Ultimately, Google Photos is a powerful and, at times, delightful way to backup and share your memories with a limitless storage that is unrivaled by any other platform. But Picasa users will find 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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