What Happened to Picasa, Photo Gallery and Your Albums

Picasa: what Google actually said

Google announced the end of Picasa on 12 February 2016, on the Google Photos blog: “As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application.” For the web service it said it would “start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016,” and the Picasa help page phrases it more carefully still: “After May 1, 2016, we will begin retiring Picasa Web Albums.” Begin. It was a rollout, not a switch. On the pictures Google was accurate: anyone who had synced albums would find that “all your photos and videos will already be there” in Google Photos.

The interesting part is what was not already there. Google’s help page names it: photo tags, tagging people, +1’s and Picasa Web comments. Embedded slideshows and albums stopped working. Public gallery pages went, along with every URL built on a username rather than a numeric user ID — which is to say, most of the links anyone had ever shared. A separate archive page let people “view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums data,” tags and captions included, with the caveat that “you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums.” A reading room, not a working library.

Two later dates are usually left out. On 26 March 2018 Google updated the original post: “The Picasa Desktop application will no longer work online, which means that you will not be able to upload or download photos and videos, create online albums, or delete online photos, videos and albums.” And in January 2019 it deprecated the Picasa Web Albums Data API and the Picasa Slideshow Widget, with the flat consequence that “apps that integrate with the API will stop working.”

Windows Photo Gallery and the names in your files

Microsoft’s notice is one sentence long and still online: “As of January 10, 2017, Windows Essentials 2012 is no longer supported on Windows 10, and is unavailable for download.” The suite it names contained Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer and more. The same page makes a point that gets lost in the retellings: “Already installed applications will continue to work as they do today.” Nothing was switched off that day. Support ended and the installer disappeared, which is a slower kind of problem — the app keeps running until an operating system upgrade or a dead hard drive ends it, and by then there is no sanctioned way to install it again.

What that page does not mention is the people-tags and captions its users had spent years creating. For those you have to go to the developer documentation, which contains the single most consequential fact in this article. Microsoft’s People Tagging documentation states: “Microsoft has created a new XMP schema for tagging people within a digital image. This schema enables applications to store the names and locations of individuals who are in the image as metadata within the image.” It is fully specified: MPReg:PersonDisplayName holds the name and MPReg:Rectangle holds four decimal values, normalized to 1, locating the face in the frame.

Read that with the Picasa section in mind. Microsoft’s design decision was to put the names in the photograph. A name stored that way does not care whether the application that wrote it still exists, because it is not in the application. It is in the JPEG, and it will still be there in software nobody has written yet.

iPhoto, Aperture and an unusually honest migration page

A terminology note first. Apple’s current application is Photos, often written as Apple Photos. iPhoto was its consumer predecessor and Aperture the professional one. “iPhotos” has never been the name of anything.

Apple’s own support article states plainly that “Aperture development was discontinued in June 2014.” That is the date people remember. It is not the date the software stopped working, and the gap is large: the same page says “macOS Mojave is the last version of macOS to run Aperture. Starting with macOS Catalina, Aperture is no longer compatible.” Apple released Catalina on 7 October 2019. Aperture ran, unsupported but functional, for more than five years after it was declared finished.

What survives migration is documented, and Apple deserves credit for how bluntly. For an Aperture library moving into Adobe Lightroom Classic — version “5.7 and later includes a built-in tool for migrating Aperture libraries to Lightroom catalogs,” Apple notes — the list of outcomes reads:

• RAW files migrate, but Aperture’s non-destructive adjustment layer does not.
• Projects, folders and albums become Lightroom collections.
• Faces, color labels and stacks are converted into keywords.
• Smart Albums and custom metadata fields are not migrated.
• Album organization becomes alphabetical, so a manually arranged sidebar is lost.

Look at what that list describes. Facts about the picture — who is in it, how it was labeled, which pile it sat in — get flattened into keywords: lossy, but an honest translation into a standard field any application can read. Judgments the software made on your behalf, chiefly the adjustment layer that made an Aperture edit reversible, cannot be translated at all: they only ever meant something to Aperture.

Moving to Apple’s own Photos app is smoother, not lossless. Apple records that “iPhoto Events are turned into albums,” gathered in a folder called iPhoto Events; that Smart Albums display differently than in the original application; and that where an Aperture library held RAW + JPEG pairs, “only the JPEG file will be visible in Photos.”

Flickr: the service lived, the deal changed

Flickr belongs in this article precisely because it did not die, and the outcome for a lot of people was the same.

On 20 April 2018 Flickr announced it had agreed to be acquired by SmugMug after nearly 14 years at Yahoo and Oath. What would change for members? “At present, nothing. You will continue to log in with your current credentials and you will have the same Flickr experience you are used to.” Six months later, on 1 November 2018, it announced that “Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos,” replacing the terabyte of free storage Yahoo had granted in 2013. It published its arithmetic too: around 97% of free members held fewer than 1,000 photos, and the new limit was five times the 200-photo allowance that preceded 2013. Both true, and still a bad month for the other 3%.

A follow-up on 17 December 2018 set out the mechanics. From 8 January 2019, “Free accounts with more than 1,000 items will no longer be able to upload new photos or videos.” From 5 February 2019, “any items over the 1,000-upload limit will be at risk of deletion, starting with the oldest of the items” — oldest first, with obvious consequences for anyone using Flickr as a family archive. One exemption: “Photos licensed through Creative Commons before November 1, 2018 will not be deleted.” On 8 March 2019 Flickr widened it and dropped the cutoff date: “All public Creative Commons works on Flickr are now protected from deletion.”

The dates, in one table

Every row below is taken from the company’s own announcement, help page or support article.

Catalog or file: the difference that decides everything

Strip the brand names out and one distinction explains every outcome above. The IPTC, which has maintained photo metadata standards since the newspaper wire era, puts the choice plainly: “Metadata is stored in two main places: Internally – embedded in the image file, in formats such as JPEG, DNG, PNG, TIFF … Externally – outside the image file in a digital asset management system (DAM) or in a ‘sidecar’ file (such as for XMP data).” Those two shelves have completely different life expectancies.

Internal metadata travels with the photograph. Three families matter here. Exif is what the camera writes — capture time, exposure, model — a published standard maintained by CIPA, whose current revision, Exif version 3.1, was published on 30 January 2026. IPTC covers the descriptive and rights fields: headline, caption, keywords, creator, copyright, dates, places. XMP is the container Adobe created for all of it, described by Adobe as “a file labeling technology that lets you embed metadata into files themselves,” and an ISO standard, 16684-1, since early 2012. Microsoft’s people-tag schema is an XMP schema, which is why a name written by Photo Gallery is a different kind of object from a name typed into a service.

A catalog does not travel. A catalog — library, database, DAM, account — is a separate file or a remote service holding statements about your photographs. It is the part that dies with the company. Picasa Web Albums’ tags, +1’s and comments were statements held in Google’s service; Aperture’s adjustment layer was a statement held in Aperture’s library. Neither had anywhere to go, which is why neither went anywhere.

None of which makes catalogs bad. Album order, ratings, stacks and face groupings are useful and mostly have no standard file-level home. It makes them perishable, and worth an occasional export.

Four things commonly said about these shutdowns that are wrong

Each is repeated confidently and contradicted by the company’s own words.

1. “Picasa shut down in 2016 and took people’s photos with it.” Google’s help page says the opposite: albums synced to Picasa Web Albums “are already in Google Photos.” The desktop application carried on running too, losing its online functions on 26 March 2018 rather than in 2016. What was lost was the descriptive layer.
2. “Windows Photo Gallery stopped working on 10 January 2017.” Microsoft’s notice says “already installed applications will continue to work as they do today.” What ended that day was support and the download. The trap is that once your copy breaks there is nothing to reinstall, and Microsoft warns that sites offering these downloads “are not offering sanctioned Microsoft products.”
3. “Apple killed Aperture in 2014.” Development was discontinued in June 2014, but Apple states that macOS Mojave was the last version of macOS to run it, and Catalina — 7 October 2019 — ended it. Announcement and end of function can be five years apart, which matters if you are working out whether an old Mac in a cupboard can still open a library.
4. “Flickr deleted everyone’s photos.” The announced policy applied to free accounts holding more than 1,000 items, and on 8 March 2019 Flickr said “all public Creative Commons works on Flickr are now protected from deletion,” dropping the earlier requirement that the Creative Commons licensing predate 1 November 2018. Pro accounts were unaffected.

What to do with a library from a dead application

If you are holding an old library, the useful moves are ordinary and mostly free.

1. Look inside one file before you believe anything. Any metadata viewer lists the Exif, IPTC and XMP fields actually present in a photograph. That single check tells you whether the names, captions and keywords you remember typing are in your files or were only ever in the catalog.
2. If the old application still runs, export before you upgrade anything. This is the last window in which a catalog can be translated, and it closes on an operating system upgrade whose timing you did not choose. Where the software offers to write metadata to the files, take it.
3. Get a copy of anything held in a service. Google Takeout was Google’s own recommended route out of Picasa Web Albums and is still how Google Photos exports work — with a well-known quirk in how the dates come back, covered in the guide to Google Takeout photo dates.
4. Expect the chronology to need repair. Rescued libraries routinely arrive sorted by the day they were exported rather than the day they were taken. Sometimes the capture date is still in the file and only the sorting is wrong; sometimes there is no date evidence at all — two cases needing different answers, covered in fixing wrong photo dates.
5. Rebuild the structure once, in something durable, and keep more than one copy. Folder and file names are the most portable organizing system ever invented, because no company owns them — see organizing a photo library. And none of it survives a single failed drive, which is the argument in cloud sync is not a backup.