Google redirecting Picasa photographers to Google+
posted Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 5:57 PM EDT
Google is continuing its push to ferry users from other services into Google+ by automatically forwarding them away from the venerable Picasa image gallery and into the Google+ social network. As spotted by the Google Operating System blog, if you attempt to head to the Google-owned Picasa image organizer and viewer, you’ll instead be redirected to the image galleries on Google+.
Thankfully, if you’re a die-hard Picasa user (and from the original article’s comment thread, it sounds like there are still quite a few), there is a workaround for now. If you head to this link, it will send you back to the old interface, and set a cookie on your computer to stay that way. However, we don’t know if this is a permanent fix, and given how much energy Google has given to the push to Google+, it might eventually disappear too.
Picasa users have complained about the lack of certain features in the conversion to Google+, such as the ability to embed individual images, and support for keywords.
This isn’t the first time Google has attempted to steer people to Google+ instead of Picasa. Google+ Photos replaced Picasa in the Google navigation bar a couple of years back, and reportedly, individual albums have been redirecting to Google+ for some time.
It’s not clear what these changes mean for the Picasa desktop client, which was updated as recently as December last year.
(Via CNET and The Verge)