My Picasa Videos Wont Upload to Google Photo Album

Daniil Peshkov/123RF

Millions accept downloaded and keep to use Picasa, Google's free and feature-rich photo direction software that works on both Macs and PCs. But the app has seen almost no honey from Google in recent years — in fact, the last major update happened more than than five years agone, 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 cloud-based production known equally "Google Photos," which launched last twelvemonth as a standalone production featuring much of same  functionality that was baked into Picasa and the visitor's social network, Google+.

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

How to stick with Picasa, for at present

Google stopped supporting Picasa on March 15, 2016 . That ways no more versions will be released, no bug fixes will exist issued, and no support will exist offered. However, if you already have the software installed, it will continue to work. No, your photos won't of a sudden disappear and neither will the software itself. If you want to keep using Picasa, you can absolutely practise so. If yous go this road, my advice is to re-download the latest version of Picasa (3.ix) for Mac or Windows correct now and go along the installer somewhere safe — you never know when y'all may demand to reinstall information technology and who knows how easy information technology will be to notice later on.

Here's what has changed. If you've been taking advantage of Picasa's costless web Albums feature, as of May 1, 2022 the merely way to access them is through Google Photos. If you're curious what that volition look similar, simply log in to Google Photos with the Google account you used to create the web Anthology — and voila — they're already there. You tin view, download, or delete your Picasa Spider web Albums from the Photos interface, but as of May i, you cannot create, organize, or edit them.

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

How to drift to Google Photos

There's a reason why Google doesn't use the term "migrate" 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 company refers to it every bit "switching," because that'south exactly how you accept to think about it.

To begin using Google Photos, simply download the Google Photos Backup tool, tell information technology where to look for your photos, and then allow information technology practice its affair. Information technology will take hours (or days) for all of your photos to make it to the cloud, just information technology happens in the background and doesn't require any intervention on your role. It'south entirely effortless. Did nosotros mention that Google gives Photos users an unlimited amount of room on its servers? As long as your photos are under 16 megapixels in size, the pinch that Photos performs should exist virtually unnoticeable. If you lot adopt, you lot can cull an uncompressed option, which lets you upload RAW files without whatever alterations. This choice is not unlimited, though. It will consume into your total corporeality of available storage for your Google account.

Easy, just not painless

Equally like shooting fish in a barrel equally it is to go your photos into the deject, information technology comes with a hefty price for Picasa users. Almost all of the claret, 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 information inside in its ain database, it isn't embedded in your physical photo files. That was the correct style to do things in order to go on changes from beingness "destructive," but information technology also means that curt of Google uploading your Picasa database too, there's no way to include it in your Google Photos collection. Information technology'southward like y'all're starting from scratch. Information technology's not a big deal for minor edits similar cropping, but for others, information technology 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 choose from — including those for cropping, rotating, and making contrast adjustments, among others—  it's a paltry selection compared to what Picasa provides. It doesn't even offer the most useful tool ever invented: Cerise-eye.

Sounds terrible. Why would I want to switch?

Finding pics in Google Photos is much easier

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

Remember when Gmail came along and suddenly it just didn't matter how well you kept your email organized? The same stiff magic that made Google practiced at finding the right webpages was now available to help you find those buried messages. Google Photos essentially does for photos what Gmail did for email. Moreover, considering Photos is a cloud-based platform, you can admission all of your photos on every device, everywhere you lot become.

Plus, if you use the Photos app on your smartphone or tablet, every new photograph you take is automatically added to the drove. That makes Photos much more than a fill-in service — it's a visual archive of your unabridged life that tin can fit in your pocket.

Inside Google Photos, all of your images are stored in a unmarried, "flat" database — at that place are no folders at all. As the size of this database balloons thanks to that unlimited storage option, algorithms become more than adept at using metadata to assistance people observe what they're looking for and folder structures first to become unwieldy. As with Gmail, the prominent search bar at the pinnacle of the interface is the place to go. Enter anything y'all like — 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 Infinite Center even though these photos had never been geotagged. Presumably Photos uses Google's vast image index from the web to meliorate sympathise what'south in your collection.

That auto-magic assistant rocks

Google Photo'south Assistant volition automatically create Albums, Animations, Videos and Collages for you. Whether you keep them or not is upward to you.

Then in that location'south The Assistant. As anyone with a massive photo collection knows, the whole concept of "1 day, I'll sit down down and do something really cool with all of my photos and videos," is nifty except for the fact that "one day" never comes. With Google Photos Banana, every solar day is that 1 day. Equally you upload new photos and videos, the assistant analyzes the content and starts to create collages, stories, movies, and animations from them. It's all done in the groundwork without any aid from y'all, and Photos notifies y'all when information technology has created a new 1.

Collages can contain between 3 and 12 photos, and usually stitch together images that were taken on the same date or location. Stories are kind of like presentations that walk you through a series 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 pocket-size notes similar location and time info.

Movies are perhaps the most amazing, simply from a time-savings betoken of view. These brusk clips — which hover between thirty and 60 seconds — are edited together from both videos and photos, stylized with a filter such every bit "Glamour," and accompanied by a slice of music. Sometimes it picks the perfect combination of style and music, creating a video vignette that is as delightful as it is surprising, while other times its choices are hilariously bad. There's no manner to re-edit these videos from your Mac or PC using the Photos website, only 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 conspicuously part of a sequence (say a child playing soccer, or a jet taking off from a rails). These tin can be awesome, especially when Photos has more than five images to work with, only you may discover that the shorter ones with every bit few every bit three frames are merely kind of meh.

You tin of class, however browse all of your photos equally you would using Picasa. By default, they volition be organized by date. It's not a bad way to practise it, but unfortunately, information technology's currently the merely way to do information technology. Photos doesn't offer any way to re-sort or filter your photos based on whatsoever 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 you like and they tin exist shared with others on a read-but ground or with contributor permissions, meaning they can add their own photos.

Photos maintains its own set of albums too, which are automatically created and updated equally before long as you lot start uploading. These include People, Places, Things, Videos, Collages, Animations, and Movies.

People: Picasa users will exist immediately familiar with People; information technology's the aforementioned facial-recognition technology that blew minds when it beginning appeared. Photos will add "people" to this album as it detects new faces amid your images, but you however need to identify who they are. This job is fabricated somewhat more pleasant if you utilise Google to store your contacts (east.g. from Gmail) because Photos will prompt you with suggestions from this list equally you type. One large downside to the People album is that Photos chooses which image to associate with a person and there's no style to change it.

Places: Picasa's Places feature worked in 1 of ii ways. The program could pull geotagging info from an image'south metadata if it was created by a phone or other GPS-enabled device, or, you could assign the location data manually. In Photos, geotagging is still used, but in that location'due south no way to add a location to a photo manually. But as noted higher up, Photos is notwithstanding able to assign locations to photos that take no geodata whatever.

Things: This is the anthology that really shows Google Photos' value when it comes to finding specific photos from amongst your drove. Photos analyzes your shots and comes up general groupings based on objects or scenes that information technology recognizes. For instance, information technology tin tell when there'south a cat in a shot and adds that epitome to the "Cats" album. It does the aforementioned with labels such as waterfalls, cars, sunsets, forests, playgrounds, and even non-so-thing-like categories like Independence Twenty-four hours and Halloween. Photos fifty-fifty provides a handy "selfies" category. The algorithms aren't perfect — our Christmas tree was filed nether "food," while a photograph I took of a treadmill was lumped in with "boats" — just when a photo collection has an upwards of 10,000 images, any help we can get is appreciated.

Videos: Self-explanatory — your videos are here.

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

Animations: Same every bit Collages, but with animations.

Movies: You guessed it. Just in this case, it's but the movies that the assistant has created. There'south no option to add your ain.

How to avert using up Google Drive space, 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 photograph edits stay inside Picasa's database until you decide to export an edited epitome, if y'all simply upload all of your photos, they'll bring together the cloud in their original state, which often means they'll be rotated the incorrect way. This is a particular problem with older digital cameras that don't tape orientation as part of the EXIF data.

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

The but 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 space — but 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 set of images. Goose egg is more frustrating than to meet all of those banana-generated collages, movies, and GIFs using images that are sideways when they should be vertical.

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

If you're a Google Bulldoze user, in that location are some things you should know about how this production interacts with Google Photos.

First, you lot can cull to admission your Google Photos as a single binder inside Drive. To do this, go to Drive > Settings > General > Create a Google Photos binder, and cheque the box. One time you meet the Google Photos folder appear in your folder listing, you can share admission to information technology just like any other Bulldoze asset. Doing so is a great way to share all of your photos, but beware, as these invitees get to meet all of your current snaps and each new 1 until you 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 big benefit to using this option is that y'all tin re-innovate folders to your photo collection. Folders you create from the Bulldoze view won't in whatever way exist visible within Google Photos itself, but if yous miss having them from Picasa, it's the only way to get them back.

If yous're using Bulldoze equally a storage location for photos, they count toward your overall storage limit, which is 15GB unless you buy more. Even so, photos stored as "loftier-quality" in Google Photos exercise not. And then now you have an option to move all of your photos from Drive to Photos in order to gain back storage infinite, without sacrificing utility — Google Docs treats the Google Photos folder the aforementioned mode as any other folder in Drive. It's actually super handy.

I matter to keep in heed with this relationship is that deleting private or multi-selected photos from the Google Photos folder inside Drive will delete them in Google Photos besides, and vice versa. Even so, whatsoever sub-folders that yous've created inside Drive's Google Photos folder can be deleted and their contents will remain prophylactic. This even goes and so far every bit the deletion of the top level Google Photos folder itself. They'll be gone from Bulldoze, but remain in Google Photos product.

Should I keep Picasa?

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

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

Even though there'due south no fashion to directly manage photos between the two products, there is a workaround if you lot're feeling adventurous. Once you've chosen to add Google Photos equally a folder within Drive, this folder will sync to your PC or Mac via the Google Drive app, but like every other binder in Drive. Thanks to Photos' unlimited storage capacity, this could quickly kill any remaining infinite y'all take on your computer — not to mention the duplication with any photos you already have there — but it too ways yous can now access your deject-based photos from Picasa for the sake of its editing tools. Keep in mind, any changes you make will need to exist exported (as mentioned earlier) in order for them to show up in Google Photos.

It's not simple, unfortunately, and not a very good solution. It does work, though.

If yous don't want to work that manner, you'll demand to download specific photos from the Google Photos interface and so 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 whatever other platform. Merely 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 unmarried 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/