Picasa was an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time may have resided at Idealab) in 2002. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Lifescape and began offering it as freeware. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa (Spanish for "my house") and "pic" for pictures.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available from Google. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine; see the Linux section). There is also an iPhoto plugin or a standalone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

On February 12, 2016, Google announced it was discontinuing Picasa, effective March 15, 2016, and focusing on Google Photos as its successor. Picasa Web Albums, a companion service will be closed on May 1, 2016.

Google Photos is a photograph and video sharing and storage service by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun out from Google+, the company's social network. At its launch, reviewers wrote that the service was among the best of its kind.

Service

Google Photos is a photo and video sharing and storage service by Google. Its core features were previously embedded within Google+, the company's social network. The new Google Photos includes unlimited photo and video storage, and apps for Android, iOS, and the browser. Users back up their photos to the cloud service, and become accessible between all of their devices connected to the service.

The Photos service analyzes and organizes images into groups and can identify features such as beaches, skylines, or "snowstorms in Toronto". From the application's search window, users are shown potential searches for groups of photos in three major categories: People, Places, and Things. The service analyzes photos for similar faces and groups them together in the People category. It can also group faces as they age. The Places category uses geotagging data but can also determine locations in older pictures by analyzing for major landmarks (e.g., photos containing the Eiffel Tower). The Things category processes photos for their subject matter: birthdays, buildings, cats, concerts, food, graduations, posters, screenshots, etc. Users can manually remove categorization errors.