Google retiring Picasa Web Albums

Picasa web albums is retiring! Google seems to be on a spree of retiring it's products. Previously, they have also retired products such as iGoogle, Orkut, Google Answers, Google Notebook, Google Reader besides several others.

With the introduction of Google Photos, Google has announced to retire Picasa Web Albums possibly as the two products are similar and one is redundant. The announcement to retire Picasa Web Albums was made
on the Picasa Blog on February 12th, 2016. In the notice, Google advises Picasa Web Albums to switch to Google Photos.

Some excerpts from the Picasa Blog on Picasa Web Albums retirement:

If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there. 

However, for those of you who don’t want to use Google Photos or who still want to be able to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. That way, you will still be able to view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums (you would now do this in Google Photos).

One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today—if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.
[source: Picasa Blog]

Here is what they have to say about Picasa Desktop application:

As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps. 
[source: Picasa Blog]