When Picasa is dropped in favor of Google Photos, will the URLs for existing photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums remain the same? The easiest way to add photos to blog posts on +Blogger is to select photos on Picasa Web Albums. I have hundreds of blog posts going back many years which rely on URLs referencing photos in Picasa Web Albums

View Comments

• Hi +Jeff Sullivan. You would do much better asking questions about Picasa in the Picasa Product Forum (productforums.google.com/d/forum/picasa) because that is where you will find the Picasa experts. This community is for questions and problems relating to Google+.

• +John Skeats My question is about Google+ image support. I upload photos to Google+ albums, post them to Blogger, then share the post back to Google+.

  At no point does the image touch Picasa, an image editing app that has been discontinued. In Google+, the storage of Google+ photos in albums happens to read "Picasa Web Albums" when I go to insert a G+ photo in the Blogger post, but it's Google+ back-end functionality that I'm asking about, irrespective of how Google chooses to label it when I access G+ photos from Blogger.

  Picasa Web Albums apparently is another obsolete product that Google+ built its image storage on top of. Uploading to Google+ via the old user interface is the only way that I know of to share albums.

  Album posts, and group image uploads to albums that create new image posts, are important to the telling on G+ the more complete story of a trip or event. Unfortunately when I try the new +Google Photos, it seems unusable for sharing albums to G+ (I've submitted feedback on that in the past few days).

  Similarly, +Blogger can enable inserting text with multiple images and sharing the blog post to G+ to tell a story, but the display of a representative image from Blogger to G+ is currently poor, which may in part account for Blogger posts typically getting abysmal reception on G+ (Blogger posts may get lower distribution for some reason as well).

  All of this is a loss for Google+, because some of the most active content creators are bloggers, and they often work with sponsors, so when content cannot be smoothly integrated between Google+ and blogs (Blogger, +WordPress and +Tumblr), Google+ loses content creators and the brands they're working with.

  So from both the standpoint of the technical details and the context of the intended use, it's all about, and centered around, Google+.

• +Jeff Sullivan Google+ does not use Picasa for photo storage. When photos was part of Google+ it originally had its own storage but the storage for photos was then moved to Google Drive. With the introduction of Google Photos, the photos function was moved entirely from Google+ to Google Photos, but the storage remained the same. Picasa also has access to the photos, but they are not in Picasa storage. The reason I referred you to the Picasa forum is that they would be best prepared to discuss aspects of the transition from Picasa -- although that is still far enough out that a lot of the information is probably not available. Another alternative would be to talk to as in the Google Photos Product Forum (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/photos) because Google Photos will be the replacement for Picasa -- and it is where the photos are stored. To the best of our knowledge at this time, the elimination of Picasa will have absolutely no impact whatsoever on Google+. I assume that will also be true for Blogger and other products -- but the people I referred you to can give you the best information.

• +John Skeats I upload to Google+. To share those photos on +Blogger, the Google+ photos apparently ended up in Picasa. The question is about the photos I uploaded to Google+ and shared to Blogger. At no point did I directly use Picasa.

  What Google+ does on the back end should not be a user's concern. I'm not going to chase down the internal architecture of where Google+ puts photos or the textual semantics for describing the path to Blogger, but it remains a valid question for Google+ users who also use Blogger.

• +Jeff Sullivan The Google+ Photos function and all associated photos moved from Google+ to Google Photos (photos.google.com), but Picasa also had access to the photos. The photos were not moved into Picasa.

  You would do much better asking questions about photos in the Google Photos Product Forum (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/photos) because that is where you will find the Google Photos experts since the photos function was moved out of Google+.