In a Friday announcement, tech biggie Google said that it is shutting down its Picasa desktop album in March 2016.

Picasa is an image-organizing app which was acquired by Google 12 years back. Picasa was originally launched by Lifescape in
2002, with the aim of giving amateur photographers on the Windows platform the ability to edit photos as easily as iPhoto.

With Google having rolled out very few updates to Picasa in recent months, apparently because of a shift of focus on its new Google Photos app, support for the Picasa desktop album will be discontinued by Google on March 15, 2016.

Announcing the imminent end of support for Picasa, Google said in its Friday announcement that though support for Picasa will be discontinued on March 15, the service will continue to work for users are already using it. Google also added alongside that, with effect from May 1, 2016, the photos which users have uploaded to Picasa will be transitioned to Google Photos.

Revealing that all the priceless photos which Picasa users have uploaded to Picasa Web Albums over the years will become available in Google Photos, Anil Sabharwal -- chief of Google Photos -- said in a recent blog post: "[W]e will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content."