Ionut Alex from Google Operating System has dugged up an interesting story. According to Alex he has come across many references to Google Photos in the current Picasa Web Albums website. Picasa Web Albums is a web based photo sharing service by Google. Google acquired Picasa, a desktop based photo editing software, in July 2004. Google later allowed the users to upload their albums to the Web and share it with friends and family by creating a web property called Picasa Web Albums. Picasa Web Albums never gained much traction, in fact many Google fans don’t even know that there is any such service available.
The reason for this sluggish performance is obvious, Google acquired Picasa to get into desktop photo editing game. But once it entered the market it never allocated enough resources to the division to make it compete with the likes of Flickr, Slide or Photobucket to mention just a few names. The reasonable decent update to Picasa Web Albums came last year when Google made the photos searchable. This alone could tell you about the speed at which innovation is taking place on this site. The online version of Picasa lacked many basic features such as stats, favorites, tagging etc to make it a little attractive to the feature hungry crowd out there.
