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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.

It seems that the current move is a little more than a name change and, in addition to changing the service name from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos, some exciting new features would also be pumped in. Some features that could be gleaned from the code snippet on the site include content licensing options, uploading photos by email and tagging people in your photos.

Online photo sharing and image search is by no means a concluded battle. If Google becomes aggressive in this space, they could easily notch a sizable market.

Note: The domain photos.google.com is already redirecting to Picasa Web Albums.