Google announced on February 12, Friday in a blog post that it will shut down its Picasa photo storage service during this spring. It will shutter the Picasa desktop application in March and end editing of web albums in May. Meanwhile, the search giant is suggesting that Picasa fans switch to the Google Photos app, which will allow them to modify and share most of their images and videos from Picasa.

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Google reports on its Picasa Blog that it has received many questions about the future of the service. It has spent much time considering the issue and has decided to "retire" Picasa during the next months . It believes it would be better to focus on Google Photos instead of dividing its resources among two products.

The post was made by Google Photos chief Anil Sabharwal.  He shared that Picasa's software would not be updated, but Photos is a new and smarter product anyway, according to The Times of India.   

The company noted that many of its customers had spent a ton of time managing their Picasa photos and videos. That is why it wanted to provide them with options.  

If people do not want to switch to Google Photos, they have another option. They can still use the web to download or delete their Picasa albums, according to The Verge.

Google purchased Picasa about a decade ago in 2014. An irony is that at the time the company wanted to compete better with Microsoft's MSN website and Yahoo.

During the next year Yahoo purchased Flickr. The photo and video hosting service is still running but Yahoo has struggled to keep it viable.

Last year the Alphabet company made several updates to Photos. In December it started rolling out its Shared Albums feature for Android and iOS devices, and the web.

Photos users just have to create a shared album,  and add images and videos they want included it in. They can share the album link by using mediums such as WhatsApp or text message.

Last year Google also unveiled its Free Up Space feature. It allows Photos users to bulk-delete media files that have been backed up to cloud storage, and web users to compress photos/videos uploaded in Original Quality to High Quality.

Here's a Google Photos ad: