Google, in a recent restructuring of services, has terminated the Picasa site (the Picasa program can still be downloaded) and launched, in its place (without making any announcements), the Google Album Archive site. This special page collects, in one place, all the photos saved by Google in the various online applications and services, so that you can find, browse, download and delete them if you no longer want to keep them.
The albums listed on the Google Archive page come from:
- Google Profile Photo (shared by Google My Business, YouTube and other Google products)
- Photos published on Google+;
- Images published on Blogger blogs (Blogspot);
- Hangouts chat images;
- YouTube Channel;
- Google Photos;
- Google Drive.
In particular, those who use the Google Photos app for backing up photos from their mobile phone can find all the stored photos and browse them by date or by place.
The only actions you can take within the Google Album Archive site are to delete or download individual images or even albums. Then open an album or photo and then click the button at the top right to find the Delete and Download options. For photos of Google Photos there is no delete option and you have to press the link to manage the photo from the Google Photos site .
Also to move an image to another album, to share a photo and to change the visibility from public to private it is necessary to go to the Google Photos site.
Be careful if you delete an image from a Blogger blog album, as this will also be permanently removed from the blog.
From this page you can also see if the photos saved by Google are visible to other people. By opening a photo, at the bottom left, you can read if the image is private or with limited and public visibility.
To download all the photos of Google Photos you must instead use the Google Takeout tool as explained in another article.
