Picasa Web Albums, a companion service, was closed on May 1, 2016. On February 12, 2016, Google announced it was discontinuing support for Picasa Desktop and Picasa Web Albums, effective March 15, 2016, and focusing on the cloud-based Google Photos as its successor. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Lifescape and began offering it as freeware. An iPhoto plugin and a standalone program for uploading photos were available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and macOS were available, and for Linux, the Windows version was bundled with Wine compatibility layer. 'Picasa' is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa (Spanish for 'my house') and 'pic' for pictures. Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by Idealab) in 2002.

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