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Tech giant Google’s Album Archive service is being shut down from July 19 onwards, so photos spanning services Gmail and defunct messaging service Hangouts could be lost if not backed up. Notably, this doesn’t have anything to do with Google Photos and Google says that Blogger images and account profile photos will remain unaffected.
Album Archive is a cloud-based photo gallery that lets users view and manage photo and video content from a host of Google products and services such as instant messaging and video conferencing app Hangouts, Chats, and Picasa Web Albums. Basically, Album Archive is an online image-storing space that houses all the images that users share on Google’s apps that are not stored on Google Photos.
The company has been urging affected users for the past two months to create backups of the data they are set to lose. Users can use Google Takeout, a service designed to export account data which seems almost identical to the Album Archive export, though it’s missing some metadata from Picasa albums.
Google+ users who were highly engaged on the platform might lose images from their posts in the exclusive Hangouts-only export. In a recent support blog, the tech giant stated the specific user data that could be in jeopardy of deletion. This includes thumbnail photos and album interactions such as comments or likes, certain Google Hangouts data stored in Album Archive, and even background images that were once uploaded in the Gmail theme picker before the year 2018.
Google has also shed light on the migration of data from its Talk service to Hangouts, and subsequently to Chat after Hangouts’ retirement. While the company assures that most data has been smoothly transitioned, uncertainty looms among users regarding the implications of Album Archive’s shutdown.
The Pichai-led firm has been axing its products and services since forever. Over the years, we have had a lengthy and ongoing list of products killed by the Mountain-view based company.
Notably, Google is not the only tech giant to consistently kill its products. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has created a dominant global online retailer and cloud computer, he’s led the creation of many duds, too. He famously called the e-commerce giant “the best place in the world to fail” in his 2016 shareholder letter. At Amazon, multiple products came to an end, some due to slowing sales and the rest due to the company’s shift in focus.
