Having used Google Picasaweb for picture-hosting for many years, Google’s transition to Google Photos has been a frustrating experience. The original Picasaweb has always worked better for me than its supposed replacement. Several friends of mine who had also been using Picasaweb have already switched to other services, including Facebook.
The latest nail in the coffin came a few days ago, when the Picasa 3 application failed to upload new albums to Google Photo. The error message was:
Error: Request failed
Click here to View Errors
The link revealed that it was a server error:
HTTP Error 400 – https://picasaweb.google.com/post?tok={long-token-here}[156]
It looks like someone at Google broke the upload servers. When they announced the transition a year ago, Google wrote:
Desktop application
As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates.
For now, the workaround appears to be to use “File | Export Picture to Folder” in the Desktop application to create files no wider than 1600 pixels (below the limit for unlimited free uploads) and then upload those file sets to Google Photo using its web interface.
At the moment it is still possible to share Google Photo images in blog and forum posts but for how much longer? First you must share the album, for example by clicking on the “share” icon in the album in Google Photo, then “Get Link” to generate a link, which you don’t actually have to use. Then you can view an image, right-click on it and select “Open image in new tab”. The URI above the new tab that opens can be used for embedding images in blogs and forums. If or more precisely, when Google also breaks this feature then Google Photos will become unusable for me.
I am looking for a good solution to be hosted on one of my own servers that will replace Google Photos, without size limits and without any hassle for resizing images for public sharing, that will let me control who can see what images like the old Picasaweb did.
Yeah this just happened to me also. totally sucks
Very bad!!
Same for me. Thought I had an issue..anyway thanks for the workaround
Thank you, I was wondering what happened to Picassa uploads, got same error. Google photos app not good, it uploads everything and I only want to share the best
Yep. Me three! I spent about 6 hours searching for an answer. I was sure i wasn’t logged out of one google account somewhere and that is what prevented Picasa from connecting. Sigh. I am going to check back on your blog for updates to see what program you come up with.
I don’t particularly want to use facebook because then they can use any of my images for anything they want…Like what if Zuckerberg left the site to some unscrupulous person that used my images for anti-immigration ads or something equally awful. Not that they would have any relevance but you know what I mean.
After being with Picasaweb since the beginning, I want something equally usable. easy to download from camera, easy to organize,easy to do basic fixes and easy to upload only the fixed ones to the internet into publicly accessible albums that I don’t have to hunt for a url for. I’ve tried lightroom and it is unwieldy due to the ram it uses so I can only use my photoshop desktop (with an empty scratch disk) to manage photos. Flik’r is way too zoned into Yahoo and therefore not as publicly accessible imho. Google photos does some fixes but the interface is way too slow I downloaded Digikam the other day and it looks a bit complicated but….gotta do something I guess. I suppose deviantart is a place to load my art photos but it seems like it is sort of meant for kids and manga. Behance is a little too corporate and looking for ways to get you hooked in and then monetize you. I’ve tried nabaroo but there is no traffic. Imgur is also a bit unwieldy and hard to find comments. Pinterest is ….pinterest. at least they get images indexed. No way to communicate though and users HAVE to log in (total bs) Instagram is great if you only use android. I even went so far as to download and use an emulator on my desktop just for instagram but it was a bit buggy and not 100% safe.
I am currently looking at building a solution on one of my servers based on the open source ImageMagick tool so I can upload my album sets into one folder each.
The web server would access a cache of image copies created from the originals at the right resolution on demand and the album would be accessed via a key generated when I publish an album. They would be revoke-able. Cached resized copies would expire when not accessed for some time to minimize disk space usage.
I’m not sure when I get around to building this, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to build.
Actually it has just started working again for me. I didn’t change anything, so it may have just been a prolonged service outage…
Yes, I can confirm that it started working again. I am again able to upload new albums. Let’s hope it doesn’t get broken again.
…and now it’s broken again. Uploads are timing out:
InternetWriteFile (connection aborted) timed out
Either their servers are overwhelmed by the backlog of pending uploads or there is a new problem.
If Google and facebook would stay out of politics and get back to work and refine what they built perhaps this may help
March 28, 2018. Stopped again. Like with videos I must upload by “pulling” with the + button on top of the album, rather than “pushing” up from Picasa. So: save your Picasa’s eventual picture tuning to the original picture (klick save in picture in Picasa), and then go to the album and fetch the picture(s). Fritz Jörn
Please Help, Picasa 3 Upload Manager no longer works. Also, instead of seeing the Google Photo app, I now see Google + app in the top right for syncing photos.
How can I replace it and bring back the Google Photo app and successfully upload again.
RichardM
Video upload has been broken for a long time now, but it appears that photo upload just broke now too. If I try to sync a new album, it just stops immediately (the sync button turns itself off). But also when it tries to sync new photos to existing albums I get the error message: “Error: Request failed. Please check that you are connected to the internet… provide following error code: Failed to check online album”.
Anybody else having this issue??? Is this the final nail in the coffin for Picasa?
Ray, see my update on the state of Picasa (which has now been officially killed):
Picasa can’t log into my account, can’t upload photos. That’s what happens when it’s free…… so sad.