Google Album Archive

» see get.google.com/albumarchive as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nobody was a user of Album Archive. You did not go there, you ended up there, usually at the end of an evening spent hunting a photograph you were certain still existed somewhere inside a Google account. It had no front page anybody visited on purpose and no search box. What it had was a URL and a column of sections, one per dead product.

It appeared in July 2016 for a specific reason. Google had announced on 12 February 2016 that it was retiring Picasa, which had been the photo product for a decade and had a web half called Picasa Web Albums holding an enormous quantity of other people's pictures. Picasa Web Albums closed that August. Album Archive was where the contents went, so that Google could say nothing had been deleted and mean it.

Then it became the place everything else went. Google+ photos landed there when Google+ was killed. Hangouts attachments went in, and so did the background images people had uploaded to the Gmail theme picker before 2018. Seven years of closures drained into one page that was never advertised anywhere.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was in there ~

The interesting part is that it kept the things a photo backup normally throws away. Picasa Web Albums had captions and comments attached to pictures, and those came across intact, which meant the archive held a record of a small social network that had grown up around family photographs in 2007 and that nobody had thought to preserve on purpose.

Hangouts was the other case. Photos sent inside a conversation stayed organized by conversation, including SMS threads that had passed through Hangouts back when Google was trying to make it your phone's messaging app. That is a strange thing to find sitting in a photo archive. Not the pictures you chose to keep, but the pictures you happened to send one person on one afternoon.

~ the takeout window ~

Google sent the warning by email in June 2023 and did a poor job of it. The message said content would be deleted without making clear which content, and the answer turned out to be narrow: only material that existed nowhere except Album Archive. Anything already sitting in Google Photos or still reachable through Google Chat was safe.

Narrow is not the same as nothing. The Picasa metadata was in the narrow category, as were the Gmail theme backgrounds and a quantity of Hangouts material old enough to predate the Chat migration. The instruction was to run Google Takeout before the deadline, which is reasonable advice for somebody who read the email and understood it, and no help whatsoever to a person who last opened Picasa in 2009 and no longer reads that address.

~ the nineteenth of july ~

On 19 July 2023 the URL stopped resolving to anything and the deletion began. There was no farewell post, because there was no audience to address one to. A product that exists as a holding pen for other products cannot have users by definition, and Google closed it the way you close a storage unit.

The pattern deserves naming, because Google has run it more than once. Close a product, promise nothing is lost, build a holding page, let the holding page sit for a few years while the promise gets quieter, then close the holding page. Picasa was retired in 2016 with an assurance attached. The assurance expired on a Wednesday in 2023, and the thing it referred to went with it.

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