it’s end almost a month since Google announced the end of the Album Archive featureand since the measure was announced a month in advance with respect to said closure… it really is now or never, either copy its contents or lose them forever. Of course, and especially if you didn’t read the news we posted about it at the announcement, it’s quite possible you’re wondering right now what an album archive is.

to explain we have to go back to 2016 when Google shut down Picasa, a suite of online applications and services for managing photo catalogs you’ve previously purchased. It was a very popular service at the time, so its closure was one of those that generated a lot of noise, even though it fit in with the company’s plans, which included shifting focus to Google Photos, which had launched a year earlier and which was better integrated into corporate service ecosystem.

Although Picasa’s photo collections have been moved to Google Photos, the company has also created an album archive to store certain items from Picasa. But the plans did not end there, because the search engine company It was proposed to transform it into a common space in which all the images of its services would be stored, i.e. all those related to the user account, of course. However, its use did not spread (and this depended on the companies themselves, not on the users), so it ended up being condemned to ostracism and, as we already know Google, to inevitable closure.

However, chances are you think you’ve never used it and, meaning you don’t have an album archive or in any case it will be empty. However, the fact that its use did not spread does not mean that it was only associated with Picasa. Other services like Google Hangouts or Blogger also used this shared store, so if you’ve used them, it’s more than likely that you have some content in them, even if it’s images you don’t even remember anymore.

So, there are only a few hours left before you can save the contents of your album archive, so you should at least be able to access it (you can do it directly from this link). And if you find that there is indeed some content in it, you can make a copy of all its content using Google Data Export. For this purpose, you have a section designated to store the contents of your file. You can access it by clicking here.

In my case, when I first checked the contents of my album archive (a month minus one day ago), To my surprise, I found a lot more pictures than I expected., and that’s why I’ve been telling everyone to check theirs ever since, because you might end up missing out on some pictures you’d want to keep if you knew they were there. So, excuse my insistence, and unless you’re absolutely sure you don’t have anything or don’t care about what’s there, I recommend you at least check it out. It only takes a few seconds and might even bring you a little joy.