Google has emailed users that the old Hangouts-related photo library will be shutting down next month.
In an email to users, Google said: “Some content that is only available in the Album Archive will be deleted starting July 19.” These include album thumbnails, comments, or likes; Hangouts data from Album Archive; background images downloaded from the Gmail theme set before 2018.
Going to the link provided by Google brings up the old library, which includes a notable album called Photos from Hangouts. These are the users’ Hangouts shared Photos and videos, sorted by conversation, Google says. Some albums contain multiple photos sent through the Google Chat app.
However, puzzlingly, if you choose to delete Photo Albums directly here, Google says it is possible that copies of photos and videos may exist in Google Photos
This move once again shows that the company is looking to clean up old applications that are no longer attractive to users. According to 9to5google, these are leftover apps from the Google+ social networking project that was killed by the company in April 2019.
Earlier on May 15, Google announced the sale of its domain name business, Google Domains, to Squarespace for about $180 million, which now hosts more than 10 million domain names for millions of users.
Google says the Album Archive will no longer be accessible from July 19, 2023, and recommends that users download a copy of the previous data through Takeout. If you’ve ever used Google Chat and Hangouts to make calls to friends, you should save the photos from these Albums before the search giant deletes them