When Google+ shuts down, hundreds of thousands of links on the Internet will break

On April 2nd, coinciding with the shutdown of the Google+ social network, hundreds of thousands of photo album links are going to be rendered useless.

Google has a long history of this behavior, and you need not look further than Google's previous photo storage effort Picasa. When Google originally acquired Picasa in 2004, it began to offer the service as freeware. By the time Picasa was discontinued in March of 2016, album links from the service were being hosted via the Google Plus social network. History repeats itself.

Now that Google+ is set to discontinue next month on April 2nd, the links to those photo albums that Google made users of the Picasa software create will no longer function. As Photo.net founder Phillip Greenspun notes on his blog, people that used these album links "will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere."

This major inconvenience to those who have used Picasa and Google+ may cause some of you to seek alternatives to both services, for which you're in the right place!