Why has Google permanently disabled Picasa’s email-photographs-directly feature?

I first encountered the problem on March 13, I don’t know if it existed before this. Since then, I have not been able to email photographs using Picasa…I have to go to Gmail and attach photographs as a file and then email them.

I liked Picasa as it would downsize images, and I didn’t have to downsize them myself, or send large jpeg files to everyone.

I found a forum of users who were all complaining about this; a friend also tried emailing from his account, and it didn’t work for him, either. But now it’s past 10 days, and I refuse to believe that the highly paid Google techies could not have rectified this if they wished to.

So…why have they disabled this extremely useful feature? and why not be open about disabling it? Or is it, truly, some mega-glitch that is not rectifiable?

There are some user-features in which Google often lags behind other tech companies. On Yahoo!, for example, being invisible was an option; Gtalk took a very long time in providing this useful option. (A friend of mine who was then working for Google explained the technical difficulty …a whole difference in the approach….behind this.) Even today, YM has another very useful feature…a “stealth” setting, which enables one to be visible to just a few on one’s friends list. If, like me, one cannot handle multiple conversations, this is very useful indeed. Google doesn’t have anything like it.

Not having something is, of course, a very different kettle of fish from having something and then disabling it…especially without a word of explanation to the users. Google…what’s the matter, and why this opacityi? Alas, mine is not a techie blog, so this question will probably go unanswered… and I will be sending large jpeg files to my Photobucket site and to everyone else :(