I'm in the same boat... did not appreciate my photo's being moved from Picasa to Google ... and what really is bad is that all the text is gone. It's just photo's with no explanation to them of what they are. I did send some feedback to them on that. I'm hoping that they are able to do something about that in the next year before they shut picasa albums down.
My blog is linked to my picasa albums.... 10 years of links. I am almost afraid to go look to see if the links still work. they might for now but won't later when picasa is truly "over"??
So I'm looking for something that is truly private. I've got a flickr acct but never used that as much as picasa. That's controlled by Yahoo.