I'm a photographer, and I was a HEAVY user (and paying customer) of Picasaweb when it existed, from the day it was launched.
When they pushed everything into G+ it enraged me. They took away the nice, fast, minimal, grid-view albums and gave us a heavy social-network wrapped mess. They turned a powerful Flickr competitor into a "pretty" and feature-poor share-with-your-friends site.
It was embarassing to link to albums to my clients because it was basically me linking to a Facebook-style social network rather than a photo site. Throw in the "realname" bullshit so I couldn't use an alias for my photography, and blam... instant enraged ex-customer running CLI scripts to systematically wipe my 10 years of Picasaweb usage (you can't bulk delete on Picasaweb).
I was upset when they killed Reader, but I got over it. I was upset when they forced G+ onto YouTube, but I got over it (I just don't log in for YouTube now). I never got over them destroying the only semi-decent Flickr competitor that exists, all in the name of "OMGSOCIAL". I was a huge Google fanboy who now goes out of my way to avoid anything/everything they do, thanks to their G+ push.
I've since moved on to being not-so-happy Flickr user (the lesser of evils currently, for bulk photo hosting and album management).
For what it's worth, with people saying there's too many photo hosting sites... I still can't find ANY that are as good as Picasaweb or old-Flickr were. Easy bulk management of photos/albums and their metadata like tags/titles/descriptions/locations. Albums within albums. A SIMPLE UI that is friendly to non-tech-savvy clients/friends visiting. Minimal fluff. Lightroom integration. Etc etc.
You may want to try SmugMug [1]. Easy bulk mangement, simple to upload to using the Lightroom plugin, private galleries if you need them for clients. Even sell prints etc. The iPad app for viewing your own photos was good too.
I was happy with them but in the end went with hosting my own Koken [2] powered site. Its a blog/cms aimed at photographers, but you host it yourself. Again pretty to use with bulk management and Lightroom plugin for uploading.
I had many of the same issues. Eventually settled on http://picturelife.com/ which has been perfect for me since I started using it. Haven't looked back.
Even has Lightroom integration so you can do all your tagging and whatnot there before you upload.
Picasaweb still works as before if you manage to not upgrade your account to G+ (not easy, as Google has some devious ways to make you upgrade, and I guess any new account is G+ by default).
And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to pre-Hangouts as well.
It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified.
How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.
I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk.
Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open.
When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it
5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)
You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze.
These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it.
Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
I've been using Picasa since version 1 but I disagree that G+ Photos is worse. I think the service has got quite a bit faster, smoother and easier to use over the last year.
Nice post :) Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about the photo space, seeing how many of us cropped up at the same time, is that you can spend enough time on product rather than the hard tech stuff to make a dent in the world. We're 3 years in and just now starting to release the product stuff we're excited about because the tech challenges are so real.
Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.
Interesting also to see that Everpix (consumer svc for organizing photos that also shut down) shared a ton of their internal data (presentations, survey results, status updates, etc.): https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence
Oh yes please. It makes no sense to bind a photo product with a social platform. I mean you can make them talk to each other, for sure, but for now it's more like photo won't function normally without G+.
For example, it's quite silly to have Google+ as the first item in navigation view on the Photo apps on Android. Whenever I want to see my photo, I want the photo features, not social features. I will only want to touch the Google+ when I want to share it, but it's not the thing I want to do all the times.
I guess... aside from hoarding photos, the only other things I want to do with them is improve them and share them. And I've never seen any other site do that as well as G+. (Except Everpix, at least for hoarding and sharing.)
G+'s circles make it really easy for me to define exactly who sees which photos, and the auto-awesome stuff really is pretty gorgeous. You'd prefer a dumb drive like S3 to free enhancement and easy sharing?
Yeah. It is understandable when you see where Photos is coming from.
Google+ has proven successful with photographs since it had (at least at the time) an very good picture experience and an interaction model that worked well for communities. So they doubled down on photo features (not to mention that according to rumors, Gundotra is supposedly prone to claim some projects for his division).
Now that we have a full fledged photo product, it may be time to :
-separate it from Google+, even though g+ should still be backed by photos.
-Merge as many google photo products as possible into this new experience.
Google has made some amazing work with auto awesome features (these automatic albums are slick) and the Photo editor, especially on mobile (where it is far from easy to build an editing pipeline, even if you use Renderscript).
More often than not when I open a photo on my phone I want to share it with someone or I'm showing it to them in person. It makes total sense to have sharing functionality right there.
I think Google has some ego issues entangled with its web services and social networks (well, whatever now remains of it). It tries to do it right, but not when everyone (including almost all its users) ask/request them to, but when most probably it's too late.
I am wary of Facebook like it's plague and I honestly believe it is, but truth to be told, I am more wary of Google services and its recent Google+ integration madness. At times I see I've an account there and I don't see how it got created and how to delete it. I recently deleted a YouTube account which was created "automatically" from my Gmail account (which "already" had a Google+ account) and it was publicly sharing all my YouTube likes, after exchanging few emails from Google staff, now I've told Disconnect/Ghostery to not let YoutTube portal any of my Google accounts, but I guess that's not possible on Android.
It's been years since I have written a Google Play (apps) review, or wrote an YouTube comment. I've been trying to move my chat to a jabber based service (I've an sdf.org account) but for some reason my GTalk friends find difficulty to connect to me. So, I'll definitely not be interested in any new Google services because I don't think when they will "integrate" it with something else or when they will shut it down "to focus on more focussed products".
Besides, I would rather put my money into a services which does, more or less, only that business and charges appropriate amount of money for that.
rant ends and tl;dr:
Google just pushed me away with their G+ craziness and saying that its web services are social networks are a mess is an understatement.
Very smart move by Google here. People don't trust Google+ as a repository for photos because it's inherently a social product and with social products there is always some confusion about privacy.
As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.
It may be a good move, but calling it 'Very Smart' seems like giving them too much credit given that it's really just returning to what everyone else does after the disaster of Google+
Related: Recently Google has been sending me cheery messages about something called Albums that it compiles for me out of the photos I take with my Android phone's camera. The feature is as creepy as it's all over the place.
I think the titles come from my Google Calendar, and the photos are put together by date. Albums mix activities that happen over the same time period, like photos of my daughter before a trip in the same album as the mundane, banal and, at times, painful photographs I took of my father's flat and personal effects while documenting some paperwork I had to do during such trip, which was just after he died.
Thanks for the happy memories, Google! Now please tell me how to turn the feature off!
You realize you can choose/remove pictures as well as edit and add captions?
(And yes, it can be turned off. I think it goes along with AutoAwesome)
For me this is one of a few data points that proves there are still real googlers around :-) Now if they would just bring back desktop search and web clips (I think it analyzed every rss linked from every web page I read and figured out what kind of news I was interested in. More practically speaking: it was magic in a good way. )
The "Stories" feature does get some things wrong, but I find it cool. I don't use Google Calendar, so it's not getting data from that for me. Here's a recent example that it did for me with pretty good results:
I really wish Google could come up with a good overarching strategy for their products and stick with it for a long time. I'm losing track of how all the different services relate to each other.
Argh. You guys, I don't get the hate. As someone else pointed out, if G+ dies, all we're left with it Facebook... and for what it's worth, G+ is far and away my favorite social network of all time. Between circles and auto-awesome, the only way for it to improve is if G+ can poach some of the celebrities and news sources from Twitter.
As it is, G+ is an absolutely fantastic feed from my favorite news sources, sorted into relevant subject-matter circles. It hasn't gained the mainstream adoption of Facebook, but that can be spun as a feature rather than a bug -- way more HN-style discussion, way fewer babies and gun nuts.
G+ Photos is by far the strongest aspect of G+, and spinning it off may spell doom for the network. I really hope not. Photo sharing and social networks go together like peanut butter and jelly, and Google's done a great job of keeping everything private unless explicitly ordered otherwise. (At least in G+... not so much in Buzz or whatever.)
> I really really have a hard time understanding the google+ hate around here.
Because it's a baffling fucking mess.
I have several different accounts. G+ integration breaks those totally, leaking information to people I didn't want it leaked to; contacting people I didn't want to contact; making my different Google services much harder to use.
And what benefit do I get from it?
This is a real question: What does G+ actually give me?
> entirely voluntary google+ social network
... is a bit of a stretch. I believe the vast majority of users on Google+ were strongarmed in. Basically just by having a Google account that they used for anything (gmail, docs, youtube), suddenly a Google+ profile was created for them, and then things like their Android reviews, play store purchases, etc were being associated with the + profile.
Yes, I make all information about me available to public when I put it online at all, but I really don't want my every online impact fully traceable back to me and to one another without that being explicit intent. Google+ subversively does that to everything their users do, and it blows.
The story is sourced to “people with knowledge of the matter.” In the same piece Google goes own the record saying “over here in our darkroom, we’re always developing new ways for people to snap, share and say cheese.” It reads almost like a comedy on sanctioned leaks.
I enabled photo sync over wifi only and never enable wifi on my phone. Somehow Google+ magically decided to sync 10GB of my private photos to Google+ Photos over my LTE connection. I'll never be sure how many copies of my photos exist now or who has them.
This is welcome news. I've been reluctantly moving everything over to Google (it's love-hate - Google really makes great web products), including canceling Dropbox and using Drive. Drive is good, but the Google+ photo thing is confusing. I like the UI and it's functionally but could care less about Google+ itself. Speaking of which, does Google photos have an auto-upload feature on phones?
Photos are one of the few (only?) good things that they got mostly right in G+ and which I use pretty extensively.
Business-wise this is the correct move except drop the ridiculous name "Google+ Photos"? Focus on adding great new features to the photo sharing parts & then slowly grow the social aspects depending on what catches on.
And for the love of all that is good SIMPLIFY the fre*%n navigation & menus.
If the point is to attract users who haven't joined Google+ (likely because they don't want another Facebook-shaped social network), why in the world would they keep "Google+" in the name?
I'd be surprised if this were anything other than an Instagram and/or Snapchat clone, with a Google+ login, but with a stream and friends-list distinct from Google+.
Great, what about separating the video service next ? All other issues aside it's kinda creepy when they want to know your real name (due to real names policy) when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that you need to log in).
when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that you need to log in).
You don't need to log in if the video is embedded on a page, or if you open the player directly like this (/v/<id> in URL): https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc
[+] [-] Andrenid|11 years ago|reply
When they pushed everything into G+ it enraged me. They took away the nice, fast, minimal, grid-view albums and gave us a heavy social-network wrapped mess. They turned a powerful Flickr competitor into a "pretty" and feature-poor share-with-your-friends site.
It was embarassing to link to albums to my clients because it was basically me linking to a Facebook-style social network rather than a photo site. Throw in the "realname" bullshit so I couldn't use an alias for my photography, and blam... instant enraged ex-customer running CLI scripts to systematically wipe my 10 years of Picasaweb usage (you can't bulk delete on Picasaweb).
I was upset when they killed Reader, but I got over it. I was upset when they forced G+ onto YouTube, but I got over it (I just don't log in for YouTube now). I never got over them destroying the only semi-decent Flickr competitor that exists, all in the name of "OMGSOCIAL". I was a huge Google fanboy who now goes out of my way to avoid anything/everything they do, thanks to their G+ push.
I've since moved on to being not-so-happy Flickr user (the lesser of evils currently, for bulk photo hosting and album management).
For what it's worth, with people saying there's too many photo hosting sites... I still can't find ANY that are as good as Picasaweb or old-Flickr were. Easy bulk management of photos/albums and their metadata like tags/titles/descriptions/locations. Albums within albums. A SIMPLE UI that is friendly to non-tech-savvy clients/friends visiting. Minimal fluff. Lightroom integration. Etc etc.
</rant>
[+] [-] rb2e|11 years ago|reply
I was happy with them but in the end went with hosting my own Koken [2] powered site. Its a blog/cms aimed at photographers, but you host it yourself. Again pretty to use with bulk management and Lightroom plugin for uploading.
[1]http://www.smugmug.com/
[2]http://koken.me/
[+] [-] kyriakos|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veratyr|11 years ago|reply
Even has Lightroom integration so you can do all your tagging and whatnot there before you upload.
[+] [-] miahi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply
Similar here, I stopped uploading.
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified.
How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.
[+] [-] criley2|11 years ago|reply
Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open.
When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it
5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)
[+] [-] munificent|11 years ago|reply
These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it.
Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilsetnieks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmathai|11 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...
[+] [-] innonate|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.
[+] [-] yarone|11 years ago|reply
Interesting also to see that Everpix (consumer svc for organizing photos that also shut down) shared a ton of their internal data (presentations, survey results, status updates, etc.): https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence
[+] [-] cnbuff410|11 years ago|reply
For example, it's quite silly to have Google+ as the first item in navigation view on the Photo apps on Android. Whenever I want to see my photo, I want the photo features, not social features. I will only want to touch the Google+ when I want to share it, but it's not the thing I want to do all the times.
[+] [-] Chevalier|11 years ago|reply
G+'s circles make it really easy for me to define exactly who sees which photos, and the auto-awesome stuff really is pretty gorgeous. You'd prefer a dumb drive like S3 to free enhancement and easy sharing?
[+] [-] on_and_off|11 years ago|reply
Google+ has proven successful with photographs since it had (at least at the time) an very good picture experience and an interaction model that worked well for communities. So they doubled down on photo features (not to mention that according to rumors, Gundotra is supposedly prone to claim some projects for his division).
Now that we have a full fledged photo product, it may be time to : -separate it from Google+, even though g+ should still be backed by photos. -Merge as many google photo products as possible into this new experience.
Google has made some amazing work with auto awesome features (these automatic albums are slick) and the Photo editor, especially on mobile (where it is far from easy to build an editing pipeline, even if you use Renderscript).
[+] [-] abraham|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myko|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balladeer|11 years ago|reply
I am wary of Facebook like it's plague and I honestly believe it is, but truth to be told, I am more wary of Google services and its recent Google+ integration madness. At times I see I've an account there and I don't see how it got created and how to delete it. I recently deleted a YouTube account which was created "automatically" from my Gmail account (which "already" had a Google+ account) and it was publicly sharing all my YouTube likes, after exchanging few emails from Google staff, now I've told Disconnect/Ghostery to not let YoutTube portal any of my Google accounts, but I guess that's not possible on Android.
It's been years since I have written a Google Play (apps) review, or wrote an YouTube comment. I've been trying to move my chat to a jabber based service (I've an sdf.org account) but for some reason my GTalk friends find difficulty to connect to me. So, I'll definitely not be interested in any new Google services because I don't think when they will "integrate" it with something else or when they will shut it down "to focus on more focussed products".
Besides, I would rather put my money into a services which does, more or less, only that business and charges appropriate amount of money for that.
rant ends and tl;dr:
Google just pushed me away with their G+ craziness and saying that its web services are social networks are a mess is an understatement.
[+] [-] Zikes|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
[+] [-] innonate|11 years ago|reply
As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.
[+] [-] gress|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candeira|11 years ago|reply
I think the titles come from my Google Calendar, and the photos are put together by date. Albums mix activities that happen over the same time period, like photos of my daughter before a trip in the same album as the mundane, banal and, at times, painful photographs I took of my father's flat and personal effects while documenting some paperwork I had to do during such trip, which was just after he died.
Thanks for the happy memories, Google! Now please tell me how to turn the feature off!
[+] [-] reitanqild|11 years ago|reply
(And yes, it can be turned off. I think it goes along with AutoAwesome)
For me this is one of a few data points that proves there are still real googlers around :-) Now if they would just bring back desktop search and web clips (I think it analyzed every rss linked from every web page I read and figured out what kind of news I was interested in. More practically speaking: it was magic in a good way. )
[+] [-] jbuzbee|11 years ago|reply
https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b3...
[+] [-] GBKS|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chevalier|11 years ago|reply
As it is, G+ is an absolutely fantastic feed from my favorite news sources, sorted into relevant subject-matter circles. It hasn't gained the mainstream adoption of Facebook, but that can be spun as a feature rather than a bug -- way more HN-style discussion, way fewer babies and gun nuts.
G+ Photos is by far the strongest aspect of G+, and spinning it off may spell doom for the network. I really hope not. Photo sharing and social networks go together like peanut butter and jelly, and Google's done a great job of keeping everything private unless explicitly ordered otherwise. (At least in G+... not so much in Buzz or whatever.)
[+] [-] reitanqild|11 years ago|reply
Yes, I can understand the issue with the real names policy that hit youtube.
Yes, I can understand the issue with hangouts.
But why oh why do so many people also want the entirely voluntarily google+ social network to crash and burn leaving us with Facebook?
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
Because it's a baffling fucking mess.
I have several different accounts. G+ integration breaks those totally, leaking information to people I didn't want it leaked to; contacting people I didn't want to contact; making my different Google services much harder to use.
And what benefit do I get from it?
This is a real question: What does G+ actually give me?
[+] [-] jasonwocky|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keerthiko|11 years ago|reply
Yes, I make all information about me available to public when I put it online at all, but I really don't want my every online impact fully traceable back to me and to one another without that being explicit intent. Google+ subversively does that to everything their users do, and it blows.
[+] [-] insertion|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpursley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reacocard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suprgeek|11 years ago|reply
Business-wise this is the correct move except drop the ridiculous name "Google+ Photos"? Focus on adding great new features to the photo sharing parts & then slowly grow the social aspects depending on what catches on.
And for the love of all that is good SIMPLIFY the fre*%n navigation & menus.
[+] [-] roc|11 years ago|reply
I'd be surprised if this were anything other than an Instagram and/or Snapchat clone, with a Google+ login, but with a stream and friends-list distinct from Google+.
[+] [-] bluecalm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpanghmc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andor|11 years ago|reply
You don't need to log in if the video is embedded on a page, or if you open the player directly like this (/v/<id> in URL): https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc
[+] [-] eva1984|11 years ago|reply