Goodbye Google plus photos | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Google plus photos

plus.google.com

62 pointsmsoad64 comments

> In May, we launched Google Photos as the home for all your photos and videos. ... In an effort to ensure everyone has the best photos experience we can deliver, on August 1st we’ll start to shut down Google+ Photos

I just don't trust Google and their 5-second attention span any more. Seems like every day brings another change in direction, or outright abandonment of a service I had relied upon. I'm self-hosting email and just won't touch the rest of their offerings, because there's no guarantee of continuity or even continuation.

It has got ridiculous. I have thousands of photos there and appreciate the service, but almost every time i log in something has changed. I'd love to know who is making these choices, it is descending into Microsoft levels of program mgmt stupidity. Also I couldn't even map out the interconnectedness of Google's product offerings.

Well, in this instance at least there's the continuation. The seem pretty set on Photos, and it's a strategic product for them (combined with Android). Google Photos is the successor to Google+ Photos and it surprised me they had both in the market at the same time for as long as they did.

Yes, I uploaded some photos to Picasa like 10 years ago and those are still available in this "new" service. But even if this is just a re-branding to get away from the G+ fiasco, it's still very confusing.

They're dismantling Google Plus. I know that's not the root cause for all the changes, but I think it's the major one and will result in significant upheaval until it's complete. I suspect that in a year or two, things will be a lot more settled and stable.

> With Google Photos you can store unlimited high quality photos

High quality does not mean the full original quality, right? This is then as before.

At the moment, there are three web interfaces to access your photos:

https://picasaweb.google.com/

https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos

https://photos.google.com/

I would switch to the latest version but the other interfaces still have their advantages too.

E.g. the old Picasa interface provides the best overview of all my albums (I have a lot: 1619), esp when I want to search an older one (they go back to 2004). Also, it has somehow the most compact view with the most details at the same time, like all meta information (sharing, tagged people, GPS, exif, ...). For videos though, the Picasa webinterface is somewhat broken. Also tagging people didn't quite work correctly.

The Google+ interface has the nicest way to tag people. And I think the photo editor is only available here?

The new Photos interface looks like the most modern one, but otherwise seems to have the least amount of features. Tagging people doesn't really work here. The photo editor is much stripped down compared to Google+. Also, it doesn't really show much meta information (no GPS? almost no exif, etc...).

This has become a serious bit of confusion, also now google seems to index any photos and videos inside of google drive into photos. Which is not the behavior you would want. I wish they just went back to only picasa, its really been the only good photo management situation

> also now google seems to index any photos and videos inside of google drive into photos

It's optional, I personally love and benefit from it. You can turn it off in the settings.

As a photo editor developer, it has been difficult to see how the uploading/dowloading/creating API call via old Picasa Web Data API will evolve overtime. Right now the Google Drive API seems to be the most robust and if you are looking for extra editing functionality, we built something for Google Drive like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/polarr-photo-edito...

Make that 4: Google Photos show up in Drive now, as well.

> Goodbye Google+ Photos, hello +Google Photos!

This line represents everything wrong with Google right now.

How so? It's an acknowledgement that forcing Google+ on people was a bad idea and that you can still continue to build awesome products (Google Photos) without a social network. If anything, isn't it a step in the right direction?

The problem is we went from Picasa -> Google+ Photos -> +Google Photos?

Why does google keep on throwing out branding, spinning down a project, only to spin up another one that does the same thing? Why didn't they go back to the Picasa namesake, with all the branding it has?

Apparently "+Google Photos" is just the nickname of the "Google Photos" account on "Google+". The name of the service is "Google Photos", not "+Google Photos".

Yes, "+" is the Google Plus equivalent to Twitter's "@". So "+Google Photos" is analogous to "@GooglePhotos" on Twitter.

On the other hand "+" is not happening, please stop.

Next year it is Alphabet photos.

2016 - Alphabet Photos

2018(jan-aug) - ABC Photos

2018 - ABC DOREMI

2019(jan-feb) - ADORE ME Photos

2019 - Adore.me

2021 - Adore.me & Analphebet.photos

2022 - Analphablet.photos ?

or just Photos+ or I dunno

+Photos you mean

Yea, that confused the hell out of me.

edit: To me, the problem is that they're using `Google+` as branding, and `+` as an identifier like `@`.

> Goodbye Twitter@ Photos, Hello @Twitter Photos

Would be equally weird, imo. (Albeit, less weird because we're used to @foo and #foo)

Wonky and confusing as fuck.

It's the same mistake Microsoft made over and over and over again in their lost days from ~2000 to ~2010. It always seems to indicate lack of focus, weak leadership and a surplus of resources.

MSN, Bing, Live, MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, IE, Edge, WinFX, .Net, Groove, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, etc. There are a bunch of other examples.

Right. This is what you get if you search Google for Hotmail (as millions of people do): http://imgur.com/CJpskkz

Is that Hotmail, Live.com, Outlook.com, or Microsoft?

And those are just the short names...

Don't forget Windows Phone 7 Series and beasts like Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit for Microsoft® Pre-Release Windows Operating System Code-Named "Longhorn", Beta 1 Web Setup.

I was ashamed of the naming of a product I worked on: Windows Live Mobile for Windows Mobile

ugh

Don't you think that the symmetry with the '+' is done on purpose, to be comical?

Indeed. Although they should have said: Goodbye +Google+ Photos, hello +Google Photos! but then it would have been ridiculous, wouldn't it? :P

> This line represents everything wrong with Google right now.

How about "Goodbye Alphabet's Google+ Photos, hello Alphabet's Google Photos!"

I am more than a bit confused - hope someone here can clarify.

I have 11000 pictures under https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos. Not that I care much about the storage/editing part: I do all my editing on my desktop, and I store original and edited pictures locally, with tagging, date-sorted directories etc.

What I do use Google+ for is to create posts with galleries. Typically if I go somewhere interesting I put online a series of pics for my trip, to share with family and friends, I post them as "Public" and then link to each individual gallery from my personal webpage (so I don't have to store these on my site).

So the question for me is: what changes in terms of "creating posts on Google+ with a bunch of pictures associated to them"?

Will this still be possible? Can I just upload pics like now, or do I need to use the new Google Photo app?

I'm also completely confused. It states:

  Download the new Google Photos today for uninterrupted 
  access to all your photos, videos and albums.  If you don’t 
  update to the new Google Photos, Google+ Photos on Android 
  will soon stop working, but your photos and videos will 
  still remain safely stored...

I'm actually so glad I didn't decide to use Google Picasa as a safe backup option for my photos. I'm not sure I can trust Google to take care of my data.

I have now been moved from Picasa, to Google+ Photos to +Google Photos, which I assume at some point will be renamed again to *Google-+Photos=WTF

I don't want an app on my phone, because I don't want a Google app to be randomly uploading photos from my phone to it's servers.

So, if I don't have an mobile app, has anything actually changed?

I just want a Google website app that allows me to:

- Present photos in albums (that I name and sort) nicely

- Share those photos with selective friends and family using a URL that I can revoke (like Flickr does)

- Explore where my photos were taken on a map

- Allow comments on photos without friends and family having to have some kind of Google account

I use my phone like a camera. I connect it to my computer with a USB cable, download the photos and then organise and sort them, then selectively upload them. I want to have that control. I don't want to upload everything. Why does everything have to be an app these days?

My perfect photo app would be open source. There is no good open source alternative. All open source photos web apps are poor. I've tried them all. I love the Google+ Photos interface. Bright, white and big photos in a mosaic. Flickr used to be good, then it decided to go all black and depressing.

TroveBox and Lychee are the closest, but Trovebox (Open Photo) has a very problematic install and Lychee is missing the Amazon S3 storage option). No app offers encrypted at rest storage, which these days should be a must.

I've read several times that "there is no money in consumer photo apps", but personally I'm paying Flickr a subscription and Google and Dropbox, when none of them really provide me with what I want. I'd happily pay a license fee for some open source software that actually did the job, and which I knew wasn't going to "sunset" after two years.

</end rant>

Absolutely nothing will change for you. When you share a gallery to google+ from photos, it will generate a unique share link to that gallery and paste it in google+. The shared gallery even displays as a gallery within g+, instead of redirecting you to google photos.

I wish they would give the Picasa OSX app more love. It doesn't even support retina displays!

It's one of the best ways to manage photos for us who like to keep photos as .jpegs inside actual folders, instead of inside some opaque package of sqlite and hidden hashed filenames (like Photos.app and the older iPhoto.app).

But I guess supporting vendor-neutral, lock-in-less file repositories like that is out of fashion these days :-/

I also hate the sqlite "feature". Lightroom does the right thing, has the best features and it's not even that expensive, however, I will never submit to that creative cloud crap. Just let me buy the damn thing, and no .pkg installers either!

Doesn't Lightroom use a MySQL database to store the users metadata/tags?

Windows Vista/7 Photo Gallery did the right thing, it stored the users metadata in the pictures (EXIF, XMP, etc metadata formats) inside the JPEG/etc formarts. Windows Media Player stored the song user rating in the MP3 files in their ID3 tags too. iTunes does the contrary, stores everything in a SQLite db.

I don't know what Lightroom uses to store metadata, but it stores data in files, which is what I'm most interested in.

I have no particular opinion on Lightroom metadata, but I sure would hate if simply assigning ratings to songs would alter the file. I sure hope metadata like that is stored outside the file.

What "data" are you talking about that Lightroom stores in files? How is your "data" different than what is known as "metadata"?

If I tag a photo or picture, I want the metadata to go with me. I can create a dynamic playlist of photos on all my devices based on the metadata on multiple different platforms (even in my car). If I choose to strip my personal metadata later, it's just a single click. What is idiotic is to store metadata only in silos (iTunes, Lightroom, iPhoto databases), it's a vendor lock-in that will hurt the customer in the long term.

> If I tag a photo or picture, I want the metadata to go with me.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what the tag means.

> I can create a dynamic playlist of photos on all my devices based on the metadata on multiple different platforms (even in my car).

Here we just have to disagree. When it comes to music, I don't want to alter metadata as part of regular operation.

> What is idiotic is to store metadata only in silos (iTunes, Lightroom, iPhoto databases), it's a vendor lock-in that will hurt the customer in the long term.

Sure, that is my pet peeve as well. But the problem is that these program suck, not that they don't store metadata in the original files. They should use some documented, stable format, and it would be great if many programs used the same format!

But even when they use sqlite this is not the case, the schema is not fixed, not documented, the data inside the database opaque, and interoperability with anything else piss poor.

At least Lightroom manages all your photographic files as files, rather than importing blobs in a database, like Photos does. It would be great if the metadata would be open, it's annoying, but that's a much minor problem for me.

Many common file formats have one, two or more metadata storage formats.

JPEG/JPG stores Exif (camera data), IPTC & XMP (authors data).

MP3 stores ID3 (authors data)

Editing the metadata doesn't reduce the quality of the file content itself. So you won't get a degenerated music file or a lower quality picture. So I really don't understand your sentense: "I don't want to alter metadata as part of regular operation."

Some people scribble books with yellow highlighters, other people are driven insane by highlighted books. If you are not a person in the latter category, I am afraid I can't explain to you why I don't want to change my music files when I do a trivial operation in my music player.

Google Plus was a bit of a shame, having used it a little bit when it first came out, it was actually quote a good social network in terms of functionality. It just never achieved that critical mass of users to make it worthy of dedicating alot of time to.

Personally, I avoided it specifically because of all the "you must use this" shenanigans around YouTube and other services, as well as the Real Names policy brokenness. They could have had much more loyal users if they didn't pull stunts like that.

This is just an opinion, but I wonder how many 'non-techies' that would have bothered?

As someone switched on to those kind of arguments I can definitely understand - but to the every day lay man, I wonder how much a real name policy really would have mattered...

(seeing the other side, I can imagine how people uneducated in these things are also naturally suspicious - my grandma is probably more cautious with her data than any other person I know - perhaps knowing the specifics of threats rather than just fearing privacy leakage as a generic fear inducing concept is worse?!)

> but to the every day lay man, I wonder how much a real name policy really would have mattered...

Many of the people most affected by the Real Names policy were not "techies".

The service right now is quite good. The first implementation is circles is just broken IMO. Yes, it is a very pertinent observation (you have different social circles) but nobody is ready to take the time to create these.

Instead one of the last updates brought collections. It is very reminiscent of Pinterest but does not just focus on pictures. It is a very handy way to maintain different streams like e.g. :

-random social banter

- technical subject 1

- hobby 1

...

The mobile interface could better serve this paradigm, but otherwise this is the best social product for me.

I really need to choose a service to host all my photos on. I was a singular archive of every photo I've ever taken.

I'm seriously considering setting up a camlistore[1] server but it would probably mean writing my own Android/iOS apps to do auto-upload.

Also, I do rather like all of the features that Google Photos comes with...

[1] https://camlistore.org/

I use the Amazon Cloud drive for backups of originals - it's $59.99 a year for "unlimited" storage. Here I backup my RAW images and camera phone images.

Once I've edited photos and want to publish (using Lightroom) I publish to flickr.

This works nicely and I'm glad I have steered clear of any of Google's or Apple's offerings - frankly I don't trust them.

Google Photos is awesome for lazy people like me. Everything auto-uploads. I can publish or not. I can edit or not. Convenient, free, and useful.

I use all three - flickr, google photos (the free version) and amazon. I also have harddrive backups as well - Im very indecisive!

Flickr is what, 10-15 years old. Why not Flickr?

I use Bittorrent Sync and just order stuff in directories. I don't like proprietary storage systems.

Alternatively, Dropbox and OneDrive work pretty well as well. Both have pretty nice photo viewing interfaces (on the web and mobile).

Why not Google Photos?...

I like Lightroom + Lightroom Mobile (which has automatic sync). When it syncs to my computer it gets into Dropbox, but a creative cloud subscription will have Adobe back things up for you too. Not free, but I put value on my photos and am getting pro-level editing tools at the same time.

Bear in mind this is from July 2015.

Why do users have to make a switch? Why isn't this just considered a rebranding from a user perspective?

I think they're separate apps. People who are used to using the Google+ app to access their photos are now required to download the separate, optional Google Photos app.

It's not just apps. The server side seems to have been rebuilt independent of Google+. Like OP, I'm wondering why Google didn't just find a way to give people outside of G+ direct access to the features inside it, which were already pretty good.

Google spends a lot of energy on supposedly optimizing UI when the biggest improvement to usability would be to avoid inconsistent and frequently changing interfaces.

You're right, Google Photos is a separate app. Google Photos is one of my favorite apps. Great UI and great functionality.

In 232 words, "Google" is mentioned 14 times (6%), and "Photos" gets 21 mentions (9%). One in 7 words is either "Google" or "Photos". They should have got bingo cards made up before this announcement so we could have all played along at home!

Kolmogorov complexity of HN comments on X is approaching boilerplate level. Where X is Google's product changes, front-end apps/frameworks, advertising, etc etc.

This is from July 21, just wondering the significance now.

Given that the google photos app isn't supported on iOS<8 (whereas the google plus app was), does anyone know what the best way of getting camera photos to upload to Google photos from an older iPhone?

I'm really hoping I don't have to do some sort of Dropbox/iPhotos dance :(

can you import them in google drive ? There is a very handy option to automatically import your drive photos in google photos. I think it should work on ios as well.

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