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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's my 30s talking, but I can't help to be sad at the decline of Facebook the product: there simply was no better way to share photo albums with friends.

Instagram only allows you 10 pictures per album, has no good auto-tagging, and has no good way to download pictures from the app (which causes deep-fried screenshot hell). None of my friends are in Flickr or whatever picture site is common these days.

It's a pity that Facebook the company seems to have prioritised engagement so much over sanity.

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I think facebook really used to be a useful tool. It was easy to meet and add people there, organize events, share photos. And then it became more, and more, and more, and stopped being useful at what it was useful at.

If I was heading facebook product, I would move all that fluff to other apps, and make the core of facebook a useful simple tool to connect people again. The removal of the historical newsfeed is the first thing that shows that it’s not made to be useful anymore. Listen to the users.

Agreed, the way to increase its value is to take away features, not to add them. Its value proposition is being the boring, ubiquitous way to connect to your kids' PTA group and to organize your neighborhood cleanup or family reunion and so forth, and if they lean in to that its first-mover advantage will keep it around forever.

OTOH, the way to increase its profit is to add features, not take them away: If it gets out of your way when you're trying to check the agenda for your PTA meeting, and shows you a clean photo album of your family reunion, there's nowhere to slip in sponsored posts or ads.

You want to make Facebook better, but the shareholders want Facebook to make money. And Facebook can, and will continue, to makes a LOT of it by melting the brains of boomers with targeted propaganda.

As much as Google tends to wiff at anything social, I think Google Photos and iCloud are pretty strong players in album sharing.

+1 for Google Photos. So far at least Google has not messed up with the product and I have seen it getting better and smarter over the years in finding blurs, dupes, fixing light, showing pics to archive, searching by pic keywords, ability to easily share albums and pics etc. All in all a great product!

Not yet messed up the product.

I dont trust them to not hose it up in the future.

It's always going to be a never ending battle unless you self-host everything. Just gotta go to the best one and be willing to backup and switch services when it gets too bad.

I don't want my kids pictures to be used for training a military drone AI or some other nightmarish computer vision application. I keep all my photos self hosted. There are a lot options for doing this, I like librephotos: https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

Meh. How do I get my photos out? Paying customer here.

IMO Google Photos (and to a lesser extent iCloud Photos) has been leaps and bounds better than FB.

Albums are shared intentionally rather than indiscriminately for anyone who you happened to click "Accept" on years ago to view. There are fewer privacy implications - I can be sure that the photos I share aren't crowbar'ed into someone else's feed.

It is incredible how empowering it was a tool to upload photos, tag friends in them, and distribute them when it launched. The introduction of the feed was the beginning of the end.

Not to be a shill, but doesn't Google Photos solve this? Or maybe just dumping to an imgur album and sharing the link around?

>Instagram only allows you 10 pictures per album

That is good, not bad. I have never sat through a vacation slideshow with more than 10 interesting photos.

I have. Many times.

Telegram is the solution I found to this. You can send hundreds of pictures and can choose to compress or not to compress them, and they are easily downloadable.

Can't you make photos public on Flickr to users without accounts? Then you just need to share the link to an album containing them.

It's a pity companies seek profit above all else?

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