Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+
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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>
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've been hearing a lot about Koken and am going to try it out soon.
Even has Lightroom integration so you can do all your tagging and whatnot there before you upload.
Similar here, I stopped uploading.
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.
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.
If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
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)
Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.
My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app...
Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments.
As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be...
I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time.
I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.
I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy).
Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(
SMS (1993), iMessage and Facebook Messenger all show what messages someone has read or not, even if the UI may be different.
Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes.
The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications.
The 2000s saw the rise of web apps.
The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps.
The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.
1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s.
2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers.
3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers.
Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant.
1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365.
2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML.
Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI...
Decision makers don't care
If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic.
Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.
But there are some major problems still. There are no good, cross-platform UI toolkits. They either support native widgets and have terrible APIs, or they have great APIs and their own, unique interpretation of what "native widgets" means (i.e. they aren't at all).
I got so mad about the situation one day that I thought I might start my own UI toolkit project. Well, I only thought about it for about a minute before I realized how stupid that was. But when I think about the UI toolkit that has the most consistent support across all platforms, has the least enraging API, and the most potential to get better over time, I come to one conclusion...
HTML.
No. It's not great. I already said there are no good UI toolkits. But it's the only one that has the potential to make the world a nicer place.
No surprise since they haven't updated the Talk client since ages.
The lack of native client for Google Music is the main reason why I'm still using Spotify.
A native client for music is a must have, an HTML5 tab just can't compete for a bunch of reasons:
- Painful to locate the window among 50+ browser tabs
- No native key support (pause/play/next) which I use all day long whenever I need to talk to a coworker or to step away from the computer
- Ease of use because of full integration with the OS
(I have have no connection with them.)
https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...
Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.
To be honest, the same reason I started OpenPhoto/Trovebox is the same reason I don't trust a 3rd party service with my data. I noticed you guys supported personal S3 buckets. I'm curious how that worked out for you as that was one of our major differentiators (we supported upwards of 7 third party storage services, incl. storage at University of Southern California). We didn't find a market for it in the consumer space.
If you're in the bay area I'd be more than happy to grab a coffee.
Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them.
I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.
All in all we treated every storage system independently but it was easy for us because that was the design from the beginning.
Even in our case the vast majority of consumers use storage we provided. We even support migration between storage services and that got some good use but nothing of any significant scale.
Drop me a note when you're in the Bay Area. @jmathai on Twitter or contact info in profile.
Love the custom S3 backing especially and the speed you guys move at (Lightroom support and Android updates came out so fast) as well as your amazing support (don't know how Amy puts up with me)!
Just recommended you to a friend in fact :)
The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple like a URL, separating storage from display etc.
Oh and it'd nice to have the option to pay you $2 or $3 since I'm using S3 :)
The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make
a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in
Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple
like a URL, separating storage from display etc.
You can see our Kickstarter from 3 years back[2].
I asked in another post how offering custom S3 buckets was working out for PictureLife. Curious if someone else found a market for that.
[1] https://github.com/photo/frontend
[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-pho...
And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to nate@picturelife.com :)
As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.
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
I used it and didn't like it. It felt like an iPhoto with a huge amount of features missing and with some anecdotal gimmicks that were presented as core concepts.
Since my macbook died I just used folders on windows to sort my pictures and I felt it did a better job than Everpix. That says a lot.
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.
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?
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).
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.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.
All that is a prelude to my total agreement with you. Of all the features of G+, Photos is the one I use most. Auto-Awesome and now Stories are both extremely cool. When combined with the simple filtered sharing G+ allows, it pretty much comprises the majority of my G+ use.
I'd be very surprised if they didn't keep them tightly related.
I noticed the other day that Docs and Drive were also being somewhat separated from each-other (unless I completely misread the popup for the 2 seconds I glanced). Perhaps they are simply realizing that the "One Google Social Everything" approach wasn't all they thought it would be, and are separating things out some to reduce some systematic complexity it's introduced?
Interesting to see where it leads.
A place to store and share serious photos, where they don't get automatically "awesome" or transcoded is a different thing. In the next couple of years prosumer cameras are going to lay siege to the last bastions of professional gear and the amount of high-resolution images that could be printed and that merit some digital darkroom work is going to go way up. That's enough reason for Google to get serious about photographers who are equipped to be serious.
But, on top of all that, Android is getting serious photo APIs that will enable Android to be used in prosumer and pro photo gear. You can already buy a Samsung Google-logo (i.e. it has Google's proprietary apps) Android mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera.
Google+ can be a gateway to a presentation that's appropriate to high quality camera images. But this category of photography needs its own specialized set of capabilities, storage, and possibly pricing.
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!
(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. )
https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b3...
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.)
It's fun watching posts bounce up an down as pro-G+ and anti-G+ readers roll through.
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?
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.
G+ however weird it may sound comes off a lot nicer to me.
I wrote specifically about the "social network" part of it. Maybe I was a bit unclear but I meant the part where you can sort people into circles and share stuff with them. And I still think adding people to groups and sharing stuff with them are is voluntary?
The implementation of a common identity across Googles properties? That seemed to have been a smart idea mismanaged badly.
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?
Also, Google+ offered this for every Android device long before Apple's iCloud backup, Dropbox Uploads, or even Microsoft's OneDrive auto-backup.
Since most people get confused and avoid the feature, I think it makes sense for them to create a separate product called Google Photos which has nothing to do with social.
I've found the feature convenient and look at most of my pictures that way. It's a bummer when I have to connect my phone via USB cable and pull stuff off that way now (especially since Android is now MTP access only, but let's not go down that road...).
Or if someone wants to have a Google Photos URL to share, Google will give an option of "photos.google.com/<one fucking long ugly random URL>" or "photos.google.com/FirstnameLastname<add some numbers or characters because others may want this URL too!>". That's just ugly!
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.
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+.
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