Socialmedia – Page 5 – Just thoughts

February 20, 2016August 27, 2017

Inevitable? I really hope not!

Back in November I posted on the inadequacies of the new Google Photos offering. Since then there have been a few improvements and some of the things that I was unhappy about then can be circumvented by adopting the “View on Web” approach, such as commenting on individual photos in albums.

However last week, perhaps the announcement that I had feared would one day come was made. Google are “retiring” Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. Let’s not focus on the suggestion that this is a forward-looking development – they use the phrase “moving on” to announce the killing-off of a much-loved friend – let’s just pause to reflect upon what this actually means for anyone who invests time and effort into using “free” infrastructure, provided by a large corporate. The significance of this announcement and others recently from Oxygen Cloud and Copy (Barracuda/Seagate) are that one should be very careful in choosing what IT cloud infrastructure you decide to use and also, and more importantly, be very mindful of what you should do if that infrastructure is taken away from you.

Now this “event” may turn out all right in the end. Google may actually make an API available for developers to upload images directly into Google Photos in the same way as Jeffrey Friedl did to allow photos to be uploaded from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to Picasaweb. And yes, nothing has been lost in this case as all my Picasaweb photos and albums do appear in Google Photos. And yes, I can upload to Google Drive to the Google Photos folder, but somehow, as yet, it’s not as clean and straightforward a way of uploading the images to the cloud for onward sharing, as it had been.

Perhaps, I ought to use Apple’s iCloud – after all as I have a nearly 100% Apple IT ecosystem my investment should be safe there … shouldn’t it?. Or alternatively, perhaps I ought to use Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage – after all as I rely so heavily on their software – they’ll look after me … won’t they?

It’s just events like these that make me wonder whether I want to be reliant on a large corporate and ponder on whether there’s another way, and perhaps there might be … watch this space.

November 24, 2015August 27, 2017

Google drops another clanger!

Google (@google) | Twitter Could we be witnessing the Photographers’s equivalent of the Google Reader debacle re-playing before our eyes?

Having launched a really useful social media tool in Google+, Google then got itself tied in knots trying to define what it actually was – eventually splitting off Hangouts. It then re-purposed Picasaweb – but thankfully hasn’t killed it off yet – into Google Photos and closed down a pretty useful Google+ Photos facility (I do have some sympathy with that decision), and now it’s launched new iOS and Android apps for Google+ focussing on two aspects of the service I didn’t want anyway – Collections and Communities and taking away functionality from the integration of Google+ with Google Photos.

Yes, Google have given me a generous storage facility – but it’s sterile. I can share an Album created on the service, but no one can comment on any of the pictures within it. They can comment on the Album if I share it, but not it’s contents if you’re using the new app. There is a sort of workaround that you can opt to see a photo in an album if you chose to see the image “on the web” and then comment on it through a different interface, but guess what … no one can see that comment, except you, and only then if you’ve got notifications switched on.

Pathetic software design. I suppose I could have lived (just) with the removal of commenting on photos in albums from within Google+ IF they’d enabled commenting within Google Photos, but they haven’t … it’s just pathetic.

Recently the Adobe Lightroom Community was up in arms about the changes to the Import functionality they’d introduced as an enhancement. Adobe, to their credit, listened and within a few weeks the old functionality had been re-instated. Unfortunately Google do not have a good record on listening to feedback. I hope I’m proven wrong, but for now I’m pondering what to do next.

Watch this space!!

PS I don’t need Collections because …. I use an RSS Reader to harvest the stuff I’m interested in. Communities – much the same, I get more value from specific forums outside Google+.