Inevitable? I really hope not!

Google Photos IconBack 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.

Some new toys for the new “Moments like these …” website

Anyone who visits this blog will know that I have another one – “Moments like these …” which is a website I’ve produced to showcase some of the images I’ve taken and processed, as well as show some quirky images often taken with my iPhone in a blog which have a commentary attached to them – hence the title of the site.

Just recently, the site has had a major make-over and I’ve been meaning to “tell the story” of that make-over – what I did, the new tools I’ve employed and some of the processes and workflows employed “behind the scenes”.

After the image has been imported into Lightroom [I have an Adobe Photography Creative Cloud subscription] on the desktop [I’ve written about this previously] I process the images as and if necessary and by labelling them with a colour-coding system, create Smart Collections which I will use for a number of purposes. In this post I introduced the fact that I was using a Lightroom Plugin to send images to Dropbox to enable the creation of an offline Portfolio on my iPad. Nothing has changed here. This plugin works really well and I’ve extended it’s use so that the Dropbox folder(s) are now used both as the source of screensaver images on my Mac, but also on my AppleTV. It works really well to create slideshows of my images on my devices.

The real change/addition at the Lightroom end has been the adoption of an amazing plugin to export images from Lightroom to a WordPress blog. This plugin – WP/LR Sync – also has a WordPress plugin which you need to install as well. When you’ve done that, any changes you make to the WP/LR Sync Publish folder in Lightroom will cause the change to be mirrored in the WordPress Media Folder – automaticlly. This is so neat!

In addition, the author – Jordy Meow – has produced a WP Media Folder plugin that allows you to organise your images into virtual folders in your WordPress Media Folder, as well as a plugin to link your uploaded images to the NextGen gallery plugin which has a load of neat transitions and effects for galleries and slideshows. This is when the fun started!

Up until just before Christmas I’d relied on using free themes for the WordPress blog and was generally very happy with what I’d achieved using the TwentyFourteen theme. However there were some security concerns about the Extended version I had been using so I thought it was about time to change, plus I’d been getting some hassle from smartphone users about how the site rendered on their devices.

That’s when I noticed that NextGen was now being handled by Photocrati and so I decided to take the plunge and purchase the Photocrati set of themes. They are magic. So customisable and, since the latest upgrade, fully integrated with NextGen.

The nuts and bolts I’ll not describe, they’re relatively straightforward. I now have a photo website with a blog all on the same platform and behaving responsively on smart devices. It’s quick as well through the optimisation applied in both the theme options, gallery plugin options and by using Cloudflare on the hosting site – 5quidhost.

I’ve mentioned this hosting company a few times before, and I will do so again. When I was having some problems getting WP/LR Sync to work due to some XML/RPC issues as the images were being uploaded, the team in Edinburgh (or St Andrews) really went the extra mile to get me the solution I required. They were excellent. I have written a review of this experience here.