Google Photos – Page 5 – Just thoughts

May 15, 2016August 27, 2017

Integrating Shared Google Photo Albums with Facebook

My concerns about the way Google has been developing its social and photography offering has been documented on a number of previous posts on this site and this has led me to look at whether it might not be the time to use Facebook more.

The main grumble I had of recent was the way that Google had made it so difficult to comment on individual photos in an album. At least they have moved towards making that easier, but again, inexplicably to me, it’s outside their social/collaboration environment – Google+.

The way forward – if you’re going to continue to use Google for storing and sharing photographs – is to create Shared Photo Albums in Google Photos – and then share them to Google+, Facebook or Twitter. You do that from the ‘share’ icon in the Album you want to share. Clicking on an individual photo will then allow you (and anyone else you’ve shared it with) to comment on the photo. These comments then don’t appear in any of the platforms you’ve shared the Album with, only in Google Photos, but at least it’s a start. You also have to be careful how you share the Album as the people you share it with can also add photographs to that Album – not what you might have meant.

Still it’s a positive step forward, but Google has a long way to climb back to build my confidence in this part of their social offering. The photography side is now becoming very strong, and presumably will continue to grow and improve. Could it be that they want to turn Google Photos itself into a Social Platform – stranger things have happened!

Detailed instructions on how to create a Shared Google Album and share it in the browser …

Open Google Photos
Click the third icon down on the left-hand side of the page called Albums
If you haven’t uploaded the photos you want to share already, click on the ‘cloud’ icon
Click the ‘+’ icon to create an album, and select a ‘Shared album’
Add the photos you have already uploaded, or that are already in Google Photos, into the new shared album
Give it a title and share it to Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

You will find that by clicking on an individual photo in an album that you can add a comment. That’s it!

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.