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Moving on from Picasa

googlephotos.blogspot.com

101–110 of 245 posts

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#101

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official B…

Why they didnt evolve google talk into a skype clone is beyond me. I have 20 ideas at least of cool features, but as we only have skype this type of product will stagnate.

Yip, Google Talk is merging with Hangouts ... I wouldn't bet on those 20 cool features any time soon though

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#102

My wife and I take a lot of pictures on our smartphones. What service can I pay for that will: - Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone - Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members. - Nice gallery feature. - Easy to export all data in one go. I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.

Take hard copies of those pictures and also consider having them transferred to film/negative. (I wonder if there will be a demand for this in the future)

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's at least two of us then. Reader is what made me swear never to rely on a Google service for anything ever again.

I still don't know how to use the Internet without Google Reader :/

newsblur is one of those open source yet hosted options that is a really good replacement

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasa web albums has hardly disappeared. It was replaced by Google Photos (then Google+ photos) a couple years ago. They left the old interface around for years to allow people to transition over at their own pace, you can't really expect a better migration path than that.

Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.

> Being able to sort pics

Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.

>not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp google thinks you're wrong. me too.

I've got a rather large collection of large photo images. Images which I can and do want to work on, crop, tune brightness, contrast, etc, before publishing them. Webapps right now are amazingly primitive and crude for even the most basic of workflows, especially when you're working with raw images.

Additionally, in order to save the images I want how I created them, I'd have to pay a non-insubstantial amount of money to store them. By saving everything locally, I can have the full-resolution image for my own usage, and just pay the occasional cost to upgrade/replace hard drives.

Furthermore, I'm almost certainly going to have to have a copy of many of the images on my computer anyways. A lot of the images I make, I tend to want to share in 2 or more other places, not just a random web album. So again, the webapp usage story falls apart.

I'm also not always in a place where I have internet access which is particularly fast and reliable. So, needing a webapp in such a situation means that I can't edit and arrange my photos at all until I get to a location that has internet access. Not everyone wants to be hyperconnected all the time.

Webapps mean you're even more beholden to someone else for functionality than a desktop app. You are limited in how you can post your content, where you can post your content, and even what content you're allowed to post. A desktop application has none of these limitations, whereas they're inherent flaws in the webapp ecosystem.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#106
I hate how google just changes things on a whim. It took me a few years to educate my parents how to use picasa to manage their pictures efficiently.

They used to access all online albums by going to plus.google.com then clicking on the panel on the left then pictures. Until one day...it was just gone. No indication where to go now. Unless of course you follow tech news and know that you have to go to photos.google.com now.

Now they are retiring picasa in favour of Google Photos which are an absolute nightmare to navigate interface wise. What is the difference between albums, collections and shared collections? When uploading photos I can choose any of those and I have no idea what the difference is. I also learned the hard way that deleting something from your album does not delete it from your photos like it did in Picasa.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#107
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment about the blog prompted me to go check the Google Voice blog...nothing since May 2013. Crap. I've been using, loving, and recommending GV since I started using it in 2010 when I got my first smartphone...one day they're just gonna up and shut down GV and not only will I lose a service I'm extremely fond of but I also won't get, you know, phone calls, because that's the number I've handed out for the last…

I ported my number out of Google Voice a couple of years ago. Some things to keep in mind with GV: * Your only form of "support", even when paying to port out a number, is a forum staffed entirely with volunteers. If you're actually using GV it's useful to read through here to see the trainwreck: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/voice * As the parent mentioned, the GV Blog is barren. * You're better off…

I ported my google voice number to... Google Fi! Most of the same features, plus now I don't deal directly with Verizon/T-Mobile/etc.

I suspect that is where the resources that had been on Google Voice have gone to.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasa web albums has hardly disappeared. It was replaced by Google Photos (then Google+ photos) a couple years ago. They left the old interface around for years to allow people to transition over at their own pace, you can't really expect a better migration path than that.

Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.

It is on the phone. Just not on desktop.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#109

My wife and I take a lot of pictures on our smartphones. What service can I pay for that will: - Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone - Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members. - Nice gallery feature. - Easy to export all data in one go. I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.

Why doesn't Google Photos work for you ? It does provide all the features you mention (depending on definition of "Nice gallery feature" of course), and on top of it really awesome search features. Full disclosure: I work at Google (not on the Photos product though). All opinions expressed are purely mine, and not of my employer.

I agree with sergiotapia about Google Photos falling short in the area of sharing pictures among family members. If we do trust Google not to kill off Google Photos...

Without grahamburger's hack of creating an independent, shared account (which I wonder whether is strictly allowed by account usage terms), how can a family share all of their photos? I'm not talking about sharing an album. My wife and I would like all photos taken from either of our phones be automatically uploaded and shared between us. We've not found a way to do that using Google Photos without making everything public, which is unacceptable.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#110

I was a Picasa user for several years and I really liked it, but after Google Photos was announced and I saw the handwriting on the wall and completely switched (with much consternation) to Google Photos and have had a great experience. I uploaded over 17,000 to the Google-free tier and applaud all the automation they have built around auto-panorama-stitching, auto-animations, auto-face-tagging, auto-object, and auto…

Does Google Photos support Canon CR2 raw format?
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