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Moving on from Picasa

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Re: Moving on from Picasa

#181

Post by stordoff »

al_biglan wrote: post #12

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…

None of the shutdowns have really impacted me, but they definitely impacted how I approach Google's offerings. It's not that long ago that I would (at the very least) try out pretty much anything Google put out (e.g. Wave/Reader/Desktop/Drive). Now there's always a nagging feeling of "When (not if) will this be trashed?"

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#182

Post by enobrev »

kuschku wrote: post #146
neves wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which consumer Google product has a kind of support different than a volunteer forum? Try to get help for Google Music, or Google+, or an Android software. They should at least sponsor and monitor some tags in the stack exchange forums like Microsoft does.

The best support (the only real support) I’ve ever gotten for Google products were (a) partnersupport-de@youtube.com (support for youtube partners, monetized, back in the days, German), (b) This very website. Start an angry thread, get it to the front page – or post a comment on a frontpage thread about a dev topic – and suddenly some Google dev ends up fixing it, and in the same moment, your comment on here disappea…

I received some excellent support from the GCS (Google Cloud Storage) team while I was working on my last project. There was only an email address listed in the API docs. I didn't have high hopes when I first contacted them with an issue, but I got a response in less than 24 hours, and a similarly quick response to my following response. That first problem was due to my own misunderstanding of the API, which the person in question patiently helped me better understand.

The last time I was in contact with them was a few months ago. I got another reasonably-timed response, and this was an issue on their end (something to do with an occasionally missed automated notification when files were uploaded). It took a couple weeks or so to fix the problem, but they contacted me after each upgrade (rather than waiting for me to contact them) to follow-up and see if my issue had been resolved. After a couple rounds, it was fixed.

I'm not sure I've ever received personal support from Google prior to that, but in my experience, the GCS support team was/is absolutely top notch.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#183

Post by BostonEnginerd »

dpark wrote: post #152
tommoor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg Reader is almost identical in every important way... just in case you haven't tried it

My experience with Digg reader is that it is still subpar, though better than Feedly. Specifically, I've seen it miss updates on some feeds (sometimes for days at a time), and it frequently "forgets" that I've looked at items and shows them as new again (seems to be a UI glitch). It also frequently shows feeds as having unread items but no items are actually unread (seems to be a server-side glitch, resolved by marki…

I've been really happy with Newsblur. I've been happily paying him since the reader shutdown.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#185

Post by aikah »

anuragbiyani wrote: post #91
sergiotapia wrote: post #83

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.

Google just shut down Picassa and you expect people to trust Google again and move to Google Photo ? Google should build trust first and foremost. Anybody who would still rely on a "non core Google product" at that time risks nothing short of a big disappointment.

Api,services are being shut down and this time people don't even have 2 months to move. Picassa and Google Photos are 2 different products, if people stuck with Picassa there must have been a reason.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#186

Post by jwatte »

D_Guidi wrote: post #68
Sanddancer wrote: post #42

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.

There is nothing on the web able to even enter the same ballpark as Photoshop.

Separately, when on travel, a web connection for your photos may be very hard to find and/or expensive.

Separately, again, Google photos downscales my photos. My hard drive does not.

Why do you think we should only have shitty tools with bad accessibility and low quality?

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#187

Post by jwatte »

D_Guidi wrote: post #68
Sanddancer wrote: post #42

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.

There is nothing on the web able to even enter the same ballpark as Photoshop.

Separately, when on travel, a web connection for your photos may be very hard to find and/or expensive.

Separately, again, Google photos downscales my photos. My hard drive does not.

Why do you think we should only have shitty tools with bad accessibility and low quality?

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#188

Post by archagon »

pjc50 wrote: post #150
dingdingdang wrote: post #131

Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions. What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google/Microsoft/Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramat…

That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.

It's unfortunately hard to make money on your software if it's free. (Assuming your primary interest is making software, not providing support.)

Personally, I'm going to try open-sourcing my retail software a) once sales goals have been met, and b) without the art assets. Maybe that would be a good compromise.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#189

Post by zanny »

masklinn wrote: post #37
sk8ingdom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still upset about Google Reader...

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 don't get it though. Yea, it was a dick move they did not just open source the backend reader server code so people could just selfhost a replacement, but they did let you export your feeds and now we have a half dozen reasonable or good reader replacements that do the same job, and most of them copied Google's UI to attract old reader users.

It was one of the most seamless transitions besides the lack of good Android apps for a while (and Feedly's is still super slow).

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#190

Post by takeawayandrun »

archagon wrote: post #188
pjc50 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.

It's unfortunately hard to make money on your software if it's free. (Assuming your primary interest is making software, not providing support.) Personally, I'm going to try open-sourcing my retail software a) once sales goals have been met, and b) without the art assets. Maybe that would be a good compromise.

I haven't really seen this done but couldn't Google pour money in to developing very high quality GPL'd libraries for say.. C++ or Python - becoming the defacto standard libraries. If other's want to use them in their closed source projects they'd have to pay licenses to Google, however internally they can use them in their closed source code since they own the rights to it.

The trick would be get that critical mass where competing libraries aren't used as much. Google definitely seems to have the talent and workforce to do it

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