Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

philip.greenspun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 95 posts

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#31

Post by freehunter »

_eht wrote: post #26
scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

Wave could have been UUUGE, though.

I'm not sure. Wave has been out (and discontinued) for a LONG time. It was even transfered to Apache under an open source license. And it's never taken off. No one has ever picked it up. No one has seriously tried to replicate it. If there was a business there, if there was a use case there, someone (anyone) had plenty of opportunity to take it and run.

The fact that not only the idea but also the implementation and the hype and the marketing were all available completely for free and no one ever turned it into a real product tells me that it wasn't a real product.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#33

Post by roywiggins »

Y_Y wrote: post #5
ravenstine wrote: post #2

I wouldn't depend on Google for anything. Maybe self-hosting needs to be made easier for the average person? The web has so much bandwidth now that there's no reason outside of potential security issues that people can't be posting more of their own stuff(like a web ).

Self-hosting has become shamefully easy now with Docker Hub and cheap VPSen in the "cloud". It really is a one-liner to spin up a new service on your server nowadays.

Point me at the self-hosted feature-equivalent Picasa clone that my grandmother can use- she still mourns the demise of Picasa- and I will set one up for her.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#34

Post by mhdhn »

pgrote wrote: post #10

Really miss picasa. I know the world is moving away from tagging your photos with descriptive words, but I still do it. As with any Picasa related subject: Does anyone have a viable alternative desktop software that allows tagging of photos, some mild editing and allowing photos to be kept in folders that are the albums.

Why isn’t there a move TO tagging photos with text? That rocks!

This is all so depressing. Picasa desktop was great. They killed it. Picasa Web albums were great. They killed it.

Why are they making everything worse?

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#35

Post by lawrenceyan »

scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

Mostly because people don't really use any of the products Amazon releases at scale. There's a reason why it's called Google scale and not Amazon scale.

Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#36

Post by mhdhn »

roywiggins wrote: post #33
Y_Y wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosting has become shamefully easy now with Docker Hub and cheap VPSen in the "cloud". It really is a one-liner to spin up a new service on your server nowadays.

Point me at the self-hosted feature-equivalent Picasa clone that my grandmother can use- she still mourns the demise of Picasa- and I will set one up for her.

Me too, please!

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#37

Post by CobrastanJorji »

freehunter wrote: post #31
_eht wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wave could have been UUUGE, though.

I'm not sure. Wave has been out (and discontinued) for a LONG time. It was even transfered to Apache under an open source license. And it's never taken off. No one has ever picked it up. No one has seriously tried to replicate it. If there was a business there, if there was a use case there, someone (anyone) had plenty of opportunity to take it and run. The fact that not only the idea but also the implementation and…

I agree and disagree. The fact that a giant company tried it and failed, and the fact that Apache Wave just sits there unused both suggest that there likely isn't a business there, but there have been many occasions where a company markets more or less exactly what has been tried unsuccessfully before a tad differently and it suddenly takes off like wildfire.

I would not at all be surprised if something Wave-ish became a huge deal someday, not would I be surprised if a dozen companies tried it and failed before someone makes it work.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#38

Post by roywiggins »

steelframe wrote: post #28
rootusrootus wrote: post #3

Add this to the list of reasons why you should not rely on cloud providers for anything you actually care about.

Maybe the right way to use Cloud providers is to develop against a "lowest common denominator" of functionality among the big kahunas. Then when of of them breaks, moving your stuff over to one of the others isn't that big a deal. Be very skeptical of any "differentiating" feature that a Cloud provider tries to sell you.

There's no obvious minimal subset of features. Here's a feature Google Photos doesn't have: you cannot automatically sort photos in an album based on the filename. Either you sort by hand, or you sort based on the EXIF data. Picasa could, but Google Photos never got that particular tiny feature.

It means if you organize photos with a program, export them so they sort correctly based on filename, you'll lose your sort as soon as Google Photos gets its ugly hands on them. Google doesn't understand that EXIF times can be wrong.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#39

Post by Baeocystin »

pgrote wrote: post #10

Really miss picasa. I know the world is moving away from tagging your photos with descriptive words, but I still do it. As with any Picasa related subject: Does anyone have a viable alternative desktop software that allows tagging of photos, some mild editing and allowing photos to be kept in folders that are the albums.

Picasa's flow is still the best quick-edit system I've used. I am comfortable with Lightroom & Photoshop, and they're great tools. But Picasa did a stellar job of balancing simple/lightweight/fast/useful in a manner I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.

Re: Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums

#40

Post by jrockway »

scarmig wrote: post #8

It's interesting that Amazon's approach of building products and killing them off if they don't improve the bottom line earns praise, while Google's similar one endlessly pisses people off.

I think it's because people like Google services, but never even heard of Amazon's services.
Post reply on HN