
Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+ - k-mcgrady
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-01/google-said-to-plan-separating-photo-service-from-google-.html
======
Andrenid
I'm a photographer, and I was a HEAVY user (and paying customer) of Picasaweb
when it existed, from the day it was launched.

When they pushed everything into G+ it enraged me. They took away the nice,
fast, minimal, grid-view albums and gave us a heavy social-network wrapped
mess. They turned a powerful Flickr competitor into a "pretty" and feature-
poor share-with-your-friends site.

It was embarassing to link to albums to my clients because it was basically me
linking to a Facebook-style social network rather than a photo site. Throw in
the "realname" bullshit so I couldn't use an alias for my photography, and
blam... instant enraged ex-customer running CLI scripts to systematically wipe
my 10 years of Picasaweb usage (you can't bulk delete on Picasaweb).

I was upset when they killed Reader, but I got over it. I was upset when they
forced G+ onto YouTube, but I got over it (I just don't log in for YouTube
now). I never got over them destroying the only semi-decent Flickr competitor
that exists, all in the name of "OMGSOCIAL". I was a huge Google fanboy who
now goes out of my way to avoid anything/everything they do, thanks to their
G+ push.

I've since moved on to being not-so-happy Flickr user (the lesser of evils
currently, for bulk photo hosting and album management).

For what it's worth, with people saying there's too many photo hosting
sites... I still can't find ANY that are as good as Picasaweb or old-Flickr
were. Easy bulk management of photos/albums and their metadata like
tags/titles/descriptions/locations. Albums within albums. A _SIMPLE_ UI that
is friendly to non-tech-savvy clients/friends visiting. Minimal fluff.
Lightroom integration. Etc etc.

</rant>

~~~
rb2e
You may want to try SmugMug [1]. Easy bulk mangement, simple to upload to
using the Lightroom plugin, private galleries if you need them for clients.
Even sell prints etc. The iPad app for viewing your own photos was good too.

I was happy with them but in the end went with hosting my own Koken [2]
powered site. Its a blog/cms aimed at photographers, but you host it yourself.
Again pretty to use with bulk management and Lightroom plugin for uploading.

[1][http://www.smugmug.com/](http://www.smugmug.com/)

[2][http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

~~~
Andrenid
Yeah I've got Smugmug and 500px profiles that I'm playing with. I quite like
Smugmug so far.

I've been hearing a lot about Koken and am going to try it out soon.

------
fidotron
And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to
pre-Hangouts as well.

It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with
each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This
used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for
enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels
utterly justified.

How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users.
Seems like such a naive idea these days.

~~~
criley2
I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software
back in the days of Talk.

Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen
conversations open.

When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that
has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many
conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the
perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build
an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript
but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it

5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because
they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly
in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter
eggs or w/e)

~~~
AceJohnny2
I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its
features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-
bloatishness that people complain about).

Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook
Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat
apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime,
whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you
might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know
anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text
message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat
systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon
in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.

My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is
poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was
purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the
aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line
whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor
performance of _that_ app...

Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It
may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and
Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before
provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other
Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google
decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments.

As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the
Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's
users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users
are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly
powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix
rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever
developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be...

I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it
means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative
implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-
engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs
and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike
previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol
for a long time.

I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat
provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with.
In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.

~~~
scrollaway
It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is
point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts.

I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly
specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is
usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its
own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy).

Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let
some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something
that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the
best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has
brought us. And they are being closed down :(

------
pilsetnieks
I just had the greatest idea about the name - it's a bit obscure and not many
people have heard of it but they could call it "Picasa"!

------
jmathai
If you're operating in the consumer photo space you should read my blog post
on why we left it in 2012.

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-
phot...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-photo-
internet-service-b1234eaf75b)

~~~
innonate
Nice post :) Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about the photo space,
seeing how many of us cropped up at the same time, is that you can spend
enough time on product rather than the hard tech stuff to make a dent in the
world. We're 3 years in and _just now_ starting to release the product stuff
we're excited about because the tech challenges are so real.

Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never
saw it back when you first posted it.

~~~
Veratyr
Thanks for doing Picturelife! Saw it in one of the comment threads here and
have been using it since.

Love the custom S3 backing especially and the speed you guys move at
(Lightroom support and Android updates came out so fast) as well as your
amazing support (don't know how Amy puts up with me)!

Just recommended you to a friend in fact :)

The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make a Cloud backend API
so that customers can plug in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with
something simple like a URL, separating storage from display etc.

Oh and it'd nice to have the option to pay you $2 or $3 since I'm using S3 :)

~~~
jmathai

      The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make 
      a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in 
      Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple 
      like a URL, separating storage from display etc.
    

For what it's worth, that's specifically what our differentiation was with
OpenPhoto/Trovebox (we support about 7 storage services along with being open
source[1]). We've moved on from the consumer space because there didn't seem
to be a large enough market for that specifically; separating data storage
from application logic.

You can see our Kickstarter from 3 years back[2].

I asked in another post how offering custom S3 buckets was working out for
PictureLife. Curious if someone else found a market for that.

[1] [https://github.com/photo/frontend](https://github.com/photo/frontend)

[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-
pho...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo-
service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a)

------
cnbuff410
Oh yes please. It makes no sense to bind a photo product with a social
platform. I mean you can make them talk to each other, for sure, but for now
it's more like photo won't function normally without G+.

For example, it's quite silly to have Google+ as the first item in navigation
view on the Photo apps on Android. Whenever I want to see my photo, I want the
photo features, not social features. I will only want to touch the Google+
when I want to share it, but it's not the thing I want to do all the times.

~~~
Chevalier
I guess... aside from hoarding photos, the only other things I want to do with
them is improve them and share them. And I've never seen any other site do
that as well as G+. (Except Everpix, at least for hoarding and sharing.)

G+'s circles make it really easy for me to define exactly who sees which
photos, and the auto-awesome stuff really is pretty gorgeous. You'd prefer a
dumb drive like S3 to free enhancement and easy sharing?

------
balladeer
I think Google has some ego issues entangled with its web services and social
networks (well, whatever now remains of it). It tries to do it right, but not
when everyone (including almost all its users) ask/request them to, but when
most probably it's too late.

I am wary of Facebook like it's plague and I honestly believe it is, but truth
to be told, I am more wary of Google services and its recent Google+
integration madness. At times I see I've an account there and I don't see how
it got created and how to delete it. I recently deleted a YouTube account
which was created "automatically" from my Gmail account (which "already" had a
Google+ account) and it was publicly sharing all my YouTube likes, after
exchanging few emails from Google staff, now I've told Disconnect/Ghostery to
not let YoutTube portal any of my Google accounts, but I guess that's not
possible on Android.

It's been years since I have written a Google Play (apps) review, or wrote an
YouTube comment. I've been trying to move my chat to a jabber based service
(I've an sdf.org account) but for some reason my GTalk friends find difficulty
to connect to me. So, I'll definitely not be interested in any new Google
services because I don't think when they will "integrate" it with something
else or when they will shut it down "to focus on more focussed products".

Besides, I would rather put my money into a services which does, more or less,
only that business and charges appropriate amount of money for that.

rant ends and tl;dr:

Google just pushed me away with their G+ craziness and saying that its web
services are social networks are a mess is an understatement.

------
Zikes
Yesterday I got a survey on the Google Opinion Rewards app[1] asking if I'd be
comfortable using a service called Google Photo Vault on my phone.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks)

------
innonate
Very smart move by Google here. People don't trust Google+ as a repository for
photos because it's inherently a social product and with social products there
is always some confusion about privacy.

As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos
vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.

~~~
gress
It may be a good move, but calling it 'Very Smart' seems like giving them too
much credit given that it's really just returning to what everyone else does
after the disaster of Google+

~~~
innonate
Fair enough. So perhaps not smart, but brave? When you have a lot invested in
something like Google+ a smart call can be tough to make.

------
k-mcgrady
If this happens Google+ is dead. Photos seems to be the main good thing people
have to say about it.

~~~
gress
People have been saying Google+ is dead since it launched.

~~~
bronson
And they've been right! ob Swingers quote:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg)

------
candeira
Related: Recently Google has been sending me cheery messages about something
called Albums that it compiles for me out of the photos I take with my Android
phone's camera. The feature is as creepy as it's all over the place.

I think the titles come from my Google Calendar, and the photos are put
together by date. Albums mix activities that happen over the same time period,
like photos of my daughter before a trip in the same album as the mundane,
banal and, at times, painful photographs I took of my father's flat and
personal effects while documenting some paperwork I had to do during such
trip, which was just after he died.

Thanks for the happy memories, Google! Now please tell me how to turn the
feature off!

~~~
reitanqild
You realize you can choose/remove pictures as well as edit and add captions?

(And yes, it can be turned off. I think it goes along with AutoAwesome)

For me this is one of a few data points that proves there are still real
googlers around :-) Now if they would just bring back desktop search and web
clips (I think it analyzed every rss linked from every web page I read and
figured out what kind of news I was interested in. More practically speaking:
it was magic in a good way. )

------
GBKS
I really wish Google could come up with a good overarching strategy for their
products and stick with it for a long time. I'm losing track of how all the
different services relate to each other.

~~~
davidgerard
They did! "Make everything a subsite of Google Plus." But it didn't work out
so well. Be careful what you wish for.

------
Chevalier
Argh. You guys, I don't get the hate. As someone else pointed out, if G+ dies,
all we're left with it Facebook... and for what it's worth, G+ is far and away
my favorite social network of all time. Between circles and auto-awesome, the
only way for it to improve is if G+ can poach some of the celebrities and news
sources from Twitter.

As it is, G+ is an absolutely fantastic feed from my favorite news sources,
sorted into relevant subject-matter circles. It hasn't gained the mainstream
adoption of Facebook, but that can be spun as a feature rather than a bug --
way more HN-style discussion, way fewer babies and gun nuts.

G+ Photos is by far the strongest aspect of G+, and spinning it off may spell
doom for the network. I really hope not. Photo sharing and social networks go
together like peanut butter and jelly, and Google's done a great job of
keeping everything private unless explicitly ordered otherwise. (At least in
G+... not so much in Buzz or whatever.)

~~~
sigmaml
Should we conclude that complaining about Google products is quite acceptable
on HN, but liking them is not? The downvotes given to parent are hard to
understand otherwise.

~~~
bronson
Naw, my G+ complaints got downvoted too. I'm guessing HN is rather conflicted
on this topic.

It's fun watching posts bounce up an down as pro-G+ and anti-G+ readers roll
through.

------
reitanqild
I really really have a hard time understanding the google+ hate around here.

Yes, I can understand the issue with the real names policy that hit youtube.

Yes, I can understand the issue with hangouts.

But why oh why do so many people also want the entirely voluntarily google+
social network to crash and burn leaving us with Facebook?

~~~
jacquesm
'voluntary'? That's rich. Google+ is the most rammed-down-your-throat product
_ever_ on the web.

~~~
reitanqild
You are upvoted even though I think you misread my opinion.

I wrote specifically about the "social network" part of it. Maybe I was a bit
unclear but I meant the part where you can sort people into circles and share
stuff with them. And I still think adding people to groups and sharing stuff
with them are is voluntary?

The implementation of a common identity across Googles properties? That seemed
to have been a smart idea mismanaged badly.

------
insertion
The story is sourced to “people with knowledge of the matter.” In the same
piece Google goes own the record saying “over here in our darkroom, we’re
always developing new ways for people to snap, share and say cheese.” It reads
almost like a comedy on sanctioned leaks.

------
staunch
I enabled photo sync over wifi only and never enable wifi on my phone. Somehow
Google+ magically decided to sync 10GB of my private photos to Google+ Photos
over my LTE connection. I'll never be sure how many copies of my photos exist
now or who has them.

~~~
junto
What's more annoying on my Nexus is that I can auto-sync Gmail (push) and that
seems to enable photo sync. I cannot have one without the other!

------
cpursley
This is welcome news. I've been reluctantly moving everything over to Google
(it's love-hate - Google really makes great web products), including canceling
Dropbox and using Drive. Drive is good, but the Google+ photo thing is
confusing. I like the UI and it's functionally but could care less about
Google+ itself. Speaking of which, does Google photos have an auto-upload
feature on phones?

~~~
reacocard
Yes, it has auto-upload:
[https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509](https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509)

~~~
cpursley
Thanks. I must be confused, does this only add it to Google+, or a Drive
folder as well?

~~~
sahaskatta
It adds it to Google+ Photos. It consumes the space which Google Drive
provides, but you can't browse the photos from Google Drive. (Side Note: If
you upload below a resolution of 2048px, it doesn't count against your storage
space.)

Also, Google+ offered this for every Android device long before Apple's iCloud
backup, Dropbox Uploads, or even Microsoft's OneDrive auto-backup.

Since most people get confused and avoid the feature, I think it makes sense
for them to create a separate product called Google Photos which has nothing
to do with social.

~~~
cookiecaper
Auto Upload definitely sounds very scary the first time you're prompted about
it. Most people fear that every photo they take will automatically be publicly
shared on Google+ (which isn't the case; it's uploaded to Google+ Photos as a
private document that "only you" can see) and go out of their way to make sure
it's off.

I've found the feature convenient and look at most of my pictures that way.
It's a bummer when I have to connect my phone via USB cable and pull stuff off
that way now (especially since Android is now MTP access only, but let's not
go down that road...).

------
suprgeek
Photos are one of the few (only?) good things that they got mostly right in G+
and which I use pretty extensively.

Business-wise this is the correct move except drop the ridiculous name
"Google+ Photos"? Focus on adding great new features to the photo sharing
parts & then slowly grow the social aspects depending on what catches on.

And for the love of all that is good SIMPLIFY the fre*%n navigation & menus.

------
roc
If the point is to attract users who haven't joined Google+ (likely because
they don't want another Facebook-shaped social network), why in the world
would they keep "Google+" in the name?

I'd be surprised if this were anything other than an Instagram and/or Snapchat
clone, with a Google+ login, but with a stream and friends-list distinct from
Google+.

------
bluecalm
Great, what about separating the video service next ? All other issues aside
it's kinda creepy when they want to know your real name (due to real names
policy) when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that
you need to log in).

~~~
kpanghmc
FYI Google recently reversed it's decision on real names:
[http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-
policy-70000...](http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-
policy-7000031642/)

------
eva1984
Now, lets talk about when google is going to shut google+ down?

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
Hopefully they won't. It's a good service; just doesn't have to be the center
of the Google universe.

~~~
myko
It really should stay the "identity" part of Google services. Having a
separate login for 12 different services offered by the same company is
stupid.

------
rjohnk
Apple got it right back when Jobs iLife. Separate apps that did one thing
well.

------
ulfw
Picasa? No! Google+! Hm maybe not. Picasa again?

