
Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums - scarhill
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/07/less-than-a-month-to-go-before-google-breaks-hundreds-of-thousands-of-links-all-over-the-internet/
======
CamelCaseName
In Google's defense:

1\. This was announced over 3 years ago [0]

2\. Photos/Videos uploaded to Picasa were transferred to Google Photos
automatically (comments/tags/captions will be lost though) [1]

3\. Picasa was originally built in 2002! (bought by Google in 2004) -- Perhaps
Picasa had a time and place?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Discontinuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Discontinuation)

[1] [https://picasa.google.com/](https://picasa.google.com/)

~~~
untog
Yeah, I'm often one to criticise Google, but an entirely free cloud-based
photo album was never going to be around forever. If you are very concerned
with keeping an online record for all time you really shouldn't be depending
on free stuff like Picasa.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Maybe, but it would also cost Google almost nothing to set up a 301 redirect
from Picasa URLs to Google Photos. I wouldn't expect someone like Yahoo or
Microsoft to bother, but being a “good web citizen” seems intrinsic to the
Google corporate identity, after all.

~~~
nikanj
The harder it is to find things via following links, the more you’ll resort to
search. Google has a perverse incentive to break the links.

------
scarmig
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.

~~~
kristianc
It's probably because by and large Amazon kills physical products and Google
kills services.

If someone buys a Fire Phone and it gets discontinued - well, products getting
discontinued is part of life and it doesn't (usually) affect the usage of the
one you have.

If Google builds a web service, then that service has the chance to grow to
50m / 100m users before deciding that it is not worth supporting. Law of large
numbers says of those 50/100m a non-trivial proportion will invest substantial
time in it and get pissed off when they have to make alternative plans.

If Amazon killed Prime Video or Audible, I bet you’d see a pretty huge outcry.

~~~
jimmy1
Wait until Amazon starts killing off some AWS services or features.

~~~
marcinzm
Which is likely why they have gone out of their way to not kill off AWS
services.

------
pgrote
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.

~~~
Baeocystin
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.

~~~
vanderZwan
It probably has only gotten more responsive by virtue of being made to run
fast on hardware from the early 2000s

~~~
Baeocystin
You're not wrong. I'll be genuinely sad when Windows eventually drops whatever
API support allows it to keep running without emulation.

~~~
Kye
Microsoft is famously unwilling to let software stop working. Picasa will
probably work forever.

~~~
erik_seaberg
Dropping Win16 was a bad sign. [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-
microsoft-lost...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-
lost-the-api-war/) talks about the back compat faction losing power at
Microsoft.

~~~
Kye
Interesting read. A _lot_ has changed in the almost 15 years since he
published it. Has he done any followups?

------
benatkin
Google may not be much worse than other FANGs, but the way it pretends to be
friendly to open source and free culture communities and co-opts them is
nasty.

"Despite illusions in 2008–2009 that it was a fair player, Google is now
trashing free culture by making all the Picasa Web images in Creative Commons
vanish from the web.

In fact, users and albums are often forced to "migrate" to Google Plus,
without telling them that any Creative Commons marking will be irreversibly
destroyed in the process. There's no way to mark Creative Commons images on
Google Plus. There's also no way to search or browse Picasa Web by license,
apparently (the feature used to exist in 2009)."

[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Picasa](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Picasa)

~~~
jrockway
> pretends to be friendly to open source

I quite like go and Kubernetes.

~~~
benatkin
That was meant to be parsed out as "open source communities".

When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being
friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Also go feels a bit tightly controlled to me and like it's not carrying on the
traditions of open source scripting languages (same with Swift). Fortunately,
Rust and Elixir are shaping up to be good continuations of the culture of
Perl/Python/Ruby/etc.

~~~
valker43
> When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being
> friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Does it have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, Google is hoping you're going to
go GKE for your Kubernetes/Container needs. But you're completely free to use
another cloud, or roll your own.

For all cloud native backend stuff I really love Go (and Rust for that
matter).

------
ravenstine
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_ ).

~~~
Y_Y
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.

~~~
roywiggins
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.

~~~
mhdhn
Me too, please!

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

~~~
steelframe
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.

~~~
roywiggins
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_.

------
etiam
On a slightly related note, what do people use to save local copies of
valuable Google+ groups? If I understand correctly we're less than a month
from shutdown?

------
aboutruby
Maybe someone could maybe a domain like fixedgoogleplus.com (similar to
rawgithub.com) and host people's Picasa/Google+ photos while keeping the same
link

------
laurynas-s
When Google will be shutting down Google Photos?

Of course, it is going to happen eventually.

However, I do have a dozen of photos there with no easy way to export hiqh
quality photos in one go that worries me.

~~~
discreditable
Exporting is easy. On desktop you can select photos and download a zip. You
can also download them with Google Backup and Sync if you enable the option to
show photos in Google Drive.

~~~
laurynas-s
There is a limit thought when I tried to export from web some time ago. It was
500-2000 photos or something.

I probably have over 30000 photos there so it's a long process to download
them all.

~~~
discreditable
The desktop sync client is probably the way to go then.

------
monochromatic
Picasa was such a great project. Google ruined it.

------
peterwwillis
As George Lopez would say, _Why you crying?_ You chose to use someone's free
platform to host and display your pictures with virtually no work on your
part, and now you don't get the free lunch anymore.

These scenarios are actually useful. They train people to use solutions that
are open and portable, which will help them respond to unexpected disasters in
the future. Use a self-hosted CMS to build, manage and publish your content so
you can re-publish your content somewhere else.

~~~
oarsinsync
> These scenarios are actually useful. They train people to use solutions that
> are open and portable, which will help them respond to unexpected disasters
> in the future. Use a self-hosted CMS to build, manage and publish your
> content so you can re-publish your content somewhere else.

If you're able to point to an open and portable self-hosted CMS that has an
equivalent feature set to Picasa (and not a minor subset thereof), you'll be
sure to gain a lot of praise from myself, and many others here too I'm sure.

