
Goodbye Google plus photos - msoad
https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/d1XubVAZ5hV
======
m0nty
> In May, we launched Google Photos as the home for all your photos and
> videos. ... In an effort to ensure everyone has the best photos experience
> we can deliver, on August 1st we’ll start to shut down Google+ Photos

I just don't trust Google and their 5-second attention span any more. Seems
like every day brings another change in direction, or outright abandonment of
a service I had relied upon. I'm self-hosting email and just won't touch the
rest of their offerings, because there's no guarantee of continuity or even
continuation.

~~~
madeofpalk
Well, in this instance at least there's the continuation. The seem pretty set
on Photos, and it's a strategic product for them (combined with Android).
Google Photos is the successor to Google+ Photos and it surprised me they had
both in the market at the same time for as long as they did.

~~~
nissehulth
Yes, I uploaded some photos to Picasa like 10 years ago and those are still
available in this "new" service. But even if this is just a re-branding to get
away from the G+ fiasco, it's still very confusing.

------
albertzeyer
> With Google Photos you can store unlimited high quality photos

High quality does not mean the full original quality, right? This is then as
before.

At the moment, there are three web interfaces to access your photos:

[https://picasaweb.google.com/](https://picasaweb.google.com/)

[https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos](https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos)

[https://photos.google.com/](https://photos.google.com/)

I would switch to the latest version but the other interfaces still have their
advantages too.

E.g. the old Picasa interface provides the best overview of all my albums (I
have a lot: 1619), esp when I want to search an older one (they go back to
2004). Also, it has somehow the most compact view with the most details at the
same time, like all meta information (sharing, tagged people, GPS, exif, ...).
For videos though, the Picasa webinterface is somewhat broken. Also tagging
people didn't quite work correctly.

The Google+ interface has the nicest way to tag people. And I think the photo
editor is only available here?

The new Photos interface looks like the most modern one, but otherwise seems
to have the least amount of features. Tagging people doesn't really work here.
The photo editor is much stripped down compared to Google+. Also, it doesn't
really show much meta information (no GPS? almost no exif, etc...).

~~~
kanwisher
This has become a serious bit of confusion, also now google seems to index any
photos and videos inside of google drive into photos. Which is not the
behavior you would want. I wish they just went back to only picasa, its really
been the only good photo management situation

~~~
kuboa
> also now google seems to index any photos and videos inside of google drive
> into photos

It's optional, I personally love and benefit from it. You can turn it off in
the settings.

------
frisco
> Goodbye Google+ Photos, hello +Google Photos!

This line represents everything wrong with Google right now.

~~~
thethimble
How so? It's an acknowledgement that forcing Google+ on people was a bad idea
and that you can still continue to build awesome products (Google Photos)
without a social network. If anything, isn't it a step in the right direction?

~~~
orik
The problem is we went from Picasa -> Google+ Photos -> +Google Photos?

Why does google keep on throwing out branding, spinning down a project, only
to spin up another one that does the same thing? Why didn't they go back to
the Picasa namesake, with all the branding it has?

~~~
jacobolus
Apparently "+Google Photos" is just the nickname of the "Google Photos"
account on "Google+". The name of the service is "Google Photos", not "+Google
Photos".

~~~
tiredwired
Next year it is Alphabet photos.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
2016 - Alphabet Photos

2018(jan-aug) - ABC Photos

2018 - ABC DOREMI

2019(jan-feb) - ADORE ME Photos

2019 - Adore.me

2021 - Adore.me & Analphebet.photos

~~~
liotier
2022 - Analphablet.photos ?

------
Pamar
I am more than a bit confused - hope someone here can clarify.

I have 11000 pictures under
[https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos](https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos).
Not that I care much about the storage/editing part: I do all my editing on my
desktop, and I store original and edited pictures locally, with tagging, date-
sorted directories etc.

What I do use Google+ for is to create posts with galleries. Typically if I go
somewhere interesting I put online a series of pics for my trip, to share with
family and friends, I post them as "Public" and then link to each individual
gallery from my personal webpage (so I don't have to store these on my site).

So the question for me is: what changes in terms of "creating posts on Google+
with a bunch of pictures associated to them"?

Will this still be possible? Can I just upload pics like now, or do I need to
use the new Google Photo app?

~~~
junto
I'm also completely confused. It states:

    
    
      Download the new Google Photos today for uninterrupted 
      access to all your photos, videos and albums.  If you don’t 
      update to the new Google Photos, Google+ Photos on Android 
      will soon stop working, but your photos and videos will 
      still remain safely stored...
    

I'm actually so glad I didn't decide to use Google Picasa as a safe backup
option for my photos. I'm not sure I can trust Google to take care of my data.

I have now been moved from Picasa, to Google+ Photos to +Google Photos, which
I assume at some point will be renamed again to *Google-+Photos=WTF

I don't want an app on my phone, because I don't want a Google app to be
randomly uploading photos from my phone to it's servers.

So, if I don't have an mobile app, has anything actually changed?

I just want a Google website app that allows me to:

\- Present photos in albums (that I name and sort) nicely

\- Share those photos with selective friends and family using a URL that I can
revoke (like Flickr does)

\- Explore where my photos were taken on a map

\- Allow comments on photos without friends and family having to have some
kind of Google account

I use my phone like a camera. I connect it to my computer with a USB cable,
download the photos and then organise and sort them, then selectively upload
them. I want to have that control. I don't want to upload everything. Why does
everything have to be an app these days?

My perfect photo app would be open source. There is no good open source
alternative. All open source photos web apps are poor. I've tried them all. I
love the Google+ Photos interface. Bright, white and big photos in a mosaic.
Flickr used to be good, then it decided to go all black and depressing.

TroveBox and Lychee are the closest, but Trovebox (Open Photo) has a very
problematic install and Lychee is missing the Amazon S3 storage option). No
app offers encrypted at rest storage, which these days should be a must.

I've read several times that "there is no money in consumer photo apps", but
personally I'm paying Flickr a subscription and Google and Dropbox, when none
of them really provide me with what I want. I'd happily pay a license fee for
some open source software that actually did the job, and which I knew wasn't
going to "sunset" after two years.

</end rant>

------
0x0
I wish they would give the Picasa OSX app more love. It doesn't even support
retina displays!

It's one of the best ways to manage photos for us who like to keep photos as
.jpegs inside actual folders, instead of inside some opaque package of sqlite
and hidden hashed filenames (like Photos.app and the older iPhoto.app).

But I guess supporting vendor-neutral, lock-in-less file repositories like
that is out of fashion these days :-/

~~~
4ad
I also hate the sqlite "feature". Lightroom does the right thing, has the best
features and it's not even that expensive, however, I will _never_ submit to
that creative cloud crap. Just let me _buy_ the damn thing, and no .pkg
installers either!

~~~
frik
Doesn't Lightroom use a MySQL database to store the users metadata/tags?

Windows Vista/7 Photo Gallery did the right thing, it stored the users
metadata in the pictures (EXIF, XMP, etc metadata formats) inside the JPEG/etc
formarts. Windows Media Player stored the song user rating in the MP3 files in
their ID3 tags too. iTunes does the contrary, stores everything in a SQLite
db.

~~~
4ad
I don't know what Lightroom uses to store metadata, but it stores _data_ in
files, which is what I'm most interested in.

I have no particular opinion on Lightroom metadata, but I sure would hate if
simply assigning ratings to songs would alter the file. I sure hope metadata
like that is stored outside the file.

~~~
frik
What "data" are you talking about that Lightroom stores in files? How is your
"data" different than what is known as "metadata"?

If I tag a photo or picture, I want the metadata to go with me. I can create a
dynamic playlist of photos on all my devices based on the metadata on multiple
different platforms (even in my car). If I choose to strip my personal
metadata later, it's just a single click. What is idiotic is to store metadata
only in silos (iTunes, Lightroom, iPhoto databases), it's a vendor lock-in
that will hurt the customer in the long term.

~~~
4ad
> If I tag a photo or picture, I want the metadata to go with me.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what the tag means.

> I can create a dynamic playlist of photos on all my devices based on the
> metadata on multiple different platforms (even in my car).

Here we just have to disagree. When it comes to music, I don't want to alter
metadata as part of regular operation.

> What is idiotic is to store metadata only in silos (iTunes, Lightroom,
> iPhoto databases), it's a vendor lock-in that will hurt the customer in the
> long term.

Sure, that is my pet peeve as well. But the problem is that these program
suck, not that they don't store metadata in the original files. They should
use some documented, stable format, and it would be great if many programs
used the same format!

But even when they use sqlite this is not the case, the schema is not fixed,
not documented, the data inside the database opaque, and interoperability with
anything else piss poor.

At least Lightroom manages all your photographic _files_ as files, rather than
importing blobs in a database, like Photos does. It would be great if the
metadata would be open, it's annoying, but that's a much minor problem for me.

~~~
frik
Many common file formats have one, two or more metadata storage formats.

JPEG/JPG stores Exif (camera data), IPTC & XMP (authors data).

MP3 stores ID3 (authors data)

Editing the metadata doesn't reduce the quality of the file content itself. So
you won't get a degenerated music file or a lower quality picture. So I really
don't understand your sentense: "I don't want to alter metadata as part of
regular operation."

~~~
4ad
Some people scribble books with yellow highlighters, other people are driven
insane by highlighted books. If you are not a person in the latter category, I
am afraid I can't explain to you why I don't want to change my music files
when I do a trivial operation in my music player.

------
gloves
Google Plus was a bit of a shame, having used it a little bit when it first
came out, it was actually quote a good social network in terms of
functionality. It just never achieved that critical mass of users to make it
worthy of dedicating alot of time to.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Personally, I avoided it specifically _because_ of all the "you must use this"
shenanigans around YouTube and other services, as well as the Real Names
policy brokenness. They could have had much more loyal users if they didn't
pull stunts like that.

~~~
gloves
This is just an opinion, but I wonder how many 'non-techies' that would have
bothered?

As someone switched on to those kind of arguments I can definitely understand
- but to the every day lay man, I wonder how much a real name policy really
would have mattered...

(seeing the other side, I can imagine how people uneducated in these things
are also naturally suspicious - my grandma is probably more cautious with her
data than any other person I know - perhaps knowing the specifics of threats
rather than just fearing privacy leakage as a generic fear inducing concept is
worse?!)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> but to the every day lay man, I wonder how much a real name policy really
> would have mattered...

Many of the people most affected by the Real Names policy were not "techies".

------
robzyb
I really need to choose a service to host all my photos on. I was a singular
archive of every photo I've ever taken.

I'm seriously considering setting up a camlistore[1] server but it would
probably mean writing my own Android/iOS apps to do auto-upload.

Also, I do rather like all of the features that Google Photos comes with...

[1] [https://camlistore.org/](https://camlistore.org/)

~~~
planetjones
I use the Amazon Cloud drive for backups of originals - it's $59.99 a year for
"unlimited" storage. Here I backup my RAW images and camera phone images.

Once I've edited photos and want to publish (using Lightroom) I publish to
flickr.

This works nicely and I'm glad I have steered clear of any of Google's or
Apple's offerings - frankly I don't trust them.

------
admp
Bear in mind this is from July 2015.

------
wodenokoto
Why do users have to make a switch? Why isn't this just considered a
rebranding from a user perspective?

~~~
thethimble
I think they're separate apps. People who are used to using the Google+ app to
access their photos are now required to download the separate, optional Google
Photos app.

~~~
cxseven
It's not just apps. The server side seems to have been rebuilt independent of
Google+. Like OP, I'm wondering why Google didn't just find a way to give
people outside of G+ direct access to the features inside it, which were
already pretty good.

Google spends a lot of energy on supposedly optimizing UI when the biggest
improvement to usability would be to avoid inconsistent and frequently
changing interfaces.

------
maniacalrobot
In 232 words, "Google" is mentioned 14 times (6%), and "Photos" gets 21
mentions (9%). One in 7 words is either "Google" or "Photos". They should have
got bingo cards made up before this announcement so we could have all played
along at home!

------
vdaniuk
Kolmogorov complexity of HN comments on X is approaching boilerplate level.
Where X is Google's product changes, front-end apps/frameworks, advertising,
etc etc.

------
sidcool
This is from July 21, just wondering the significance now.

------
growse
Given that the google photos app isn't supported on iOS<8 (whereas the google
plus app was), does anyone know what the best way of getting camera photos to
upload to Google photos from an older iPhone?

I'm really hoping I don't have to do some sort of Dropbox/iPhotos dance :(

~~~
on_and_off
can you import them in google drive ? There is a very handy option to
automatically import your drive photos in google photos. I think it should
work on ios as well.

