7 ms·

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

100 points by scarhill 8y ago

ravenstine 8y ago
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).
- scarmig 8y ago
  It's far easier, more scalable, and more secure now than it's ever been, and people quite simply don't want it. I wish it weren't so, but people prefer staying inside walled gardens to homesteading.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    They do, but I think there's some potential demand for it. For instance, I want to be able to host my own files without having to make some sort of deal with my ISP. Although I've never had a problem serving requests directly from my computer, it's usually against the rules of ISPs. With a regular internet connection, I should be able to more easily store files on my own hardware and be able to share them with people as easily as I could with Instagram. Maybe there could even be an always-on hardware device that integrates in an open way with third parties that can serve those files, but ultimately those files live on that hardware and can be designated their own domains for URL resolution. Peer-to-peer and Cloudflare support could come with it out-of-the-box to mitigate load issues. Meh, maybe nobody wants anything like that. I still like the idea.
    - vkou 8y ago
      I want something like that, but if I'm asked to shell out $50 for a box that does what I can do on Imgur/Instagram/Photos for free, I'm going to turn my nose on it. With 99% of the images I want to share on the web - I don't really care if they aren't going to be around in five months time. Also, what if the vendor of the box (That handles the integrations with third-party hosts) goes out of business? Am I going to now have to figure out how to hack my hardware to be allowed to talk to <Whatever the new image hosting service> is? This is an inescapable rabbit hole of third-party dependencies.
- Y_Y 8y ago
  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.
  - konschubert 8y ago
    If you know what a console is.
    - stuartd 8y ago
      And you have a server.
      - bduerst 8y ago
        And have a domain name
        ex3ndr 8y ago
        And backups
        mattlondon 8y ago
        And time to apply security updates frequently and promptly.
        acutesoftware 8y ago
        and a credit card to pay monthly fees (which may or may not increase dramatically)
  - pizza 8y ago
    I mean, it is a one-liner, but only if you know what to do with that line -- linking to a URL in a message or putting a URL in the URL bar is the most complex one-liner you can reasonably require non-tech types to do, in my experience. Technology that aims to serve that audience should be reasonably usable for that audience.
- emanuensis 8y ago
  i have the additional requirement that it survives my death ... which rules out anything one has to pay for, or ping every x months, and self hosting (even ones house disappears on ones death). The solution i have found so far is GitHub Pages. It seems the website, though static, can be arbitrarily deep and large.
rootusrootus 8y ago
Add this to the list of reasons why you should not rely on cloud providers for anything you actually care about.
- steelframe 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
CamelCaseName 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
    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.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - nikanj 8y ago
      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.
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      But that doesn't solve the issue that the photos on Google Photos are private by default, so Google would need to change the sharing to public on all photos that have external links, which would be a terrible privacy measure.
scarmig 8y ago
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.
- jrockway 8y ago
  I think it's because people like Google services, but never even heard of Amazon's services.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Amazon's are probably almost not used at all, whereas Google kills off products that still have plenty of users, even if not by the standards of Search or Gmail.
  - cle 8y ago
    This is probably by design on Amazon’s part, in which case the lopsided outrage is entirely justified.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
  I wonder about the lifetimes and user engagement between examples from Amazon and Google. It's interesting that my off-the-cuff impression is that Google gets into hot water here by letting its experiments 1) run for a long time, 2) acquire a lot of users because "hey, it's free" and 3) sometimes suck the air out of a product segment because #2 (see: Google Reader). Likewise, my impression of Amazon's similar experiments are that they're cut short at a much younger age, with lesser engagement. Now I'm very curious: does the data actually back up those impressions?
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Maybe I'm wrong but I think the difference is Amazon always/mostly charges the primary users money. Googles business seems to be 'hey it's free' for primary customers, charge secondary customers $$$. Problem with that is much later when it becomes obvious there isn't enough money to be made by spying on the now quite large user base. Google then just tosses the thing over the side.
pgrote 8y ago
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.
- matwood 8y ago
  It's not free, but Lightroom is the canonical software for this purpose.
  - acomjean 8y ago
    I used lightroom too. I'm on the last version that isn't subscription based. Since I didn't upgrade my camera, I could stick with the old version (Adobe doesn't back port new cameras into the old version of its software). I noticed the "view photos on map" feature is now broken. and since my new desktop is linux I've been looking for alternatives. "DarkTable" seems promising but I haven't really got the hand of the UI.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      Darktable is a bit laggy (sadly), but it has a whole bunch of amazing filters that not even the latest Photoshop or Lightroom has, so it is well worth diving into. The equalizer tool is incredibly powerful and flexible, for example[0]. That linked video is by Robert Hutton, he makes really good tutorials for Darktable so that might help you. Anyway, for non-realistic stuff you can add G'MIC for more filter-options and you are pretty much set for life[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVXK4eAM5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVXK4eAM5E [1] http://gmic.eu/ http://gmic.eu/
      - matwood 8y ago
        I want to use and like Darktable, but it just feels so foreign after using LR for over a decade at this point. I keep giving it a try, so maybe one day it will stick :)
peterwwillis 8y ago
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.
- acutesoftware 8y ago
  I don't know why you got modded down, but this is the KEY point here. Yes, I loved Picasa and am pissed when Google drop cool services, but overall it is a good thing to make everyone more aware that their data is not permanently safe "in the cloud"
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
benatkin 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > pretends to be friendly to open source I quite like go and Kubernetes.
  - benatkin 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > 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).
- pkaye 8y ago
  If you care about free culture, don't put it up on a private (company) service. Most things on the web have not guarantee of longevity. The only thing open source about Google is some of the software licenses they use.
etiam 8y ago
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 8y ago
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
monochromatic 8y ago
Picasa was such a great project. Google ruined it.
laurynas-s 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      The desktop sync client is probably the way to go then.
- Forge36 8y ago
  Google takeout was great for this. I did it last month and backed up 60gb of photos.

100 points by scarhill 8y ago

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).

scarmig 8y ago
It's far easier, more scalable, and more secure now than it's ever been, and people quite simply don't want it. I wish it weren't so, but people prefer staying inside walled gardens to homesteading.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  They do, but I think there's some potential demand for it. For instance, I want to be able to host my own files without having to make some sort of deal with my ISP. Although I've never had a problem serving requests directly from my computer, it's usually against the rules of ISPs. With a regular internet connection, I should be able to more easily store files on my own hardware and be able to share them with people as easily as I could with Instagram. Maybe there could even be an always-on hardware device that integrates in an open way with third parties that can serve those files, but ultimately those files live on that hardware and can be designated their own domains for URL resolution. Peer-to-peer and Cloudflare support could come with it out-of-the-box to mitigate load issues. Meh, maybe nobody wants anything like that. I still like the idea.
  - vkou 8y ago
    I want something like that, but if I'm asked to shell out $50 for a box that does what I can do on Imgur/Instagram/Photos for free, I'm going to turn my nose on it. With 99% of the images I want to share on the web - I don't really care if they aren't going to be around in five months time. Also, what if the vendor of the box (That handles the integrations with third-party hosts) goes out of business? Am I going to now have to figure out how to hack my hardware to be allowed to talk to <Whatever the new image hosting service> is? This is an inescapable rabbit hole of third-party dependencies.
Y_Y 8y ago
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.
- konschubert 8y ago
  If you know what a console is.
  - stuartd 8y ago
    And you have a server.
    - bduerst 8y ago
      And have a domain name
      - ex3ndr 8y ago
        And backups
        mattlondon 8y ago
        And time to apply security updates frequently and promptly.
        acutesoftware 8y ago
        and a credit card to pay monthly fees (which may or may not increase dramatically)
- pizza 8y ago
  I mean, it is a one-liner, but only if you know what to do with that line -- linking to a URL in a message or putting a URL in the URL bar is the most complex one-liner you can reasonably require non-tech types to do, in my experience. Technology that aims to serve that audience should be reasonably usable for that audience.
emanuensis 8y ago
i have the additional requirement that it survives my death ... which rules out anything one has to pay for, or ping every x months, and self hosting (even ones house disappears on ones death). The solution i have found so far is GitHub Pages. It seems the website, though static, can be arbitrarily deep and large.

rootusrootus 8y ago

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

steelframe 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

CamelCaseName 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nikanj 8y ago
    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.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    But that doesn't solve the issue that the photos on Google Photos are private by default, so Google would need to change the sharing to public on all photos that have external links, which would be a terrible privacy measure.

scarmig 8y ago

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.

jrockway 8y ago
I think it's because people like Google services, but never even heard of Amazon's services.
icebraining 8y ago
Amazon's are probably almost not used at all, whereas Google kills off products that still have plenty of users, even if not by the standards of Search or Gmail.
- cle 8y ago
  This is probably by design on Amazon’s part, in which case the lopsided outrage is entirely justified.
saidajigumi 8y ago
I wonder about the lifetimes and user engagement between examples from Amazon and Google. It's interesting that my off-the-cuff impression is that Google gets into hot water here by letting its experiments 1) run for a long time, 2) acquire a lot of users because "hey, it's free" and 3) sometimes suck the air out of a product segment because #2 (see: Google Reader). Likewise, my impression of Amazon's similar experiments are that they're cut short at a much younger age, with lesser engagement. Now I'm very curious: does the data actually back up those impressions?
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong but I think the difference is Amazon always/mostly charges the primary users money. Googles business seems to be 'hey it's free' for primary customers, charge secondary customers $$$. Problem with that is much later when it becomes obvious there isn't enough money to be made by spying on the now quite large user base. Google then just tosses the thing over the side.

pgrote 8y ago

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.

matwood 8y ago
It's not free, but Lightroom is the canonical software for this purpose.
- acomjean 8y ago
  I used lightroom too. I'm on the last version that isn't subscription based. Since I didn't upgrade my camera, I could stick with the old version (Adobe doesn't back port new cameras into the old version of its software). I noticed the "view photos on map" feature is now broken. and since my new desktop is linux I've been looking for alternatives. "DarkTable" seems promising but I haven't really got the hand of the UI.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    Darktable is a bit laggy (sadly), but it has a whole bunch of amazing filters that not even the latest Photoshop or Lightroom has, so it is well worth diving into. The equalizer tool is incredibly powerful and flexible, for example[0]. That linked video is by Robert Hutton, he makes really good tutorials for Darktable so that might help you. Anyway, for non-realistic stuff you can add G'MIC for more filter-options and you are pretty much set for life[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVXK4eAM5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVXK4eAM5E [1] http://gmic.eu/ http://gmic.eu/
    - matwood 8y ago
      I want to use and like Darktable, but it just feels so foreign after using LR for over a decade at this point. I keep giving it a try, so maybe one day it will stick :)

peterwwillis 8y ago

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.

acutesoftware 8y ago
I don't know why you got modded down, but this is the KEY point here. Yes, I loved Picasa and am pissed when Google drop cool services, but overall it is a good thing to make everyone more aware that their data is not permanently safe "in the cloud"
oarsinsync 8y ago
> 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

benatkin 8y ago

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 8y ago
> pretends to be friendly to open source I quite like go and Kubernetes.
- benatkin 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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).
pkaye 8y ago
If you care about free culture, don't put it up on a private (company) service. Most things on the web have not guarantee of longevity. The only thing open source about Google is some of the software licenses they use.

etiam 8y ago

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 8y ago

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

monochromatic 8y ago

Picasa was such a great project. Google ruined it.

laurynas-s 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    The desktop sync client is probably the way to go then.
Forge36 8y ago
Google takeout was great for this. I did it last month and backed up 60gb of photos.