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Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+

87 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

k-mcgrady 12y ago
If this happens Google+ is dead. Photos seems to be the main good thing people have to say about it.
- dudus 12y ago
  Maybe that's the point.
- gress 12y ago
  People have been saying Google+ is dead since it launched.
  - bronson 12y ago
    And they've been right! ob Swingers quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  For me G+ wasn't so bad, it was kinda like Hacker news is to Reddit in my social world. But the mobile app has some serious battery drain so I couldn't keep it on my phone. A few times it out drained my battery while one the charger! I found the removal interesting, for me, as once I removed the mobile app I stopped using it a news point and didn't go to the desktop versions either something I has done fairly regularily.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Google+ has never really accomplished what it was meant to accomplish. Maybe it's best if they the de-bundle the good, scrap the brand, and try again from a different angle. Maybe then we can have the + operator back for search queries.
  - chatmasta 12y ago
    Well, except it did accomplish one key goal. Before Goole hangouts, Google could only estimate the identity of its users. Now, it knows exactly who you are.
- perrylaj 12y ago
  I do like Google+, but am not a regular user. Might use it more if it had more activity since I like the way it encourages networking around ideas more than networking around who I already know. I've never used Facebook for that reason -- my social circle is somewhat small and close-knit. All that is a prelude to my total agreement with you. Of all the features of G+, Photos is the one I use most. Auto-Awesome and now Stories are both extremely cool. When combined with the simple filtered sharing G+ allows, it pretty much comprises the majority of my G+ use. I'd be very surprised if they didn't keep them tightly related. I noticed the other day that Docs and Drive were also being somewhat separated from each-other (unless I completely misread the popup for the 2 seconds I glanced). Perhaps they are simply realizing that the "One Google Social Everything" approach wasn't all they thought it would be, and are separating things out some to reduce some systematic complexity it's introduced? Interesting to see where it leads.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  "Photos" isn't just one category. Snapshot photography with smartphones is the biggest part of photography now. Social networks are the center of the snapshot photography universe. This is not going to change that. A place to store and share serious photos, where they don't get automatically "awesome" or transcoded is a different thing. In the next couple of years prosumer cameras are going to lay siege to the last bastions of professional gear and the amount of high-resolution images that could be printed and that merit some digital darkroom work is going to go way up. That's enough reason for Google to get serious about photographers who are equipped to be serious. But, on top of all that, Android is getting serious photo APIs that will enable Android to be used in prosumer and pro photo gear. You can already buy a Samsung Google-logo (i.e. it has Google's proprietary apps) Android mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera. Google+ can be a gateway to a presentation that's appropriate to high quality camera images. But this category of photography needs its own specialized set of capabilities, storage, and possibly pricing.
cnbuff410 12y ago
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.
- abraham 12y ago
  Maybe for your use case. The only thing I do with photos (other than back them up online) is share them with other people.
- Chevalier 12y ago
  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?
- on_and_off 12y ago
  Yeah. It is understandable when you see where Photos is coming from. Google+ has proven successful with photographs since it had (at least at the time) an very good picture experience and an interaction model that worked well for communities. So they doubled down on photo features (not to mention that according to rumors, Gundotra is supposedly prone to claim some projects for his division). Now that we have a full fledged photo product, it may be time to : -separate it from Google+, even though g+ should still be backed by photos. -Merge as many google photo products as possible into this new experience. Google has made some amazing work with auto awesome features (these automatic albums are slick) and the Photo editor, especially on mobile (where it is far from easy to build an editing pipeline, even if you use Renderscript).
- myko 12y ago
roc 12y ago
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+.
pilsetnieks 12y ago
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 12y ago
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-photo-internet-service-b1234eaf75b https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...
- innonate 12y ago
  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.
  - jmathai 12y ago
    I've got a PictureLife account. I should get around to checking it out again. To be honest, the same reason I started OpenPhoto/Trovebox is the same reason I don't trust a 3rd party service with my data. I noticed you guys supported personal S3 buckets. I'm curious how that worked out for you as that was one of our major differentiators (we supported upwards of 7 third party storage services, incl. storage at University of Southern California). We didn't find a market for it in the consumer space. If you're in the bay area I'd be more than happy to grab a coffee.
    - innonate 12y ago
      Would love to hang next time I come out to SF area. Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them. I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.
suprgeek 12y ago
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.
eva1984 12y ago
Now, lets talk about when google is going to shut google+ down?
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  Hopefully they won't. It's a good service; just doesn't have to be the center of the Google universe.
  - bronson 12y ago
    Unfortunately, Google disagrees with you. They've worked very hard trying to push it to the center of the universe.
  - myko 12y ago
    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.
fidotron 12y ago
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.
- munificent 12y ago
  You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze. These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it. Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago. If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
    - klodolph 12y ago
      Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.
- 12y ago
innonate 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
staunch 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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!
Zikes 12y ago
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.android.apps.paidtasks https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
GBKS 12y ago
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 12y ago
  They did! "Make everything a subsite of Google Plus." But it didn't work out so well. Be careful what you wish for.
insertion 12y ago
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.
bluecalm 12y ago
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 12y ago
  FYI Google recently reversed it's decision on real names: http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-policy-7000031642/ http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-policy-70000...
- andor 12y ago
  when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that you need to log in). You don't need to log in if the video is embedded on a page, or if you open the player directly like this (/v/<id> in URL): https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc
rjohnk 12y ago
Apple got it right back when Jobs iLife. Separate apps that did one thing well.
cpursley 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Yes, it has auto-upload: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509
  - cpursley 12y ago
    Thanks. I must be confused, does this only add it to Google+, or a Drive folder as well?
    - sahaskatta 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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...).
candeira 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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. )
- jbuzbee 12y ago
  The "Stories" feature does get some things wrong, but I find it cool. I don't use Google Calendar, so it's not getting data from that for me. Here's a recent example that it did for me with pretty good results: https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b380-f3c1-3379-bd70-ae8f5664696514750b820b4?authkey=CLbFg5jp7-iUCA https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b3...
reitanqild 12y ago
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?
- jasonwocky 12y ago
  Some of us, at least, pretty much hate all social networks.
- keerthiko 12y ago
  > entirely voluntary google+ social network ... is a bit of a stretch. I believe the vast majority of users on Google+ were strongarmed in. Basically just by having a Google account that they used for anything (gmail, docs, youtube), suddenly a Google+ profile was created for them, and then things like their Android reviews, play store purchases, etc were being associated with the + profile. Yes, I make all information about me available to public when I put it online at all, but I really don't want my every online impact fully traceable back to me and to one another without that being explicit intent. Google+ subversively does that to everything their users do, and it blows.
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    Last time I checked it was Facebook who retroactively would chane everything. Again and again. Last time with graph search. G+ however weird it may sound comes off a lot nicer to me.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  'voluntary'? That's rich. Google+ is the most rammed-down-your-throat product ever on the web.
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    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.
Chevalier 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
Andrenid 12y ago
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>
- kyriakos 12y ago
  I still use the native Picasa app for windows. It's the fastest image viewer even though it hasn't been updated in years.
- rb2e 12y ago
  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/
balladeer 12y ago
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.
ulfw 12y ago
Picasa? No! Google+! Hm maybe not. Picasa again?

87 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

k-mcgrady 12y ago

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

dudus 12y ago
Maybe that's the point.
gress 12y ago
People have been saying Google+ is dead since it launched.
- bronson 12y ago
  And they've been right! ob Swingers quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg
Gustomaximus 12y ago
For me G+ wasn't so bad, it was kinda like Hacker news is to Reddit in my social world. But the mobile app has some serious battery drain so I couldn't keep it on my phone. A few times it out drained my battery while one the charger! I found the removal interesting, for me, as once I removed the mobile app I stopped using it a news point and didn't go to the desktop versions either something I has done fairly regularily.
cookiecaper 12y ago
Google+ has never really accomplished what it was meant to accomplish. Maybe it's best if they the de-bundle the good, scrap the brand, and try again from a different angle. Maybe then we can have the + operator back for search queries.
- chatmasta 12y ago
  Well, except it did accomplish one key goal. Before Goole hangouts, Google could only estimate the identity of its users. Now, it knows exactly who you are.
perrylaj 12y ago
I do like Google+, but am not a regular user. Might use it more if it had more activity since I like the way it encourages networking around ideas more than networking around who I already know. I've never used Facebook for that reason -- my social circle is somewhat small and close-knit. All that is a prelude to my total agreement with you. Of all the features of G+, Photos is the one I use most. Auto-Awesome and now Stories are both extremely cool. When combined with the simple filtered sharing G+ allows, it pretty much comprises the majority of my G+ use. I'd be very surprised if they didn't keep them tightly related. I noticed the other day that Docs and Drive were also being somewhat separated from each-other (unless I completely misread the popup for the 2 seconds I glanced). Perhaps they are simply realizing that the "One Google Social Everything" approach wasn't all they thought it would be, and are separating things out some to reduce some systematic complexity it's introduced? Interesting to see where it leads.
Zigurd 12y ago
"Photos" isn't just one category. Snapshot photography with smartphones is the biggest part of photography now. Social networks are the center of the snapshot photography universe. This is not going to change that. A place to store and share serious photos, where they don't get automatically "awesome" or transcoded is a different thing. In the next couple of years prosumer cameras are going to lay siege to the last bastions of professional gear and the amount of high-resolution images that could be printed and that merit some digital darkroom work is going to go way up. That's enough reason for Google to get serious about photographers who are equipped to be serious. But, on top of all that, Android is getting serious photo APIs that will enable Android to be used in prosumer and pro photo gear. You can already buy a Samsung Google-logo (i.e. it has Google's proprietary apps) Android mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera. Google+ can be a gateway to a presentation that's appropriate to high quality camera images. But this category of photography needs its own specialized set of capabilities, storage, and possibly pricing.

cnbuff410 12y ago

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.

abraham 12y ago
Maybe for your use case. The only thing I do with photos (other than back them up online) is share them with other people.
Chevalier 12y ago
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?
on_and_off 12y ago
Yeah. It is understandable when you see where Photos is coming from. Google+ has proven successful with photographs since it had (at least at the time) an very good picture experience and an interaction model that worked well for communities. So they doubled down on photo features (not to mention that according to rumors, Gundotra is supposedly prone to claim some projects for his division). Now that we have a full fledged photo product, it may be time to : -separate it from Google+, even though g+ should still be backed by photos. -Merge as many google photo products as possible into this new experience. Google has made some amazing work with auto awesome features (these automatic albums are slick) and the Photo editor, especially on mobile (where it is far from easy to build an editing pipeline, even if you use Renderscript).
myko 12y ago

roc 12y ago

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+.

pilsetnieks 12y ago

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 12y ago

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

innonate 12y ago
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.
- jmathai 12y ago
  I've got a PictureLife account. I should get around to checking it out again. To be honest, the same reason I started OpenPhoto/Trovebox is the same reason I don't trust a 3rd party service with my data. I noticed you guys supported personal S3 buckets. I'm curious how that worked out for you as that was one of our major differentiators (we supported upwards of 7 third party storage services, incl. storage at University of Southern California). We didn't find a market for it in the consumer space. If you're in the bay area I'd be more than happy to grab a coffee.
  - innonate 12y ago
    Would love to hang next time I come out to SF area. Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them. I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.

suprgeek 12y ago

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.

eva1984 12y ago

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

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Hopefully they won't. It's a good service; just doesn't have to be the center of the Google universe.
- bronson 12y ago
  Unfortunately, Google disagrees with you. They've worked very hard trying to push it to the center of the universe.
- myko 12y ago
  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.

fidotron 12y ago

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.

munificent 12y ago
You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze. These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it. Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago. If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
  - klodolph 12y ago
    Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.
12y ago

innonate 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

staunch 12y ago

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 12y ago
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!

Zikes 12y ago

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.android.apps.paidtasks https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

GBKS 12y ago

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 12y ago
They did! "Make everything a subsite of Google Plus." But it didn't work out so well. Be careful what you wish for.

insertion 12y ago

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.

bluecalm 12y ago

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 12y ago
FYI Google recently reversed it's decision on real names: http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-policy-7000031642/ http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names-policy-70000...
andor 12y ago
when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that you need to log in). You don't need to log in if the video is embedded on a page, or if you open the player directly like this (/v/<id> in URL): https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc https://www.youtube.com/v/UF8uR6Z6KLc

rjohnk 12y ago

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

cpursley 12y ago

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 12y ago
Yes, it has auto-upload: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509
- cpursley 12y ago
  Thanks. I must be confused, does this only add it to Google+, or a Drive folder as well?
  - sahaskatta 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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...).

candeira 12y ago

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 12y ago
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. )
jbuzbee 12y ago
The "Stories" feature does get some things wrong, but I find it cool. I don't use Google Calendar, so it's not getting data from that for me. Here's a recent example that it did for me with pretty good results: https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b380-f3c1-3379-bd70-ae8f5664696514750b820b4?authkey=CLbFg5jp7-iUCA https://plus.google.com/115948923511703408018/stories/ed22b3...

reitanqild 12y ago

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?

jasonwocky 12y ago
Some of us, at least, pretty much hate all social networks.
keerthiko 12y ago
> entirely voluntary google+ social network ... is a bit of a stretch. I believe the vast majority of users on Google+ were strongarmed in. Basically just by having a Google account that they used for anything (gmail, docs, youtube), suddenly a Google+ profile was created for them, and then things like their Android reviews, play store purchases, etc were being associated with the + profile. Yes, I make all information about me available to public when I put it online at all, but I really don't want my every online impact fully traceable back to me and to one another without that being explicit intent. Google+ subversively does that to everything their users do, and it blows.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  Last time I checked it was Facebook who retroactively would chane everything. Again and again. Last time with graph search. G+ however weird it may sound comes off a lot nicer to me.
jacquesm 12y ago
'voluntary'? That's rich. Google+ is the most rammed-down-your-throat product ever on the web.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  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.

Chevalier 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

Andrenid 12y ago

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>

kyriakos 12y ago
I still use the native Picasa app for windows. It's the fastest image viewer even though it hasn't been updated in years.
rb2e 12y ago
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/

balladeer 12y ago

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.

ulfw 12y ago

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