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I work on the backend for Google Photos (and Google+ Photos and Picasaweb). Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place.

I work on the backend for Google Photos (and Google+ Photos and Picasaweb). Picasaweb, Google+ Photos and Google Photos all store the photos in the same place. There was never any need to "shuffle gigabytes of photos" when moving from picasaweb to G+ Photos and there won't be any needed to move from G+ Photos to Google Photos. I don't see howany of that adds up to "do not rely on Google for your photo storage needs".

brohoolio 11y ago
Google is amazing but in the same token my grandma and my mom were using Google+ Photos. Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means. You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.
- estel 11y ago
  Doesn't this just mean that you need to click a different button to access the photos? There's a hierarchical change to make Photos a top-level product, and the product itself has had a facelift.
  - tomlu 11y ago
    It's even the same button. The old photos launcher opened the photos page of G+, the new launcher opens a separate app.
- hobarrera 11y ago
  > Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means. From what I've read around here, there's little to explain that matters basically, it's just a different URL, and a facelift. The fact that it's a different product is probably irrelevant to them, and not-knowing would be less confusing.
chinhodado 11y ago
Can you comment on why Google Photos is missing so many features from Google+ Photos? Things like date picker, EXIF editor are missing. There's no highlight view, there's no way to make the detail pane of a picture open by default, and it takes a huge number of steps to rotate a picture, which I think is one of the most common editing tasks.
- mvgoogler 11y ago
  I'm a backend infrastructure guy rather than a product guy so I'll do my best but please take it all with a large grain of salt. I was privy to some of the higher-level discussions, but I spend most of my days down in the guts of the system. I don't spend much time debating the finer points of product direction or user experience (and the world is probably a better place because of that!) Conceptually, Google Photos is very much a V1 product. It might sound a little weird since the team is experienced and a lot of the technology it is built on has been through multiple iterations. But from a _product perspective_ Google Photos is a new product. The product team was really focused on a few key aspects of the user experience (I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. The main reason is that I would certainly do a poor job of explaining them. The other reasons are that I can't remember how much of the strategy has been talked about publicly and it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make). Being focused meant saying no to things - at least for the initial launch. So the first answer to your question is that for most of the mentioned features the answer is that they simply didn't make the cut for V1. I can't comment on which features will or won't make it to future versions. Date picker is an interesting one. Really, the only reason it existed was to work around how painful it was access older pictures in Google+ Photos, Date picker was added to (somewhat) ease that pain. In building a new product, there was a desire to make things like date-picker unnecessary. Make finding older photos so fast and painless that you don't even need it. Try grabbing the scroll bar in the new web-app - you can scroll to any time you want in seconds. On mobile, it's easy to zoom out, scroll and zoom back in. There is also search, which often means you don't even _need_ to scroll through your photos to find what you want. Just this morning my wife wanted me to find a picture of a tatoo from six years ago. I was able to find it by searching for tatoo. It was awesome! In Google+ Photos I would have spent a long time trying to figure out the right date range and then searching around. If you really want to jump to a date, just type it in search - I just tried "September 2012" and "9/23/2012" and they both worked great. So I would argue that date-picker just flat out isn't needed any more, because the team focused on some core user experience flows.

brohoolio 11y ago

Google is amazing but in the same token my grandma and my mom were using Google+ Photos. Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means. You can bet I'm gonna think twice about recommending any Google product to my family just because of the time sink in doing support.

estel 11y ago
Doesn't this just mean that you need to click a different button to access the photos? There's a hierarchical change to make Photos a top-level product, and the product itself has had a facelift.
- tomlu 11y ago
  It's even the same button. The old photos launcher opened the photos page of G+, the new launcher opens a separate app.
hobarrera 11y ago
> Imagine trying to explain to non-technical folks in their 60s and 90s what all of this means. From what I've read around here, there's little to explain that matters basically, it's just a different URL, and a facelift. The fact that it's a different product is probably irrelevant to them, and not-knowing would be less confusing.

chinhodado 11y ago

Can you comment on why Google Photos is missing so many features from Google+ Photos? Things like date picker, EXIF editor are missing. There's no highlight view, there's no way to make the detail pane of a picture open by default, and it takes a huge number of steps to rotate a picture, which I think is one of the most common editing tasks.

mvgoogler 11y ago
I'm a backend infrastructure guy rather than a product guy so I'll do my best but please take it all with a large grain of salt. I was privy to some of the higher-level discussions, but I spend most of my days down in the guts of the system. I don't spend much time debating the finer points of product direction or user experience (and the world is probably a better place because of that!) Conceptually, Google Photos is very much a V1 product. It might sound a little weird since the team is experienced and a lot of the technology it is built on has been through multiple iterations. But from a _product perspective_ Google Photos is a new product. The product team was really focused on a few key aspects of the user experience (I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. The main reason is that I would certainly do a poor job of explaining them. The other reasons are that I can't remember how much of the strategy has been talked about publicly and it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make). Being focused meant saying no to things - at least for the initial launch. So the first answer to your question is that for most of the mentioned features the answer is that they simply didn't make the cut for V1. I can't comment on which features will or won't make it to future versions. Date picker is an interesting one. Really, the only reason it existed was to work around how painful it was access older pictures in Google+ Photos, Date picker was added to (somewhat) ease that pain. In building a new product, there was a desire to make things like date-picker unnecessary. Make finding older photos so fast and painless that you don't even need it. Try grabbing the scroll bar in the new web-app - you can scroll to any time you want in seconds. On mobile, it's easy to zoom out, scroll and zoom back in. There is also search, which often means you don't even _need_ to scroll through your photos to find what you want. Just this morning my wife wanted me to find a picture of a tatoo from six years ago. I was able to find it by searching for tatoo. It was awesome! In Google+ Photos I would have spent a long time trying to figure out the right date range and then searching around. If you really want to jump to a date, just type it in search - I just tried "September 2012" and "9/23/2012" and they both worked great. So I would argue that date-picker just flat out isn't needed any more, because the team focused on some core user experience flows.