Sharing an image (or album) from Google Photos

To finish off this series of posts on using Google Photos, this post complements the email that I sent out to the Cardiff U3A Computer Group which encouraged them to do some “homework” and share a photo stored in Google Photos with me.

This post uses a couple of photos which I took this week of some toadstools that had appeared in our garden after the heavy rains we’ve had this month and which Jenny was worried might be Honey Fungus. I took them to achieve an identification – which I hope I’ve got right!
From my  Google Photos desktop I can see this …
 
 
… I need to select Create, then Album and click on the photos I want to put in the Album …
 
 
… and click on Create and give the Album a name …
 
… in this case I’m calling the album “Common Inkcap” and then click on the Tick in the top left-hand corner of the screen.
 
Now I can Share the album using the ShareShare icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen, and clicking on Get link
 
 

… and after clicking on COPY I can email the link to the album to anyone, or if you’re a Google+, Facebook or Twitter user I can share a link to any of those social media sites.

At another time, you can change the Sharing options from the More options  Moremenu in the top right hand corner of the screen …
 
 
 
… and click on the slider to let others if they have the link to see the album, and you’ll see a screen like this …
 
 
 
 
… and you can choose how others will interact with your album, but that’s for another day.
In case you’re interested here’s a link to the album

Google drops another clanger!

Google (@google) | TwitterCould we be witnessing the Photographers’s equivalent of the Google Reader debacle re-playing before our eyes?

Having launched a really useful social media tool in Google+, Google then got itself tied in knots trying to define what it actually was – eventually splitting off Hangouts. It then re-purposed Picasaweb – but thankfully hasn’t killed it off yet – into Google Photos and closed down a pretty useful Google+ Photos facility (I do have some sympathy with that decision), and now it’s launched new iOS and Android apps for Google+ focussing on two aspects of the service I didn’t want anyway – Collections and Communities and taking away functionality from the integration of Google+ with Google Photos.

Yes, Google have given me a generous storage facility – but it’s sterile. I can share an Album created on the service, but no one can comment on any of the pictures within it. They can comment on the Album if I share it, but not it’s contents if you’re using the new app. There is a sort of workaround that you can opt to see a photo in an album if you chose to see the image “on the web” and then comment on it through a different interface, but guess what … no one can see that comment, except you, and only then if you’ve got notifications switched on.

Pathetic software design. I suppose I could have lived (just) with the removal of commenting on photos in albums from within Google+ IF they’d enabled commenting within Google Photos, but they haven’t … it’s just pathetic.

Recently the Adobe Lightroom Community was up in arms about the changes to the Import functionality they’d introduced as an enhancement. Adobe, to their credit, listened and within a few weeks the old functionality had been re-instated. Unfortunately Google do not have a good record on listening to feedback. I hope I’m proven wrong, but for now I’m pondering what to do next.

Watch this space!!

PS I don’t need Collections because …. I use an RSS Reader to harvest the stuff I’m interested in. Communities – much the same, I get more value from specific forums outside Google+.