Just over a month ago I wrote a piece “What’s the future for Picasaweb?” – I managed to get that one spectacularly wrong, didn’t I!
Some things were clear, Photos was going to be spun out of Google+ and I assumed the link between Google+ and Picasaweb would be broken at that stage. I should have thought the other way round, shouldn’t I!
With the launch yesterday of Google Photos it has become apparent that the future of Picasaweb is … Google Photos. In all but name, they are one and the same thing but Google Photos has been optimised now, of course, for Mobile.
This morning I’ve tested from an Apple users perspective all the possible combinations of upload to Picasaweb, Google Drive and Auto-backup from Camera Roll (on my iPhone 4S which can’t have Google Photos installed on it as it’s running iOS 7… see previous post about Apple and “end-of-life”), and it has become clear that a new Workflow for iOS users wanting to share their photos is available and works very well.
Make sure your Google+ (or Google Photos) is set to Auto-backup and take a picture. Instantaneously that picture (in my case the one at the top of this post) will be sitting in your Google Photos app, it will also within a minute be in Google Photos on the web (that’s the desktop link), and it will soon arrive in your Google Drive <GooglePhotos> folder as well.
You then have a few tools in the Google Photos app to do edits (or you could use Snapseed to do even more). Then from the Google Photos (or Snapseed) app on your mobile device you can share to twitter, Facebook, Google+, iCloud Photo Sharing, Pocket, Flipboard, Flickr, Evernote, 500px, Tumblr, etc. etc.
So given the speed at which Auto-backup works, and as long as you have it switched on for both WiFi and Mobile Network (f you want to share away from a WiFi network), the Photo Sharing Workflow on your iPhone can now be “Snap using device Camera and Share using Google Photos”.
NB You could of course have already been using Apple’s new Photos app, iCloud Photos and Photo Sharing where the sharing options are identical, but I wasn’t, and I’ve no intentions of doing so at the moment. You could also have been using IFTTT, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
If you’re using a desktop browser there are less sharing options namely Google+, Facebook and Twitter, or … you can get a Shareable Link that you could put in an email or link to in a blogpost. Unfortunately, I don’t see an embed option, as yet, to allow you to publish an image from Google Photos into a blogpost – I hope that will follow. For the moment since Picasaweb and Google Photos are virtually one and the same thing, I can continue to use Picasaweb techniques for that use case!
In fact I’m sure the real heavy-lifting work has been done by making Drive and Photos a single image repository. Not all my Picasaweb images have been moved over to Drive … yet, but they are all accessible from Photos. The integration of Picasaweb and Photos has been achieved – presumably by re-directs. At some stage the message at the bottom of my Google Drive <Google Photos> folder – “Stay tuned! Your older photos are coming soon” – will disappear and the integration will have been complete [EDIT 22/07/2015: This has now happened] and then (presumably) I will be advised that the Picasaweb interface is no longer available, but hopefully NOT before all the Picasaweb features have been added to Google Photos.
A couple of questions remain to be answered.
- What image quality should I be using – the default in the app has been set at “High Quality” which is correct for my iPhoneography and at 16Mp is much better than the original Free limit of 4Mp for storage, but do I want to set uploads to be “Original Quality” which would allow my unedited RAW files to be stored in Google Photos.
- What’s the place of the Google Desktop Uploader in my Workflow. This replaces the old Picasaweb Upload facility. I suspect I won’t use it – particularly since it also has Auto-backup and Sync features … a potential for just too many copies – but I do need to review whether it has a place in my Workflow. I suspect not, and I suspect I’ll continue using the Export to Google Drive/Picasaweb plugin(s) from Lightroom for this purpose. [I’ll return to both of these issues another day as they also relate to this recent post as well.]
- What should I do about all the duplicates that are now sitting in my Google Photos as a result of Auto-Backup and Google+ Sharing having caused two (or more copies) to have been made. I really need to sit down and work out whether I should do a one time job to sort this out.
So first impressions are good. I just need to make sure it works for me, and the way I work, before it gets my unqualified “thumbs up”.
So if I’ve got this right, Google have upgraded PicasaPlusWebGooglePhotos (or whatever it’s called now) so the limit is 16mp. But my entire photo collection is already on that at < 2048px.
The next step is going to be interesting…
The limit is a “Free” limit. Any image less than 16Mp doesn’t count towards your Google storage allowance.
The issue, I suppose, is whether this is an issue or not? After all Flickr gives you 1Tb of storage now and doesn’t degrade your images to 16Mp, if they’re larger.
However … the issue is whether you’d want to share an image of >16Mp on a cloud-based storage system, or not! Surely if you have a penchant for storing/saving HUGE images online and WERE NOT a professional photographer you’d either
a) have a huge over-inflated sense of the value of your images;
b) be ready to give away an image at a very high resolution that could be printed; or
c) be lazy!
I think Google Photos is primarily and firmly in the iPhoneography space. Whether enthusiasts like you and me will look to store out hi-res images on it, or not is open for discussion.
Me, tonight, I think my hi-res images might go elsewhere anyway as they already do, as a separate stream.
Actually the issue for me isn’t the 16mp limit (though I’d put it the other way round – why wouldn’t you store your large images online in this day and age – but then I store the original for all of my images that I keep (so a) and licence under CC (b) and I’m certainly (c) lazy, so….) I think iCloud is a much better option for primary storage for me.
But I do want to have the maximum resolution possible, so the daunting thing for me is all the duplicates that uploading again will create…. And how Google can help me handle that!
Or to put it another way, I’ve got the same problem you’ve highlighted in (3) above, just with every one of my photos, not just the ones I’ve shared.
You are certainly not (a) or (c), I was talking about the sharing use case, not the storage use case – I suspect you realised that 🙂
I’ve started to use CC on http://moments-like-these.uk – but even there I don’t put the full resolution image online.
So we turn to your storage use case. You’ve probably seen my post a few days back on the subject of Workflow – I think I discuss my views on Cloud Storage of original images there. Would welcome your thoughts.
We are both in agreement on the need to sort our collections out (as well as the duplicates online). One of the problems is caused by the multiplicity of auto-sync’ing and auto-posting services and then services like IFTTT as well. I’m trying to simplify and rationalise these too.
In the post mentioned above I describe what I’m doing with images as I import them. I’m gradually going back through past years doing the same – even into the ones I’ve scanned from 35mm transparencies and negatives. You need to be retired to do that sort of thing though, so all the more importance to get a Workflow right now that you take forward.
It seems to me that Google are pitching this for private storage (they popped up a little message to tell me photos I share will still be in G+)
I think you’re right about needing to be retired to have the time to devote to organising images – especially as they proliferate across platforms! I expect I will live with duplicates. I am interested in the intelligent searching that Google (like Flickr a few weeks ago) have added. That should make my disorganisation more manageable.
Will go back and comment on the other post regarding cloud storage…
What I really think I’m looking for, #1 on the list is a storage/sharing site that allows me easily to embed images in blogs. If I use Blogger, I’m OK – I can use Google Photos, otherwise I’m reliant on WordPress Plugins which upload the images to WordPress, rather than embed them.
Picasa and Google+ Express?
Yes. I have that one installed (but don’t use it) relying mainly on Media Manager Plus with the Picasa addition. They all just provide ways of uploading to the Media Library. I would like to just embed images from where they are stored. You used to be able to do that in Flickr (we’ve had this conversation before), you can do it if you use Picasa and Blogger, I have experimented with using a Featured Image plugin on the Moments Like These blog which does what I want. One day!