A couple years ago, my most often used Google products were Gmail, Contacts, Google Reader, and Picasa. Then Google eliminated Google Reader. After some grumbling, I have switched to Feedly. Now, Google is no longer supporting Picasa. I organize and edit my photos using Photoshop CS5, and I use Picasa for photosharing. Picasa has a very nice feature where it will automatically resize the photo to a high res, but not full res version. Online, I can easily share photos with people by setting privacy such that anyone with a link can view. Not super secure, but enough for my purposes and easy for my less tech-savvy relations to deal with.
Google Photos, the ostensible replacement for Picasa, does not allow you upload photos by album. Instead, it sorts them by date. This is problematic because I like to sort my photos in folders of my own definition. These photos are actually usually defined by date, but I have two cameras, and I like to keep all the photos I generated from a single camera together. I use the cameras interchangeably, so there is a lot of interweaving. With Google photos, i can’t easily select all the photos I just edited and share them with people. In addition, my husband sometimes switches my camera to RAW + JPG mode since he likes to deal with jpegs. I always process my photos in raw. (Typically I do very little processing, but I like to adjust white balance and I usually let Photoshop do auto-light and contrast.) This results in two jpgs of the same photo. This problem is over-comable, I found after some pain. You set Google Photo not to auto-backup but manually add each new folder. I put my processed photos in a separate folder. However, it doesn’t solve the interweaving issue. I will probably give Google photos another try with my next batch of photos, but for now, I’m trying Flickr.
Flickr has a couple issues as well. First, you’re limited to 1 Tb of storage. That is a lot of course, but this brings us to issue #2. It doesn’t include any automatic resolution reduction. I like to upload high res but not full res versions of my photos. However, I like to store full res versions on my machine so that they’re easily available when I make prints or photo books. I could, of course, save two versions of every photo, but that would be a pain. I can also upload full res versions. This may cause me to run into the storage limit, and it is very slow to upload. I like to upload the photos and then share; I’d have to start it uploading and then come back later to share.
Any other photo buffs have thoughts or recommendations?
Back to Google: obviously there are no guarantees with free online software. Google has been brutal lately about getting rid of their applications that I like best. Is Gmail next?
I have been using inoreader instead of google reader. I am not sure what I will do post-picasa so I am open to ideas. I enjoy using the desktop app for viewing photos. I shoot raw and then process them to full res jpegs before using picasa to upload large but not full res photos. I like being able to easily make custom groupings in folders. Anyway, let’s hope gmail does not stop. I believe I sent you the invite long ago.
Funny – I had forgotten you got me my last name gmail account. I assume you have Uhlig?
It sounds like we have a very similar workflow for photos. Surely then there must be tens of thousands of others with the same interest. Maybe they’ll improve Google Photos. The difficulty of sending a Flickr notice out to a google contact list was making me seriously grumpy today.
I have no idea what I should do for a photo workflow after years of thinking about it. So mine is basically that I have all my photos on my computer hard drive, and a backup drive. I don’t really keep anything in “the cloud”…