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.
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.
I had many of the same issues. Eventually settled on http://picturelife.com/ which has been perfect for me since I started using it. Haven't looked back.
Even has Lightroom integration so you can do all your tagging and whatnot there before you upload.
Picasaweb still works as before if you manage to not upgrade your account to G+ (not easy, as Google has some devious ways to make you upgrade, and I guess any new account is G+ by default).
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.
I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk.
Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open.
When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it
5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)
You know what's really hilarious? I still use Second Life sometimes, which at the time received a certain amount of mockery because people were in effect using a huge, bloated 3D application for text chat. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, everyone's caught up in the bloat department so that Second Life's not actually much more RAM and CPU hungry than alternative options for text chat. Even though it's streaming and rendering a whole 3D virtual environment in real time.
Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes.
The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications.
The 2000s saw the rise of web apps.
The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps.
The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.
I'm not so sure. We don't have the single-platform uberdominance that we used to have. Writing software for one platform will cause you to miss out on a very significant portion of users. And I think the trends in software, both on the development side and in the released units side, are showing more projects adopting a cross-platform strategy by default.
But there are some major problems still. There are no good, cross-platform UI toolkits. They either support native widgets and have terrible APIs, or they have great APIs and their own, unique interpretation of what "native widgets" means (i.e. they aren't at all).
I got so mad about the situation one day that I thought I might start my own UI toolkit project. Well, I only thought about it for about a minute before I realized how stupid that was. But when I think about the UI toolkit that has the most consistent support across all platforms, has the least enraging API, and the most potential to get better over time, I come to one conclusion...
HTML.
No. It's not great. I already said there are no good UI toolkits. But it's the only one that has the potential to make the world a nicer place.
The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.
1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s.
2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers.
3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers.
Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant.
1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365.
2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML.
Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI...
Decision makers don't care
If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic.
Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.
I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about).
Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.
My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app...
Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments.
As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be...
I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time.
I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.
It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts.
I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy).
Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(
> Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.
SMS (1993), iMessage and Facebook Messenger all show what messages someone has read or not, even if the UI may be different.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Picasa since version 1 but I disagree that G+ Photos is worse. I think the service has got quite a bit faster, smoother and easier to use over the last year.
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.
Thanks for doing Picturelife! Saw it in one of the comment threads here and have been using it since.
Love the custom S3 backing especially and the speed you guys move at (Lightroom support and Android updates came out so fast) as well as your amazing support (don't know how Amy puts up with me)!
Just recommended you to a friend in fact :)
The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple like a URL, separating storage from display etc.
Oh and it'd nice to have the option to pay you $2 or $3 since I'm using S3 :)
The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make
a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in
Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple
like a URL, separating storage from display etc.
For what it's worth, that's specifically what our differentiation was with OpenPhoto/Trovebox (we support about 7 storage services along with being open source[1]). We've moved on from the consumer space because there didn't seem to be a large enough market for that specifically; separating data storage from application logic.
You can see our Kickstarter from 3 years back[2].
I asked in another post how offering custom S3 buckets was working out for PictureLife. Curious if someone else found a market for that.
Thanks for the feedback. Firstly, Amy is very awesome indeed.
And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to nate@picturelife.com :)
As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.
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.
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.
The way we dealt with that was for storage systems like Dropbox we store originals there but cache all of the thumbnails in an S3 bucket. It also didn't make sense to store thumbs in a user's Dropbox account.
All in all we treated every storage system independently but it was easy for us because that was the design from the beginning.
Even in our case the vast majority of consumers use storage we provided. We even support migration between storage services and that got some good use but nothing of any significant scale.
Drop me a note when you're in the Bay Area. @jmathai on Twitter or contact info in profile.
Interesting also to see that Everpix (consumer svc for organizing photos that also shut down) shared a ton of their internal data (presentations, survey results, status updates, etc.): https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence
That Everpix data was fascinating. They had one of the best products on the market. I felt if anyone was going to make it in the consumer space for a paid photo service it was going to be Everpix. You can never tell how the internals of a startup are looking.
> They had one of the best products on the market.
I used it and didn't like it. It felt like an iPhoto with a huge amount of features missing and with some anecdotal gimmicks that were presented as core concepts.
Since my macbook died I just used folders on windows to sort my pictures and I felt it did a better job than Everpix. That says a lot.
I've never seen any app that dealt with sorting pictures satisfyingly. I just want to be able to sort by dates, albums, types (videos, phone pictures, camera pictures...). And I want to be able to sort those things myself really quickly, drag & drop is not an option for that kind of things.
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.
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?
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).
More often than not when I open a photo on my phone I want to share it with someone or I'm showing it to them in person. It makes total sense to have sharing functionality right there.
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.
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.
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+
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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. )
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> I really really have a hard time understanding the google+ hate around here.
Because it's a baffling fucking mess.
I have several different accounts. G+ integration breaks those totally, leaking information to people I didn't want it leaked to; contacting people I didn't want to contact; making my different Google services much harder to use.
And what benefit do I get from it?
This is a real question: What does G+ actually give me?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...).
But then they might want you to login only with a G+ profile if at all they let people comment or so it will require them to use their Google+ photos.
Or if someone wants to have a Google Photos URL to share, Google will give an option of "photos.google.com/<one fucking long ugly random URL>" or "photos.google.com/FirstnameLastname<add some numbers or characters because others may want this URL too!>". That's just ugly!
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.
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+.
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).
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
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>