Hoisted by your own petard
Corporations and other groupings assume all is lightness and wonderful. Just ask Sepp Blatte. I watched the 2.25-hour keynote for Google I/O and was amused at wasn't said, what was glossed over.
The update to Photos, for example. Wonderful, just wonderful stuff. Well, according to Google staff. When the software became available on Google's awfully-named Play Store, the reviews were immediate. Here's a sampling of what is missing from Photos:
Sorry Google, long way to go... What's the point of all the visual fluff when Photos has taken a few steps back from the previous Photos? I like the added gestural functionality, but photo editing has gotten worse.
Where is spot/point editing? Where are the fine editing controls from before? And there's STILL no way to embed/edit captions? And STILL no way to directly share to FB (regardless with or w/o the FB app)?
This new Photos app seems to sway from your Android M promise to improve on the fundamentals. Listen to your fans, please.
- AL
Very bad update. Unlimited storage and organizing is nice. But...
Where is auto enhance? Where are many photo editing features? Where is the ability to edit date and time? Where is the geolocation edit?! How should I edit everything now? Huge step back :(
- KC
Search Photos from Your G+ Circles Removed / No Chromecast Support / Tags Lost.
My family can no longer do a search from the Google Photos app of the pictures I shared with them(almost 30k [photos]). Previously there was an option to search pictures from "Your Library" or "From Circles".
All the hours work I did to tag faces, Geo tag, Picasa tags, set album covers, edit dates on scanned pics, shared privacy settings, captions, etc went right down the drain. Most of the editing features/auto enhance have been removed. This app was more powerful when it was part of Google+.No Chromecast support.
- BF
Lack of tags and captions limits usefulness There is no way to add your own tags and captions to photos as you can in Picasa Web/Picasa. This limits the usefulness of the app for someone who uses their phone camera as the primary method of capturing moments in time.
The app will let you search by tags applied to photos through Picasa Web/Picasa. I hope Google adds this functionality in the future or at least keeps Picasa Web/Picasa alive.
- PG
Why no captions? Doesn't anyone at Google caption their photos? I couldn't figure out how to add or display captions in either this or the previous G+ incarnation. I spent a lot of time captioning 2500+ photos, and I'm getting tired of having to use the Web version to add or edit them to my photos. (I don't like that the new Web version "hides" the captions under Info instead of displaying them with the photo, but at least they're there!)
Please consider adding this capability, and if it's already there, tell me how to add captions through the mobile app! Otherwise, I really like this. Fast display of photos, good searching and "grouping". Love unlimited free storage as well.
- DB
Ack! Editing got obliterated! This update is a classic Google-giveth and Google-taketh away. The new contextual awareness engine is amazing! The auto face tagging is exactly what I've wanted since Picasa started doing it....... BUT......
As anyone who used the "old" version of Google Photos knows this new version has completely trashed the photo editing abilities. I would give up all this auto-magic to have those old photo editing tools back!!! They were very deep and robust, the new editing tools are an insult.
- MB
The Cure to Photos
The part that puzzled me is that these people are talking like there are no options for viewing photos. Kind of like Microsoft making a big deal that some of their software will be installed on Android devices. It's not a big deal, because under Android so many options exist for software, and Microsoft is just one of millions.
When my Nexus 4 was updated to Android 5, the Google demolished the perfectly good Gallery app with the first Photos app. When I found that it required me to sign up for Google+, I disabled it. (Yet another benefit to Android: stock apps can be disabled.)
I hunted through the Play Store (have I said yet how awfully childish that name is?) and found QuickPic, which is (a) free and (b) better than Photos.
The Drawback to Photos
We heard from actual users about the flaws they found in the new Photos app. What about professional reviewers? Remember that this new Photos is awesome software with awesome functions powered by Google's awesome computers.
The Register dug a bit deeper to find that Google compresses your photos and movies to save space on its storage system. I thought JPEGs and MP4s already are compressed, but I suppose Google whacks them a bit more, one step in the machine learning process that lets Google riffle through your private memories:
If you don’t want your visual memories tampered with, the original photos can be uploaded as .RAW or .TIFF files and stored as-is there in the cloud.
The uncompressed storage service has only 15GB free storage; after that its $10 a month to get 1TB storage.
As one cynical commenter wrote on The Register: "This isn't about you. This is about more efficient NSA data collection."
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