During our recent trip to Amsterdam, my wife and I used Google+ to share photos with family and friends. This was the first time I had tried to use the Photos capability of G+ on the fly, rather than as a bulk upload after an event. There were some parts of the system I loved, others that took some getting used to, and some that just seem terribly designed and still leave me scratching my head. Here are some of my thoughts based on our recent experience.
The Good - Things we loved!
- Automatic upload from the phone - We set up "Auto Backup" on the first day of the trip and never looked back. Since my wife did 99% of the photography, we set up her phone to automatically upload photos to her G+ account whenever we had wi-fi (which was often, including in our apartment). I was impressed with how quickly and unobtrusively the photos were backed up, and then Julie got a G+ notification whenever it happened. On previous trips, we would have to remember to upload pictures every few days, if at all. I really appreciated this feature when we left her phone in a bar one night. They found it and held it for us, and we got it back a few hours later, but during that time, we had no worries about losing all of our pictures, because we knew they were saved to G+.
- Sharing an album with those outside G+ - It was easy for our friends and family who do not have G+ accounts to view our pictures. I wasn't sure about this at first; I thought Google might require them to create a G+ account just to see what we shared, but that was not the case. We set up an album that we shared publicly, then just got the link to that album and we could share that however we liked. I sent the link by email to a couple people; I shared it on Facebook, and on Twitter. The link remained pointed to the album even as we added pictures, so our friends and family had just one link to always see our most recent uploads.
- Caption and slideshow capabilities - Adding captions to pictures was easy and quick. Our viewers could choose to see a single picture with caption, or view a slideshow of all our pictures. Display options, even for those outside G+, are pretty great.
- Photo editing capabilities - On the few occasions we need to rotate or crop or slightly edit a picture, we could do it directly from within G+. Nice features, though we didn't use them too often.
The Bad - Things we didn't like but could work around
- Automatic "filters" and "enhancements" - In the first couple of days, G+ kept randomly "improving" our pictures, with filters and borders and such. If I wanted that, I'd do it myself. We figured out how to turn that feature off: go to "Settings" and scroll down a bit. You'll find checkboxes for "Auto-enhance" and "Auto-awesome". It's not that I don't want those capabilities; I just want to choose when to use them, not have G+ choose them for me.
- Showing only highlights - It took us a while to get used to the "Highlights" view of photos, and to figure out why we weren't seeing all of our pictures. We learned that we could control the "Highlights" by marking some pictures as highlights and removing others, but overall it seemed pretty useless. Unless you could use the "Highlights" feature with other people (for example, so your family only sees the best pictures instead of every single one), which we could not find a way to do, "Highlights" seems like just another layer to get in the way of seeing our pictures.
- Adding photos to an album - This seemed more difficult than it needed to be. Here's how we managed to work through it. (1) Photos were auto-uploaded; (2) We had to open our "Amsterdam" album and choose "Add Photos"; (3) We had to scroll through all our photos and select the ones (from memory) that had just been uploaded; (4) Click on "Add Photos". It would have been much easier to simply open the auto-uploaded photos and choose to add them to an album directly from that page. If that capability exists, we couldn't find it.
- Sharing multiple photos without creating an album - To share only some of our photos, not all of them, we had to create a second album. That meant that after we added our photos to our "Amsterdam" album, we then had to go to our "Amsterdam Shared" album, and go through the entire process of adding photos again. On the one hand, once we did that, access by other people was easy (see "The Good", above.) On the other hand, we really wanted a way to just share some photos in an album, maybe with "highlights" or "stars" or something, and we just didn't find it.
The Ugly - Ugh. Really?
- Handling multiple accounts - The way G+ handles multiple accounts is terrible. Let's just set aside that I have to have separate G+ accounts for each email address I have and can't merge them. There were two of us on this trip; we've been married for more than 20 years and have shared everything, but we can't share photos in G+ so we can both work on them? In order for me to add photos to an album, edit them, or write captions, I had to log in to Julie's G+ account, even though she had shared the photo albums with my own account. This really needs to work more like Google Docs, where one account can share photos with another and decide the level of access: edit, view, or comment. Right now, that doesn't exist.
- Finding albums shared with me - Once her "Amsterdam" photo album had been shared with my account, I expected to see it in my "Photos" section. Wrong. In order to even view those pictures with my account, I had to search and find the post in my stream that announced that she had shared it. At first that wasn't so bad. After a few days, and hundreds of other posts in my stream, it was a major pain. Surely there is a better way to access an album that has been shared with me? Anyone? Bueller?
- Integration with other Google Apps - Trying to insert a picture from G+ into Gmail, or a Google document, or a Blogger post (like this one) is, again, much harder than it needs to be, considering that all these tools come from Google. This may have to do with the multiple-account issue, or it may just be that development on different tools occurs at different speeds. More than once, though, I found that the best (and sometimes only) way to insert a G+ photo into some other web tool was to download the photo and then re-upload it. (That's so 2006.) Seems like a waste for photos that are already in the cloud. (By the way, does Picasa Web Albums even exist anymore? Is that still a thing? Is it separate from G+ Photos? I can't even tell.)
We loved our trip, and on balance, G+ Photos was a great way to share. As with anything, though, there's room for improvement!
