Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Google Photos: How Not To Use

Google's photo management tools are in chaos.

Have you loaded a lot of images into Google's cloud, and would you like to use a robust photo tool on them? You can! The original Picasa interface is still available. It can find and update albums, edit tags, keywords, locations, captions and dates, change album orders, change album covers and more.

For now... just go to this URL:


This will get you to Picasa, and you can get on with life.   You only need to do this once as it will leave a cookie, allowing you to get to Picasa in the feature.  Let's just hope that either 1) Google makes its tools usable, or 2) this work around stays working.

Be aware that from this interface, you can access the photos-from-posts albums. These are albums made by Google+ to hold photos you have shared in a post, in the past. The existence of these copies is the main reason many see their photos as duplicated. But leave these albums alone if you want to keep your Google+ posts intact, at least for as long as Google keeps Google+ accessible.

Also from this interface, you can see the instant/auto upload/backup albums made by the mobile app, and by the photos desktop backup mechanism. These are another source of the idea that photos are duplicated since these copies, which exist outside of the albums you may have created yourself, do appear in search results. Picasa Web Albums is the only way, that I know, that Google allows these albums to be visible as separate albums. If you have not made any direct links to these copies, you can delete the backup albums using Picasa.

Speaking of links, this tool is also the only way Google has provided to get a direct link to an image file, suitable for use in a webpage, for example (so long as the album is shared "public" or "anyone with a link".


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