Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.
Right now I see it as a technological boon that ensures that I have access to software irrespective of my OS platform. That used to matter so much previously. Now it doesn't, and that's great.
...until they shut off the server that serves you that software, or remove/change features you liked. In the old days, you could save your software somewhere and know you could always use it and it wouldn't change on you.
I wasn't taking a position on that, but I realize the sub-thread was about Picasa. Yes, it is better if a desktop app without cloud dependencies is abandoned, than a webapp.
I'm sure the usage of the Picasa desktop app wasn't very high, and the Photos web version captures most of the features users wanted like albums, editing, tagging and sharing (lacking folders still).
Nothing wrong with Google thinking that Picasa usage didn't justify continued development. Other companies are free to make a great native desktop app for photos as their core product, but Google is surely thrilled with the reception of Photos.
I couldn't disagree with you more, Google Photos is garbage compared to Picasa. There's no folders and no tags (for writing a quick description that applies to a bunch of pictures), no manual face tagging (for when the magic fails, or tagging pets, or tagging people that were there but not in the photo, or just tagging things that aren't faces), no people pane (where you can select two or more people to quickly see all the photos of them together), no batch editing of any kind really, no bulk mechanism to give your feedback to the facial recognition engine to help it learn (did Google Photos perfect that technology? Is that why it doesn't need our help anymore? No. It just misses half the faces Picasa would've caught)
In lieu of these basic requirements, Photos presumes to be able to create collages automatically for me (sure put all those pictures that are basically identical together) and albums (oh yes call that one "Trip to California" it's not like I don't fucking live in California). Not to mention all of this is happening in a browser that is clearly sweating to scroll hundreds of thumbnails across my screen where Picasa would effortlessly zoom and resize on the fly.
I honestly don't see how Photos could ever deliver a superior user experience to Picasa without first abandoning the idea that it's all going to happen in a browser. I'm also curious what your use-case is that Photos is actually superior to Picasa in your opinion, are you a heavy user?
Manual face tagging is there now, and it definitely looks like they're trying to bring as many (relevant to web) Picasa features as possible to Google Photos.
Google Photos is 'partially' superior because of its super-search, which was not there in Picasa. People, place, things or time (and their combinations), it can search them all without any manual tagging required. Picasa Desktop or web couldn't search photos of "Alice and Bob riding hiking/riding a boat" by just typing that in. Sure, they could have built that feature to the desktop app as well, that would have been the best.
Picasa has a click-and-type description at each folder where you can write something like "Burning Man 2015" which becomes globally searchable (along with your people, place, etc. tags). I suppose an AI could determine that my photos are from Burning Man 2015 by inspecting the Exif tags and doing some Freebase magic but there's a whole semantic chasm between that and "Lorelei's first Burning Man".
Auto enrichment of my tags and descriptions would actually be a nice feature but that assumes some basic usable tags and descriptions first. It seems like the designers are too busy coming up with futuristic magic to think about good old practical usability. Worse they also seem completely out of touch with what's practically achievable so their futuristic magic ends up being useless.
As there seem to be done Photos fans here; I've tried to ensure that all my hundreds of photos are in albums (they've settled on the term album now, right?) but there doesn't seem to be any way to check. I'd like to look at the set of photos not in any album so that I can either move it into an album or delete it. What do I do?
I don't hate it, but a big problem for me is that the editing seems to produce quite low-quality output, at least in the Android app (maybe it's better if you use the web version?). For the use-case of cropping/editing photos and sharing low-res versions on Twitter it's not very noticeable, but I was very surprised when I looked at one of my edited photos in higher res and it had a bunch of really grating artifacts, that weren't in either the original, or a similar edit reproduced in gimp.
The only problem with webapps is they they are fragile and depend on a set of materials. If we had a way, we could make a completely contained webapp, call it a dApp...
Oh wait, we now do: IPFS can do the storage mechanism and contain the whole app as a link and just work. And with that magic, it will never 'link rot' as everything would be self-contained. Yep, that's a solution.
