Dear Google, Using Google Photos is Painful

Dear Google,


I use your Picasa desktop app to edit and to upload photos, for years, it worked swimmingly until I was forced to embrace Google Photos. To my horror, when I was transferring photos from one Picasa site to another Google Photos site, in an attempt to consolidate work, I found that all the Picasa app editing did not translate.

My photos look awful in Google Photos.

Now I'm stuck with either using a different desktop app, and the Google Photos online editor. Alas, your editor is not as robust, and it's slow and cumbersome. Did I mention cumbersome? Try using it with a variable DSL speed sometime. Oh, btw, we upgraded to ATT Uverse, much faster, but still boggy at times. Still your glitches persist.

When you have 1000s of photos to reprocess, Google Photos makes editing impossible. No batch edit of albums—Picasa's desktop Auto Contrast and I'm Feeling Lucky were great filters. And the Darken Sky filter was brilliant. Can't do that in Google Photos.

So disappointing. The entire Picasa app and online experience was so much better than the online Google Photos experience. I'm sure I've told you before, I started out loving all Google products, Like The Guy (Kawasaki, who got me into this blogging mess to begin with back in 2007), I was an Google-evangelista, but I've discovered the more you tinker with our online experience, the worse it gets.

Blogger is a case in point. I continue to use it, but most of the time I'm seething. nay, frothing. The revamped Blogger has been a royal pain in the ass to use for years—since its last upgrade, and now I see Google Photos has followed suit. The relatively new Gmail revision is bad enough. At least I can opt out and use the old school version for slow HTML. Bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing. I avoid Google+ for the same reasons.

There needs to be multiple ways to do things, and there needs to be quick and dirty methods to deal with multiple blog posts, bulk images, etc. It seems you've gone the way of Microsoft—bloatware. It's fine in small quantities, but frustrating on bigger jobs.

And while we're at it, what the hell happened to all my historical album annotations when you forced my Picasa photos over to Google+ Photos? Have you ANY idea, how much work went into that process, and now it's all gone. Poof. Like with my Seamus Heany Memorial photos, I had written a curatorial pieces identifying the readers, etc.—including poets laureate, and the Consul General of Ireland. Had I known, I would've copied the comments.

I want my Picasa web albums site back. I want my album comments back.

The more I use Google Photos the more I HATE Google Photos, and I mourn the elegance and simplicity of Picasa. What were you thinking? And  yet you've let some users keep their Picasa sites, why not me? I know others are still using their Picasa sites, including Robert Lee Haycock.

I want to opt out of Google Photos, as a user, and have access to my Picasa Web Albums again. All five sites. I don't mind that viewers interface with Google Photos, but, as a user, I need something better designed for behind the scenes access. Something like Blogger-All Posts listing. But with thumbnails.

It seems the more you make things better, the worse it gets. You need to use a much wider test market before you roll out some of these design changes. You do use a real test market, right? It's not all in-house?

And while I'm ranting, do you actually ever listen to your constituents? I get it that I'm proverbially biting the hand that cyberfeeds me. Clearly I am ungrateful. But I was once one of your most ardent supporters. Once you were great, now, you're  bloatware. Cumbersome, at best. Get a new design team in, fergawdsakes. And test drive it to a wider audience. Especially to us dyslexics. I'm offering it up, here.

1. Google+ Photos needs to also have an additional thumbnail user contact page style design—like film strips—for overall ease of viewing. Not just this multi-sized format that fills the entire page that the visitor sees. The eye needs places to rest in order to comprehend, not to be bombarded with imagery.  Please take care of the user as well as the visitor. And modular organizing of images, not by exif dates.

2. Each album needs to have a discrete space to include album prose, and not just the space on each photo, but for overall curatorship. People need context as well as visual imagery.

3. On Blogger, you also need another way of organizing posts. It's cumbersome when you have 2K's worth of posts, to navigate. Perhaps a hierarchical decade index as well as a year/month index.

4. Your in-house blogger search engine is not very robust. In fact, it's tetchy. Gawd help us if we add an extra space between words, or misspel (stet) a word. It needs to be more like Google search engine, more boolean in nature. I know you have the skills. I know you can do this. And when we get the results of the blog search, just list the titles, not the entire piece—I'm long-winded, in case you can't tell. It's otherwise impossible to access the older pieces via the in-house blog search. Even with Hot Links enabled—which bogs down the loading of Blogger, BTW.

5. On the Blogger Compose page, an actual date listed up there with the toolbar. The Schedule button is not always visible. And the helpful Schedule And Label slide-out windows are a little too trigger-happy. Sometime I have a cat-and-mouse chase the window to nail it down. Nothing worse than an overly helpful  hide-and-seek window anticipating my every need, only to have it be the wrong need. Sort of like using Autocorrect. And what's with the ghost drafts of blogposts I've already corrected and reposted? Hard to track down and delete.

I'm sure I'll have more suggestions as I continue to use the site...but at least this is a start.

Thank you, I feel better now. So let's get to it, improve Google Photos and Blogger. Or at least keep those legacy pages available for the users.

Yours under the Cranky Sign,
Maureen

Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience...

Type Faster

This morning, Facebook coughed up an old memory, a quote:

"What would I do if I had only six months left to live? I'd type faster."
                         —Isaac Assimov

I think I'd also travel. I love travel, how it unleashes language. And photos, the unformed image resonating on the retina, begging for the stasis of the photograph. Line and form.

But the main thing I would focus on, would be to get all my writing organized, online, etc. Books, art, photos, and writing re-homed... A daunting task, at best. I've been nibbling at the concept in one form or another during the past year, and beyond. I still haven't uncovered all my writing from those madcap SSU daze. Only hints here and there resurface. It's like an archaeological dig into the past of one's craft.

I'm also snagging old Facebook memories that pop up daily (mainly from 2009 to 2013), and turning a few of them into blog entries as well—if they merit it, and no, I don't think my aesthetic standards have slipped. Well, not too much, anyway. Facebook offers up old status quotes by the day, not by year. So it's interesting to see what I was doing on July 4, from 2009 to time present. Sometimes the gold's in the comments. Not the post itself.

Funny, I didn't twig that many of my old Facebook posts were also writing worth saving, other than the obvious ones. I am still uneasy with the concept of prose, and tend to shy away from it, as it's a different voice, not like how a poem comes, complete, and unbidden. And so it goes.

NB: Well, I've managed to load the bulk of my nature photos for 2015-2016 up onto Picasa, in two days... A whole lotta editing and culling: 72 folders and counting! I was up until 5 AM, and I hit the keyboard by 8 AM. Still to do Monument Valley and Flagstaff.  It becomes a diary of sorts. What I took photos of. Last year was tough emotionally. My partner went batshit crazy in Febuary, and it peaked in June. I was sleeping on my cousin's couch a lot. Seeking beauty and solace in nature.

I have people/event pix on another Google+ site. To do. Recycled a few bits of old FB fragments in my blog. Picasa's being shelved, deep-sixed, going to the dark net, so it means that some pix will show up on Google+. Not sure of all my kid teaching pix. I may need to rescue them. Or consolidate my two sites. I need to create a new Google+ site for CPITS pix as an archive, so that's a project in the works. I've got some pix and poems from 2015 in Dropbox, But I can see that I'll soon run out of room. Future task. One among many. Trouble is, I hate Google+, and I don't like the photo layout, but storage is now limitless. 



WIKI IS THE NEW OED
Straddling the Continental Divide
ALARMED AND DANGEROUS

Facebook photo album: Mo's Landscape Pix (photos)

 Mo's Landscape Pix 

Some landscapes and odd things that caught my eye. I'm fairly new to the realm of digital photography. I don't yet have a good SLR digital camera as the quality is still so poor. They're a bit better now, but not as good as my trusty old Pentax K-1000. But they're still way too expensive for what they are.

So I'm using two entry level Nikons that are not really all that good. My old 1980s Nikon auto focus sport camera has a better lens than these digital cameras. Auto-focus leaves a lot to be desired and I miss being able to manually focus and choose my F-stops. 

I used to take photos for alternative newspapers in Sonoma County, CA. My realm was grainy black and white Tri-X film. I loved chiaroscuro light and Dorthea Lang was my inspiration. A car accident in 1996 put an end to my camera packing days. I'm only now coming back to my love of taking photographic images.

All works of art and photographs in these albums is © copyright by Maureen Hurley and may not be used in any endeavor or context.

This Facebook photo album was created November 10, 2007 so I'll use it as a temporary post date, until I figure out what to do with them all.  Most of the photos are from 2005-2006.

LOL. I posted the date as 20007, and Blogger didn't find that date at all strange.... So, I can backpost to 1970, and apparently forward post to the year 20,007. Will we even make it that long as a species, I wonder? 

The pergola at the headwaters of Lake Merritt, Oakland. After we lit our vigil candles, during a MoveOn rally on the first anniversary of the war, a huge stormfront moved in. Lightning struck the lake, thunder bellowed. It was if the sky was speaking. 

During the final dog days of summer, a fleet of antique chairs suddenly appeared, disappeared and then reappeared again—up and down our street like homeless cats, as people claimed them, then changed their minds and put them back out on the street. I think this one eventually made it into our neighbor's home. There was a real pith helmet sitting on the chair too. By the time I got to a camera and back to the chair, the helmet was gone. 2007

This old leather chair was less lucky, it never found a new home but there was something so surreal about it patiently facing a busy street.

Grotto, Andreas Canyon, Palm Springs desert. Mid-July, the temperature was pushing 120 degrees so we wallowed in an upper pool sheltered by house sized boulders on Andreas Creek, on the south-eastern slopes of Mt San Jacinto. Note that the boulders don't actually touch each other. the gap between them created a visual tension that made for bathing at their feet a little worrysome but they never shifted.

Eons of relentless water from snowmelt on Mt San Jacinto carved this deep gorge in Andreas Canyon. I think it's a type of schist or shale as it's layered. I love how the canyon wall looks like the trunk of the native California Washingtonia fan palm (right). I felt like a child caught between giant elephant's legs.

Rare native California Washingtonia fan palms in Andreas Creek gorge, Palm Springs desert. Native California palms are like redwoods, they need to keep their feet cool and damp year round. I think of them as southern California's equivalent to our northern California redwoods. Both have an extraordinarily small range and very specific micro climate needs. Redwoods are strictly coastal and extend from Big Sur to the Oregon border. Washingonia fan palm once extended as far north as San Francisco (one of the few palms that doesn't mind the cold). They need year round water and favor the fussures caused by the San Andreas fault because of the presence of the dense ultrabasic rock: serpentine, blueschist and clay that help hold onto year round. water If you use Google earth to look at the desert landscape, the palms are bright green strands on an otherwise arid and colorless landscape.  July 2007?

Mt. Diablo, from Ygnacio, Ca. Outside the NICU trauma center at John Muir Hospital, I was waiting for my cousin to come out of a coma, after a brutal hit and run car accident, and suddenly the clouds parted, I knew she'd recover. May 2004

Most of these photos were taken in the fall of 2005 and 2006 with my first 3.1 megapixel digital camera that was so bad, it cost a whopping $29. The memory card cost more than the camera. But it had a great close up lens, better than my Nikon, but off color and pixellation was hard to work around.

November moonrise over Nicasio Resevoir, I took this shot with my cheap camera while I was driving down the highway. I pulled over and tool lots more photos but this is the one that came out.... 2004?

Goat Rock, Sonoma County. This was taken with my cheap $29.95 Chinese camera. Looking south from Goat Rock. Note the solid carpet of dwarfed flowers. The dwarfed California poppies are less than 6 inches tall, I had to lay down to get to their level. Note the solid carpet of dwarfed flowers. I've never seen a spring like that one.

Goat Rock, Sonoma County. My old stomping grounds, and one of my favorite places on earth. The mouth of the Russian River is just north of Goat Rock, Sweet Colt's Foot blooming in the foreground is taller than I am.