List Day: 8 Reasons Why Google Photos Sucks

I've used Google Photos for photo storage ever since they bought and gradually crushed Picasa. It's no surprise that Google continues to single out useful pieces of software to axe once they're bored of them -- I don't recall where I read it, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that the Google company is like a Montessouri school full of software engineers run amok.

While I regularly say that Google Photos sucks, I've never actually itemized the reasons why.

1. Google bills it as a drop-in replacement for Picasa, which was a solution for organizing photos, performing minor edits, and sharing them in albums. It's actually a photo backup service, intended for synchronizing bulk collections of photos between devices.


2. It's impossible to create a truly "public" album, as all sharing requires sharing-by-link or a Google account for each recipient.


3. The old Picasa API was not updated to serve photos from new Google Photos albums and I never felt compelled to support 2 separate APIs just to get all of my photos together. This is why old Picasa photos show up with URI! Zone theming while the new albums are just links out to Google.


4. Google is now shutting off the old Picasa API permanently, so I'll have to rewrite my photo-serving MVC code whether I want to or not.


5. Google Photos allows photos to live in limbo outside of albums. If you accidentally "remove" a photo instead of "move to trash", it will pop up in unexpected places later on.


6. Google likes to suggest things it thinks should be in your albums. If you explicitly remove a photo from an album, Google will suggest that you re-add it the next time you want to upload new photos. You cannot disable the suggestions and have to click through them to get to the upload mechanism.


7. Google has a hard time preserving photo order, always using the timestamp on the file, which might be different if you've downloaded the photo from another device or edited it in Photoshop. Sometimes, I've gone back to old albums I've painstakingly reordered before to find the photos back in timestamp order.


8. Google is incapable of uploading more than 1 - 2 photos at a time without stalling out. Sometimes I'll get daring and upload 4, only to stall on #3. Even then, 1 - 2 photos may still end up duplicated in the album.

What do I like about Google Photos?

1. The facial recognition is pretty neat for watching babies grow up.

Series to be continued in, "Why Firefox After v56 Sucks"...