Google Plus Photos NOT

Google is clearly pushing everybody to Google+ for everything and making things "pretty" in the move. The photo feature in Google+ was pretty awful at first. A recent change got the presentation much "prettier" but still there's a tremendous amount of function and information that is simply missing.

Start rant...

When you browse to http://picasaweb.google.com be certain that you don't end up here.

Notice that little yellow banner. "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums." I thought that that's where I told it to go.

Anyway...

Here's my Picasaweb landing page.

Three rows of data. Each album has its name, the date of the album and the number of photos in it. The right column is pretty well wasted. I have to click 'Show All Albums" to see the rest.

Here's my Google+ Photos landing page.

Sorry. No albums here. "Highlights" Not your highlights. Google's. Go figure. The first photo in my "Highlights" capture above is more than 6 years old. These "Highlights" change with your activity. After working on this blog post the first highlighted photo is from my blog. Almost 5 years old.

Click on "Albums."

There! But wait. Where are the album dates? And the loss of that information doesn't even give me another row of albums. There are more albums in each row without the wasted right column.

So let's go look at an album. Here's a Picasaweb album.

15 pictures on the page. 123 pixels of header. Lots of white space. You can see that I geotag my photos. Picasaweb collects this and gives me a nice map of the entire album.

Click on "View map" and ...

By the way, that URL is shareable. Nice.

Here's the Google+ album page.

12 full pictures and most of 4 more. 234 pixels of header; 100 pixels more than Picasaweb. No album map. I can't find one at all. And you can see that I requested to "Show location data" but there's none on this page. But it is pretty. The presentation of the panorama (automatically created by Google+) is much nicer than Picasaweb.

Why didn't they make the page of all the albums look like this and overlay the text on the album cover photos?

Now here's a photo in Picasaweb.

Wow! There's a map over there. The ">>" near the right column just collapses the right column and doesn't enlarge the photo.

Same photo in Google+.

Hmm. Wonder where that was taken? The photo is much bigger than in Picasaweb though. They put the caption over on the right to gain that space. But they sure left a lot of dead space below the caption. Maybe they needed the room for the +1 button.

Maybe if I click on "Photo details."

Finally. There's the geotag data. The map has a much more appropriate level of zoom than Picasaweb. And there is the exif data. But wait. That doesn't seem like all the exif data.

Back to Picasaweb and click on "full details page."

That's more like it.

I could go on but you get the picture.

I'm looking forward to Google fixing these and the rest before they "Spring Clean" Picasaweb.

I don't have the patience to even start on the topic of sharing these albums. Maybe next time.