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.

Picasaweb Free Photo Hosting

When Google introduced Google+ they said it offered free photo storage. How they implemented this was to integrate Picasaweb into Google+ and not count photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes. I realize that this isn't sufficient size to use this for backup but Picasaweb has a nice presentation for sharing photos.

So I set out to figure out how to upload and resize to the target size automatically. Previously the Picasaweb web upload offered to resize automatically but that capability is now gone. Odd but oh, well. But I figured out that the Google+ photo upload process does resize automatically. But (isn't there always a "but?") Google+ wants to share the photos automatically and doesn't give you good tools to manage the sharing.

So here's my trick. You need a Google+ profile to make this work.

Login to your Google account. This is probably your Gmail account. Go to your Google+ "Photos" page (https://plus.google.com/photos). You may have to join Google+ the first time.

Click on "Upload new photos."

Drag photos or select them from your computer.

Here's how they'll look uploading. Click "Create album" when they're done.

I don't tag people in my Picasaweb albums so I "Cancel" here.

Now here's the fun part. This prompt about sharing is about sharing using Google+. Click on "Cancel" here. You'll get to specify sharing in more detail in a little bit.

Now browse to "https://picasaweb.google.com/home." Your new album should near the first of the list.

Select it and you'll get the Picasaweb sharing options at the right. Click on the "Only you (edit)" way up near the top right.

Whew! That's what you want. Down at the bottom is a drop down for "Visibility." That gives you more choices that just Google+. Notice just below this drop down is a check box to show or hide the geolocation data.

Make your choices and click on "Save changes" and you're done. If you've chosen the "Visibility" of "Limited, anyone with the link" the link is about halfway down the page on the right when you click on "Link to this album."

The link will look like "https://picasaweb.google.com/[your Google+ profile]/[album name]?authuser=0&authkey=[authkey]&feat=directlink." I know the following is confusing but when you share this, add "&noredirect=1" at the end. Google moves in mysterious ways. What this does is force the presentation to be in the Picasaweb format rather than the Google+ format. It'll work fine if you don't so don't sweat it.

These photos are resized to 2048 x 2048 or less and don't add to your Picasaweb quota of 1 GB. Unless your originals are smaller than this you shouldn't depend on this process for backup, just for free sharing.

Google Photos Public Gallery

So there isn't a Google Photos Public Gallery, you say? Well, there is, Kinda. But you have to access it via Picasaweb.

This continues my rant about apparently deprecated functions from Picasaweb to Google Photos.

When you first login to Picasaweb you have to create your Google Profile. You used to have to do this to use much of Google but that has generally been eliminated. However this seems to be the key to having a public gallery of photos.

Once you create your Google Profile you are able to go to Picasaweb. You probably want to click on "View All" to see all your albums (collections?).

Now you can see all of your Google Photos albums.

To put one of these in a public gallery click on the album thumbnail and then choose "Album properties" from the "Actions" dropdown.

Under "Visibility" choose "Public on the web" and click on "Save". Realize that you just put all your photos "Public on the web."

You're halfway there.

Go back to Picasaweb and click on "My Photos" and then click on "Public Gallery".

Now copy that URL.

That's the URL of your public gallery.

You're done.

Unfortunately that doesn't present in the Google Photos UI. Honestly that's a mixed blessing.

Update: If you're interested in this you'd better hurry.

Google Photos

Google seems to be killing Google Plus with 1,000 cuts. Latest is moving photos out to it's own app.

I don't have the time or patience to address the "free" photo storage of Google Photos. Suffice it to say it's not "free."

Anyway on to a subject dearer to my heart, viewing.

I previously looked at Google Plus Photos and compared them to Picasaweb. All of my findings/comments from there still stand.

You'd hope that Google had noted those issues and addressed them in Google Photos.

You'd be disappointed then.

Just to recap here's the presentation of a photo in Picasaweb.

And in Google Plus.

No changes here.

And in Google Photos.

Aaarg! Still no way to see all the exif data. No way to zoom the map. No way to change the base map, i.e. to satellite.

Oh, do you want to change the sequence of the photos in an Album (or is it Collection?) in Google Photos? Sorry. You have to go back to Google Plus or Picasaweb to do that. And Google Plus will nag you when you do. It seems only a matter of time until Google kills Google Plus Photos.

What I do like is the sharing of Google Photos. You no longer get tangled up with needing Google Plus profiles.

After I wrote this Google did another flip-flop restoring function previously removed from Picasaweb.

This comment is exactly my feeling.

Matt Baer
At first I was against Picasa redirecting me to Google + photos. But after a few added features in Google + photos. I stopped trying to go to Picasa. I am really not a fan of the new Photo. Photos seems to be very limited compared to Picasa and Google + photos.

Geotagging

After our trip to Long Island last summer, I laboriously went through all my pictures on Picasaweb and geotagged them. I liked the result but not the effort!

So I've been investigating how to do this automatically. I searched high and low for GPS loggers. I looked at ATP PhotoFinder (original and mini), Sony GPS CS1KA, Qstarz BT-Q1000P, Canmore GT-730F(L), i-gotU GT-100, AMOD AGL3080, and more.

My key criteria were that I wanted it to be rechargeable via USB and to not require Windows drivers to get the data off the device.

The closest I came was the Columbus V-900. It recharged via USB and wrote KML files to a micro-SD card. That way all I needed was a micro-SD to SD USB adapter. Close enough so I clicked on "Submit" on Amazon.

Then I remembered my Blackberry Curve has GPS. Duh! I googled "Blackberry geotagging" and eventually found GPSLogger on some of the Blackberry forums.

It met both my criteria. Obviously the Blackberry is rechargeable via USB and GPSLogger creates standard format files on the Blackberry's micro-SD card.

The short version is that it just works. Surprisingly, it runs in the background. I've run it for 12 hours and it drew down about 1/2 the Blackberry's battery.

Here's the track in GeoLogger:

Here's the altitude:

And the speed:

Here's what I have for Options:

When you want to export the track, go to the path manager and "Export Path to Filesystem":

To apply the GPS data to the photos, I'm using GeoSetter. It's real simple but very capable.


Here's the result in Picasaweb.

Now I'm set for our next vacation. And I have to return the Columbus V-900.

Which Camera?

You may have read my earlier post about my Samsung CL-65 (actually 2 of them). For Christmas 2010 my wife surprised me with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7.

I'm really torn between the 2 cameras and I wanted to stop and recap the capabilities and differences of them.

First I'll list the capabilities and differences and then discuss them. Please note that this is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis but rather the capabilities and differences that are important to me. You may have different objectives.

Feature	Samsung	Panasonic
UI	Touch screen	Traditional buttons
GPS frequency	Continuous	~ Every 5 minutes
Optical zoom	5X	12X
Lens design	Internal	Traditional
Process to record video	Touch screen navigation	One button
Media	Micro SD	SD
Charging	USB	Remove battery
Connectivity	Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, DLNA	None
Overall size	3.94 x 2.4 x .75	4.07 x 2.35 x 1.28

UI

While the Samsung's "gee whiz" touchscreen is fun at first, eventually you will find yourself bumping it when you don't intend to and changing something. If you're lucky you'll realize what it is and undo the change. If you're not lucky, ... You will eventually get to where you struggle to find a way to hold the camera for a long time with it turned on where you don't bump the touchscreen. This is especially problematic when you're waiting on the GPS to acquire satellites.

GPS

While we're talking about the GPS, there are significant and undocumented differences in the way each of these cameras' GPS works. The Samsung's GPS wakes up when you turn the camera on and starts trying to acquire satellites. If it is a "cold" GPS start it'll take a couple of minutes, sometimes longer than you want. If it is a "hot" GPS start, it'll take up to a minute. It could be better but it's actually good enough. Once it acquires the satellites the Samsung seems to continue updating the location. If you go look at this Picasaweb album you can actually track my walking around.

Panasonic's site says "By simply turning on the GPS function, the location data and time are automatically updated." Don't believe everything you read on the web.

The Panasonic actually keeps waking up the GPS periodically even when the camera is turned off. This should reduce the satellite acquisition time. Should is the operative word. If you store the Panasonic in a location where it can't acquire satellites all this does is run the battery down. What I did find significant was that the Panasonic only updates the GPS about every 5 minutes even when the camera is turned on. Look at this Picasaweb album and you'll see the pictures clustered where the Panasonic updated its GPS. The photos show only two locations although I clearly walked all around the house and yard.

This is apparently by design by Panasonic to reduce power consumption. There's even an icon on the screen that tells you this once you understand the issue.

You can force the Panasonic to update its GPS but that's not practical when you're walking around taking shots.

You can see this in several users' reviews on Amazon here and here.

For the trolls out there I am running Firmware version 1.2 on the Panasonic.

Optical Zoom

The numbers say everything. When you need to get up close and personal take the Panasonic.

Lens Design

The Samsung has a clever design that allows the lens to be completely contained within the compact size of the camera. The Panasonic has a traditional lens that protrudes as soon as you power on the camera and extends when you increase the zoom.

Process to Record Video

This gets back to the whole touchscreen UI issue but it is a real example. With the Samsung, you have to touch the mode section on the touchscreen and then select movie mode. This is hard to do one-handed.

On the Panasonic there is a dedicated button that starts taking video when you push it. "Piece of cake" as one of my former co-workers used to say.

Media

The Samsung takes a micro SD and the Panasonic takes a standard SD. They're close enough to the same price now as to not matter and almost all micro SDs come with a micro SD to SD adapter.

But that's just the point. The micro SD requires you to keep up with one more adapter and I can't see that much size advantage especially when you compare it to the battery. Yeah both cameras present removable drives to your computer when attached via USB but still ...

Charging

Why can't everything just charge off of a mini-USB? I know the EU has selected micro-USB and even that'd be Ok.

Both of these cameras charge using proprietary techniques. The Samsung at least uses a USB-powered cable but it's specific to this camera. To charge the Panasonic you have to remove the battery and put it in a charging shoe that plugs into the wall. While it will accept 110V or 240V it only has a US plug so that will require an adapter when I go abroad.

Connectivity

While the Samsung sounds like it has a definite advantage don't judge too soon. According Samsung's user guide Bluetooth connectivity is limited to "you can send photos only to mobile phones or PDAs" so you can't Bluetooth transfer them to your laptop. Using the Wi-Fi I've only been able to connect with no security or WEP security (isn't that the same thing?). Samsung's customer support couldn't help either. And DLNA, you get bonus points if you know what that is.

Size

The two cameras are almost identical size in every dimension except depth where the Panasonic is slightly more than .5 inches thicker. You'll quickly see how much this matters when you try to slip it into the pocket of last year's jeans. Enough said.

Conclusion

I don't know. I like them both and am using them both. My general thinking is that if I'm going to be outside where the GPS can acquire satellites the Samsung is my preference. But if I need a long reaching zoom or quick video it's the Panasonic.

Geotagging Pictures on a Blackberry

I'm still a relative amateur on my Blackberry but I just cracked the code on how to geotag pictures taken on my AT&T Curve 8310 running OS 4.5.

I'd Googled this and never got a concise explanation. Here's how to do it.

When you go to the Camera on the Blackberry, hit Menu and then Options. Set Geotagging to Enabled. Go back to the camera. In the lower left corner is an icon that you can't figure what it is. It is a satellite representing GPS. A red X over it means no GPS signal. No red X means you've got the satellites. Now take a picture. Save it and press Menu and View Pictures. Use the trackball to select the picture you just took. Don't click on it. Look at the bottom left corner of the screen. I don't know what the green icon means but the white dot between that and the file name means it has location data. How obscure can they make this?

When you finish with the camera, I suggest hitting Menu and then Close to ensure that the GPS is turned off.

I use Picasaweb to share my pictures. You have to go into Settings and check "Show my photo locations to others" and "Use Exif location data." Now go upload the Blackberry pictures to Picasaweb and voila!

Geotagging II

I rambled at length in previous posts about my interest in geotagging. In my recent comparison of cameras I even talked about geotagging. In the GPS section of that post I linked to a Picasaweb album that had GPS data from the Lumix.

Yesterday I put the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 to the test. The results weren't pretty.

We went to the Memphis Zoo and I wanted to use this trip to compare my previous geotagging process with the built-in capabilities of the Lumix.

I enabled GPSLogger on my wife's BlackBerry Curve and set it to log every 30 seconds.

As soon as I arrived I turned on the Lumix and enabled GPS. That was the first mistake.

The Lumix took more than 5 minutes to obtain a GPS location fix. Consequently my first pictures didn't have GPS location in their EXIF data. Then the Lumix began obtaining GPS locations every 5 minutes.

When we returned home I used GeoSetter to compare the GPS locations.

Here's the result.

The top set of markers is from the Lumix and the bottom is from GPSLogger.

The first thing to notice is the absence of markers in the Lumix set near the bottom center. This is the entrance to the Zoo and the Lumix hadn't obtained a fix yet. To be fair I have to acknowledge that I started GPSLogger before I left home. The next thing is to notice that the Lumix seems to have fewer markers than the BlackBerry. This is because the Lumix tends to cluster photographs as it only renews its location every 5 minutes. Another thing is the Lumix has one photograph tagged as being in the middle of a small pond. Let's just say that I didn't get wet so this indicates a lack of accuracy on the part of the Lumix's GPS.

The other issue I observed is impact on battery life on each device. With the GPSLogger frequency set to 30 seconds it had no noticeable impact on the BlackBerry Curve's battery. I didn't fully charge the Lumix's battery before I left as it indicated a full battery although it had been used several times on that charge. During the day the Lumix's battery indicator dropped to 2 of 3 and then 1 of 3. When I returned home to offload the photos it began flashing red. I could do a more comprehensive test of the impact of the GPS on the Lumix's battery life but given the ineffectiveness of the Lumix's GPS who cares?

Perhaps I have the bar set unrealistically high. If your interest in geotagging is to tag your photos with which part of a town you are in then the Lumix does fine but carry an extra battery. And if you're lost the Lumix will even show you where you are every 5 minutes. When it obtains a GPS fix it I have it set to show the town and landmark. It kept displaying "Memphis Zoo."

On the other hand GPSLogger and a BlackBerry is a first class method to geotag your photos.

Oh and if you have an Android phone? Don't even bother.

Samsung CL65

Remember last summer when I blogged about geotagging? I'd had to work some to capture my lat/lon information and associate it with each photo. That worked pretty good but I wanted something simpler.

My Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 was only a 10 megapixel and only 3x optical zoom.

So I went Google shopping last Christmas and came up with the Samsung CL65 (ST1000 in Europe).

The CL65 has 3.5" touch screen LCD. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi along with built-in GPS. It has software on the camera to directly upload images online or e-mail them via the Wi-Fi. It's 12.1 megapixels with a 5x zoom lens. Oh, and the video recording is HD.

When I started looking it seemed to also be made of "unobtainium." I got on a waiting list at Rocket Camera. Their BBB rating doesn't look so good but I didn't have any problems with them. They had a good price and gave me good service. Caveat emptor.

The camera is awesome. The touch screen took me a little getting used to as I seemed to touch the screen accidentally while I was holding it. Other than turning it off, there is no screen lock. The GPS isn't AGPS like your phone so it takes a little while to find the satellites when you first turn it on. When I was in a situation where I was likely to be taking frequent photos, I just kept turning it on and off to keep the GPS sync relatively fresh.

I don't like digital zoom so I played with the settings until the digital zoom was disabled. Unlike the Casio, there isn't an obvious setting for this and I don't know which setting I changed to disable it but I think it was the image stabilization that did it.

Speaking of settings, the Casio has a lot more of pre-programmed scenarios. The Samsung has only 13. I don't use these much and all the ones I looked for were there, e.g. sunrise.

The Samsung charges with a proprietary (and short) USB cable. This cable also presents the MicroSD card as a USB drive to the PC. Just don't lose this cable. I haven't had any problems with the battery life even while running the GPS all the time.

The Samsung's 5x optical zoom is all internal. What this means is that the lens never protrudes from the camera's body. Nice.

I can't get the Wi-Fi to connect to my WPA/WPA2 network on my D-Link WBR-2310 router. I called Samsung and they weren't much help. It connected when I turned off security but that wasn't acceptable. I did get it to connect at my daughter's house and at her mother-in-law's house.

I've taken hundreds of snapshots with the Samsung but hadn't traveled with it to exercise the GPS until our recent trip to Bainbridge Island. Picasaweb does a great job of presenting the lat/lon for each photo. All went well until just before this photo.

That's when I dropped the Samsung into my soup! Luckily I had the camera all set before I handed it to the waiter so the picture turned out fine. The camera wasn't so lucky. It had landed screen down. Initially the touch screen wouldn't respond at all. Slowly it began working better and better and eventually seemed fine.

It worked great all the rest of the day but the next morning I got up early to take photos of the sunrise and it was cold outside. After about 30 minutes out in the cold the touch screen quit again.

Luckily Father's Day was coming up and the CL65 was much more available. My wife got me a new one and I've applied all my settings to it and am ready to go.

Picasa Web

Have you tried Google's Picasa Web? It came out a couple of weeks ago. Initially it was by "invitation" only. Technically, it still is but it seems that you get your invitation immediately. You'll need a Gmail account and then go to http://picasaweb.google.com.

You'll get 250MB of storage for free. You can bump up to 6GB for $25 per year or use more than one Gmail account. Looks to me like 250MB will last a while. More on that later.

You can upload to Picasa Web two different ways. First, you can use the typical web upload for one file at a time. Ignore the #4 FAQ that says you can't. They just want you to download the Picasa desktop client. Which leads to the second method of uploading, using the Picasa desktop client.

If you already have the Picasa desktop client, you will still need to download the v2.5 beta. It has the feature you need to post to Picasa Web directly from the Picasa desktop client.

In a nutshell, all you have to do from the Picasa desktop client is to create an album and click on the "Web Album" button.You get a prompt about what size to upload. Just let that default. Picasa will resize the pictures and upload them to Picasa Web.

If you have the v2.5 beta Picasa desktop client and you visit a Picasa Web album that allows you to download, you'll have a link on that web page that allows you to download the entire album!

I have over 250 pictures on my Picasa Web and am using 25% of my 250MB.

You'll notice that the URL has my Gmail e-mail address so you may want to setup another Gmail address for photos (and darn, you'll get another 250MB for each one that you setup).