Google Drive Will Stop Syncing With Google Photos In July (digitaltrends.com) 48
In an effort to create a "simplified experience," Google said in a blog post today that Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive in July. Digital Trends reports: The change is sure to be controversial. For many, the fact that Photos automatically syncs to Google Drive is a favorite feature, as it allows for much easier organization of photos. Of course, the change will avoid some confusion. According to Google, the change is aimed at helping "prevent accidental deletions of items across products." In other words, it seems like some users were confused about the fact that deleting a copy of a photo in Photos also means that the image is deleted in Drive, and vice versa. The blog post notes that the two services will still work together to an extent. The company announced a new feature called "Upload from Drive," which will allow users to manually select photos and videos to be imported into Photos. Once the items are uploaded, the files won't be connected, so you can delete the file in one without it being removed in the other.
Additionally, Backup and Sync will continue to work on both Windows and Mac, "so if you store your photos locally and want to then sync them to either Google Drive or Google Photos, you'll still be able to do so," reports Digital Trends. Google also notes that existing photos and videos will stay in both Photos and Drive, but the Google Photos folder in Drive will no longer update automatically.
Additionally, Backup and Sync will continue to work on both Windows and Mac, "so if you store your photos locally and want to then sync them to either Google Drive or Google Photos, you'll still be able to do so," reports Digital Trends. Google also notes that existing photos and videos will stay in both Photos and Drive, but the Google Photos folder in Drive will no longer update automatically.
Want to bet on a undisclosed security hole? (Score:5, Interesting)
> avoid confusion of deleting photos from both places
if user mistake was even close to the true reason, they would have put a dialog "do you want to delete this photo from drive AND photos?" but no, this is a huge architecture change that is only explainable if they found some deeply rooted problem that became evident when they added some feature or another on either products.
The user mistake avoidance is just the spin narrative.
Probably they figured out that they photos was creating a Drive share that was only possible in the enterprise tier, or you could use the combination of both to reach someone else private files, or some other nonsense they want to avoid.
Re:Want to bet on a undisclosed security hole? (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously that causes problems, but so does putting stuff in multiple repositories to the point that no one knows what they even are.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, "the maintainer left and nobody feels like working on it" is a sufficient and sufficiently-Google explanation for what's going on. Pretty much any feature that's been around for a while is just old useless crap that only the elderly (over 30) people care about, and nobody can figure out the code anyway, so just cancel it and rip it out.
Re:Want to bet on a undisclosed security hole? (Score:5, Informative)
It really makes you want to get rid of that feature, and if no one is actively maintaining it (because that person left long ago, which happens at a company with high turnover)
Google actually doesn't have particularly high turnover, in fact it's a little lower than most of the tech industry. What Google does have, though, is a great deal of internal mobility. Employees are encouraged to switch teams every 3-4 years, and this can leave some components unmaintained, or poorly maintained. In addition, it's widely perceived that promotions come to people who build new things, not those who maintain old things. I question the accuracy of that perception, but it really doesn't matter if it's factually wrong. If people believe it and act as though it's true they'll seek opportunities to build new stuff and avoid maintenance work.
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According to this, the median time Google employees have been at the company is 1.1 years [payscale.com].
That's based on self-reported data, so it depends more on who bothered to self-report than anything else. A lot of other, more thorough, surveys that report slightly higher numbers have a different problem: They give you the average tenure of the people who left, which excludes those who stay. I think Google does have a fairly high "infant mortality" rate, by which I mean people who join the company and discover they can't cut it and leave (or are asked to leave).
If you were to look at average tenure o
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if user mistake was even close to the true reason, they would have put a dialog "do you want to delete this photo from drive AND photos?"
They do have that. But users don't read dialogs.
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Maybe, but the way Google handles deletions is confusing as fuck.
It's especially bad on Android when you want to take something out of Google Photos but keep a local copy on your phone, or want to have a copy on Drive but not in Photos. You can do it, it's just really difficult and confusing and you will waste several minutes making sure the copy you want is still there after everything else is synced up.
Deduplication? (Score:3)
I really hope they get around to a duplicates search like Picassa had.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a program called VisiPics http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page [visipics.info] that does a good job of finding duplicates over large collections (well, my 20k+ desktop wallpaper collection might not be "large" to photographers).
Picassa was awesome though, they should have open sourced that instead of just dumping it.
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I find the lack of deduplication incredibly frustrating.
I was really excited with Google Buzz since they actually seemed to be sanely integrating their various services together (instant messeging, email, picassa) into a cohesive interact with people thing.
Instead they broke it all apart, dropped some of their best stuff, and then gave us decent, but not as good versions.
Motorola migrate copied all of my on phone photos to the new phone with the date of migration, cleaning it up is a huge PitA, especially w
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try fdupes for linux, works well.
I still use Picassa (Score:2)
It works. And I know where my files actually are.
I would like to move to something supported, that would keep my edits. But for now, Picassa works OK.
Re:I still use Picassa / Business Cloud (Score:2)
... And will probably keep working long after Google retires another half dozen web based apps.
I would be very concerned running a business on the cloud. At any time you can get an email "Sorry, we have decided to discontinue your services. You have 30 days to find an alternative..."
Picassa aint on the cloud.
Holy hell, having photos organized by year/month (Score:2)
combined with easy file access (for quick browsing) was my favorite feature of Google Photos.
for fucks sake (Score:2)
Fuck this. why does google turn everything to shit. Picasa was great - they killed it. Photos totally stunk but at least it would pull pics off my phone and automatically put them in the cloud and sync them with Drive.
The scary thing about google is they have so much data they already know that any uproar about this will have no significant effect or they wouldn't do it in the first place.
Big Brother Google fucks it up again (Score:2)
There is one really great thing about Google's descent into overt evil: it seems to have utterly decimated their ability to write software or create products users actually want.
As usual (Score:2)
We can't have nice things because everything has to be done so as not to confuse the morons of this planet.
alternative android backup for photos? (Score:2)
None of my photos are synced to Drive (Score:2)
What? None of the files I have on photos.google.com are synced to drive.google.com.
The Drive ecosystem is confusing as all hell; this is actually something that would be really simple and make a lot of sense, so it's no wonder they're killing this feature [that I never heard of and doesn't exist for me].
I discovered recently that my Android phone backs up to Google Drive - but it does it in this opaque manner. If you go to Drive, there's a submenu called "Backups", which have some weird "objects" that behav