Online photo managers

The internet is a great place for sharing photos. At first, it was pretty terrible - the only way you could share photos with your friends online was to publish them for all to see. These days, though, there are more and more ways of selecting which photos you share with which groups of people. And of course those groups of people are spread all over the place - some on Twitter, some on Facebook, the sensible ones on Google+, and some elsewhere.

And then there are the photo managers; the best of breed pretty much has always been Google's Picasa, and now the advent of Google+ means some tidy Picasa integration. But as well as Picasa there's Flickr, probably the biggest photo sharing site around; but of course Flickr is pretty much just about photo sharing whereas social networks are about sharing much more - so photo sharing on Facebook is pretty big too.

So what's this post all about? The point is, we end up with different albums shared with different people on different platforms, and we want something tidier. As users we want a service that lets us see all our photos in one place, and to share them with the people we want to. A bonus would be to retain the information we've added to the photos - where and when the photos were taken, people we've tagged in them, captions and comments etc. Not surprisingly there's no service (yet) that can do all that for us - partly due to the limitations of the various APIs and partly because nobody's made them yet - but there are a few that are trying to come close. Below I'm going to explain what I've found, but first here's a list of what the ideal online photo manager should be able to do:

• MUST: list photos and albums across various services in one place
• MUST: allow copying of photos/albums from one service to another "web-side" (ie. without using any of the users' bandwidth to download photos from one service and re-upload them to another)
• MUST: be completely free of charge
• SHOULD: copy time and location information
• IDEALLY WOULD: copy captions and lists of people tagged
• IDEALLY WOULD: manage which circles/lists/users/friends/followers can see which photos/albums
• SHOULD: allow easy merging of albums
• IDEALLY WOULD: allow automatic synchronisation of albums across platforms 

Showzey

Showzey is a relatively new kid on the block and promises much. It searches all of your Google, Facebook and Flickr photos and lists them nicely. It lists albums and, yes, lets you copy an entire album from Picasa to Facebook or vice versa. Another key plus point is you don't need any new username or password - simply authenticate via your existing Google, Facebook or Yahoo account.

On the downside, it's excruciatingly slow. I have over 15 pages of albums and navigating between pages on Showzey is an ordeal. Shifting photos around between services requires oodles of bandwidth, memory and processing power and it's apparent that Showzey's infrastructure isn't quite up to the task.

Pictarine

This site has a slightly nicer look and feel than Showzey but does require a separate user account to be created, along with yet another user name and password to remember. Considering the whole point is to link other services together, and the first thing you do when you've created an account is to authenticate with those other services, it's a tad surprising that Pictarine hasn't gone the way of Showzey and used that authentication instead of requiring users to input separate credentials just for Pictarine.

Pictarine covers a much wider range of services than Showzey - but seems to suffer from the same performance issues: loading a list of albums takes ages. In fact, performance is so bad that I haven't yet managed to load my Pictarine homepage after signing up and authenticating with Facebook and Picasa. Sbo I can't really report on how good or bad its features are beyond that point; suffice to say if it takes over an hour to load a list of albums it's not really a usable service. Which is a shame, because there are some favourable reviews of Pictarine out there.

Mobypicture

This site sounds promising - "share your photos, videos and audio with your friends on your favourite social sites" - but since the very well established Picasa is not supported - and, therefore, neither is the fastest growing social network in the world, Google+ - this isn't really worth a look. I only discovered Mobypicture though through Pictarine. If Pictarine can't share directly with Facebook, but Mobypicture can and Pictarine can share directly with Mobypicture - then perhaps there's some mileage. But as I write I'm still waiting for Pictarine to load my list of albums, and I won't be going anywhere near Mobypicture until I'm satisfied that it has a robust link with Picasa - either directly or through a reliable third party.

Facebook & Google+

Of course there's no real reason why we should have to rely on third party applications, as it's within the means of both companies to make their own photo handling better. But since these are rivals it's very unlikely that either would see fit to put the wishes of their users first; Facebook are unlikely to put a "share album to Picasa/Flickr/whatever" button on their photo pages of their own accord, and neither are Google+ likely to add a native "Share to Facebook" button in their Google+ or Picasa album views. Which is shooting themselves in the foot slightly, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, whichever service were to offer that function first would most likely become my primary online photo management service. If Facebook want me to spend more time on their site, they need to allow me to manage my content on other sites through their site. The same goes for Google and, indeed, anyone else.

Secondly, both companies claim that they value the notion of putting users in control of their own data, and make it easier to share whatever we want with whomever we want. If they're serious about that, they should acknowledge that some of those "whomevers" don't use their services, and that their users will still want to share with them - which means being able to throw stuff at other services from within their own.

But it's not just sharing that's problematic. There are some pretty basic requirements that neither site meets; the ability to merge two or more albums together at album level, not at photo level, is something that's frustrated me on both sites in recent days. The ability to automatically identify and remove duplicate photos in an album (preferably merging comments/tags if appropriate) is technically more difficult but far from impossible, and would be a very useful feature for users.

Conclusion

Well, I signed up for Pictarine just before starting writing this blog entry and it's been trying to load my list of albums since then and still hasn't succeeded. So the best of the services that are available at the moment definitely seems to be Showzey. But the reality is that there's a substantial gap in the market for a decent online photo manager. It's a gap that could be filled by one of the big players themselves (Google, Facebook or Yahoo [Flickr]) quite easily, or a nice niche for a startup to come along and fill. It's clearly not the easiest nut to crack - lots of issues with APIs and and setting up servers that are able to cope with large volumes of images being punted backwards and forwards - but nobody said these things were easy. They are, though, sorely needed.

Update
Not surprisingly, as soon as I published this blog post I came across another one which lists the services mentioned above plus several others:
http://www.mysensetechnology.com/2011/11/group-albums-and-photos-from-facebook.html

I've started using Fotolink (the last one mentioned in that post) and am very impressed so far!

Privacy is about security, not shame

A very silly article was posted on the BBC website yesterday. Cindy Gallop is identified by the Beeb as "an advertising consultant and commentator on cultural issues" (well, that makes all of us, surely). In her article she suggests that instead of trying to compartmentalise our lives and only share certain information with certain people, we should just not worry and make everything public, and instead concentrate on our image. Worries about privacy on social networks are unfounded, she implies.

By managing our image, she means that we should be consistent in our behaviour and not be one thing to one person and something else to someone else. If you don't want your boss to see photos of you as an idiot drunkard puking your guts out in the city centre, then don't be an idiot drunkard puking your guts out in the city centre. Just don't do stuff you'll be ashamed for other people to see.

Well, that's a sound argument; it's not one I disagree with. But it completely misses the point.

I'm not ashamed of what I do or of who I am. If I take my family on holiday for a couple of weeks, that's not something I hide from the world because I'm ashamed of it. But if I plaster the fact that my house is going to be empty for a fortnight all over the internet, that's a massive security risk.

My date of birth and mother's maiden name are nothing to be ashamed of. Sharing them could turn out to be pretty useful - more birthday greetings perhaps, and maybe a friendly genealogist might trace my family tree for me. But publicising information banks use to reset online accounts is never a wise  move.

I agree with Cindy that it's silly to pretend you're something you're not, that telling lies is a bad thing, and being open, honest and transparent is good. But to pretend that privacy of information doesn't matter, that it's ok to share everything about you, that worries about what Facebook might do with your information are unfounded - well, that's just daft. It's embarrassing.

It's something to be ashamed of.

How to update Twitter from Google+ (without browser extensions)

Update: The plusfeed.appspot.com feed no longer works, so this method no longer works either! Still, this article may be useful for future reference...

You may have come across this article from Justin Bee, which explains how to update Facebook directly from Google+ without the need for any browser extensions. Justin's approach uses email to send a message from Google+ to Facebook.  Justin's article mentions that there may be similar ways to update Twitter, but they would rely on third party services that the author wasn't too sure about. Justin also mentions a significant downside to his method -it relies on the message being in the subject of the email, which Google+ truncates after 50 characters.

So I've taken a slightly different approach - although mine does rely on third party services, and actually doesn't result in a real-time update, but at least has a longer character limit. It also has the advantage of not needing to do anything extra in Google+ - all of your public posts are turned into tweets automagically.

It works in two steps. First, grab an Atom feed of your Google+ public posts; and second, publish that feed to Twitter. Here's the method, step-by-step:

1. In Google+, go to your profile.
2. The URL will be https://plus.google.com/[your Google+ ID number]/posts. Copy your Google+ ID number to your clipboard.
3. There are several RSS/Atom feed-to-Twitter applications available; I use one of the most popular and easiest to use, Twitterfeed. You can log into it via OpenID, i.e. using your Google or Twitter account, so you don't have to remember a new password. So, log into Twitterfeed (or an alternative of your choice)
4. Create a new feed, selecting the options of your choice, but using the following as your feed URL: http://plusfeed.appspot.com/[your Google+ ID number] 
   Select the minimum refresh period (currently 30 minutes) and post up to the maximum number of posts at a time (currently 5).

Job done! Now Twitterfeed will check your Google+ public feed for new posts every half an hour and post those to Twitter.