Google Photo falters at the line … …

I doubt the race is over yet but the google photos, google+, picasa team failed to deliver while I was travelling in two aspects. First the uploading of images from my phone was very erratic (I suspect an automatic upldate to the google photos app didn't load correctly and was queued on my phone for a few days). Second from about Wednesday last week till this morning I have not been able to reconnect into my google account from my laptop. This came about because I was continually getting an error message when trying to upload an album from picasa (the progressive album of my travels for my family) So I log out from picasa and when I tried to load back in I always got a blank pop up screen. Gmail was logged in so I tried logging out and back in …same problem!

I was still seeing google notification of new items in assistant (aka annoy-ant) and could usually click on the link and see those items, but alas trying to look around google photos from there usually resulted in the dinasaur screen (webpage not available). I suspect my lack of access was a google problem.

Thus I abandoned using and of the google team to preview,cull & share and went over to aftershot, perfect photo suite and  lightroom (painfully slower than picasa) and uploaded where necessary to flickr. The flickr app on my phone was slowly keeping pace with phone photos. The tortoise is well ahead now.

Once I got home I was able to, after a few tries (getting the same blank pop up screen) to eventually log via picasa. Then after a few more tries upload some photos in a picasa album to google photo’s collection. Then several on my previous retries showed up and it was clear I was attempting to upload the same thing several times. It took a while to abort everything and start again, then I notice I had a strange email (shown on the right). Whilst I do still have windows explorer on my laptop, I always used google chrome? I can only assume this was picasa (using a microsoft’s internet explorer pop up window). I’m not seeing a very consistent approach here to photo management from google. It appears more like the rabbit is chasing its tail.

Clearly the competition to gobble up all my photos is far from over, Now that I’m back home I found the desktop apps for google’s auto backup and Flickr’s Uploadr had both decided to pop up and ask me (yet again) to start uploading everything. Perhaps that are just letting me know they have been updated. Perhaps that is were the real race is. Needless to say I declined.
 .vs.