Bad Google Photos (again)

Oh google what are you doing? I had pretty much stopped using google photos (the on-line end) and deleted it of my phone (it kept updating and gobbling up lots of precious memory) but I am more fond of picasa and use it daily as my preferred method to off load photos from the memory cards.

The biggest advantage for me is I’m used to it, but it also organises into daily directories, named YYYY-MM-DD so that each day has a separate sub-directory and they automatically sort into dates in descending order. I then quickly cull the duds, the out of focus, unnecessary duplicates anything not worth keeping. I immediately delete both the jpeg & raw files

 

What I was trying to do yesterday was use googles Auto-Awesome feature to produce a small animation of a cruise ship passing late last nigh. This involved uploading 25 jpeg images, so I selecting those images and hit the big green button and let the computer sort out the bandwidth and time taken etc, the animation was created over night. (ie I didn’t watch the uploads). The animation was created as expected.

However What The?

Over night most of my photos from yesterday had also been uploaded and weird auto awesomes created everywhere (it seems to always make my HDR sets animations and almost never makes proper panorama to mention a couple of common misdemeanours). All the photos have been uploaded to the daily directories that auto backup used to use (not the albums I had been using). Except for bandwidth losses, these extra photo on google photos don’t bother me as they are private and are the size that is free to store. I just can’t figure out why they are uploaded, I have avoided loading google’s autobackup on this computer. Further I can not see anothing in picasa that might trigger such an upload.

 

The more devastating occurrence was that at the same time (or more particularly overnight) the album I am building from photos of my current trip had been filled with duplicates of some of the images and many others are now missing from the album. It is possible that I have somehow been involved in this because  I did up load some new photos into that library last night. I do have the original images on my computer and also safely backedup up on separate hard drive. The causality here is my faith in google photos, well there isn’t any left now