A dozen regrets, and reasons I’m not excited about google photo

That 15^th March deadline is approaching fast for the cutting off picasa in favour of google photos. Although I know I must keep using google photo for my blog, but it is clearly wanting in many aspects compared with Picasa web albums, connected to Picasa of the desktop

1. Sharing privately is now very difficult if your family member do not have google accounts. It is possible to send links to selected photos and albums, and whilst you can share publicly to a number of social networks with one click, you need to get a link and then cut and paste to be able to email the link. The URL is not a direct link to the photo anyway but some google address that google needs to translate. All this is tedious and not obvious.
2. Albums in google photos should be called events or photo sessions as they are rigidly saved as the chronology (of the first uploaded photo). Something you are trying to constantly append to (eg a 365 daily photo or year long photos from one location) disappears into the past If you don’t provide an album organization the photos are grouped by date anyway. One small screen and even standard opens because of the album tile size, anything older than a couple of weeks disappears “below the fold” (ie you have to go scrolling to find it).
3. You can no longer choose create common licensing. In fact it would appear you can not copyright images either (at least there is nothing to that effect displayed). The terms of service
4. The People organization is not as comprehensive as the people (face recognition) in picasa
5. Classification of Places and Things are even less successful. What’s more disappointing here is there is no way to redress the misclassifications. (eg. my wife does not appreciate being on the tile labelled things)
6. Why oh Why! was SnapSeed editing removed from google photos? The current edit capabilities are so very limited. Its just sad really.
7. Why is something as fundamental as resize (eg smaller to email) missing?
8. Where is the exposure histogram?
9. What about all the other EXIF & metadata?
10. What has happened to geotagging (location)? Is it merely being used occasionally in the location organization. Why not have an option to display it in photo details?
11. I haven’t been successful in getting google photo autobackup to be selective, either from my phone camera or computer, it just behaves like a vacuum cleaner (and miss-behaves a lot as well, so I have removed it). The android google photos app kept updating itself and then crashing requiring yet another download and re-setup I just gave up and deleted it (and enjoyed having a lot of space back on my phone). If my older android version was not compatible wouldn’t it have been better not to have kept trying to update. No matter its gone also.
12. I’m frequently off the grid (ie no internet access a lot of the time) and I normally load and preview on my laptop computer first (I know I will continue using picasa to do this) THUS the [DEPRECATED] picasa connection makes the cloud based google photos irrelevant to me.

The list could go on but my firm opinion now is that google photos is way below my expectations. Ok Google photos can keep storing images for my blog but is not the place I intend to use to share and store my photos on-line anymore. I definitely intend to keep using picasa on my computers locally but the search is on for an on-line service that makes sharing and organizing easy, that will at a pinch do a reasonable job of simple editing, not strip out metadata and clearly display licensing, eg creative commons &/or copyright. Face recognition and auto organization might be nice but that’s not the deal breakers, lack of control is.