WARNING … TECHNICAL TALK AHEAD

I have finished creating the blog posts and photo pages from our January trip. There is another gallery waiting to go, if you would like a preview click here.

You may have noticed that I tried to make the photo presentations smaller this time around. Part of this is to improve download times and editorial content.

Earlier today, Google announced that it was shutting Picasa down. This isn’t surprising and Google seems to be doing a lot to keep the existing content viable; there will be no additional content permitted effective on 1/May. I’m hoping that these arrangements keep the methods that I use to attach content to Abelfamily.ca viable.

Google also announced that they were withdrawing support for the Picasa photo editing app. Of course, photo editing apps are often a question of taste, I have yet to find a free app that comes close to Picasa’s capabilities. In addition, the Picasa desktop app is organically linked to Picasa (therefore Google Plus) which makes it amazingly efficient. I’ll keep with Picasa for the foreseeable future but I’m alert for a good replacement.

So what to do? Here are some of my options:

1. I can wait for the app community to try to react to this by creating better ways to link Google Photos content once Picasa is gone. It seems clear to me that Google wants you looking at Google, they should probably be applauded for keeping Picasa going as long as they have; there is no profit in it; I doubt that it will be easy to link to non-Picasa content.

2. I could go back to uploading photos to the site and use plug ins to display it to you. There are a lot of advantages to this approach, the look of the content is always better. The disadvantages are largely technical, the backup burden is large, the plug ins inevitably go obsolete; after a while the photos are being displayed a bunch of different ways.

Subject to some time to think it over, I think that the solution is to move to Flikr.  There are some real benefits, Flickr doesn’t force a quality reduction on uploading; there seem to be a lot of plug ins that handle the connection to Flickr;  connectivity is built in to Flickr, it is not likely to change.

For the moment, I’m expecting to upload to Google Photos as well as Flickr while I assess things.

I’ll keep you posted.