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by 4ad 3185 days ago
> What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos.

100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums.

The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums.

> and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour"

It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times.

Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway.

> (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?

It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data.

I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly.

> you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything?

I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.

2 comments

FWIW, all these reasons are why I pay Flickr.

I attempted over the years to use the various incarnations of Google's photos but they consistently mangled pictures, canceled / renamed / migrated services, bungled who gets to see what under what Google Accounts, etc., until I was browbeaten into conceding defeat.

I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong. So unless you fix the metadata, the only sort you can have is manual.

Note: If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again? What's the use case? Throwaways? You're making on average a new album every 3 days, which still seems a little awkward. And innumerably more shared with you, means, what, 10 albums shared with you a day? It's amazing you have time for detailed and thoughtful HN comments. You should switch to pictures, they're worth a thousand words.

> FWIW, all these reasons are why I pay Flickr.

I am very happy to pay someone to take care of my problems and I am a big fan in general of paying for software and services. Not sure exactly how Flickr would help me though, but I will take a look at Flickr.

Does it integrate with the iOS/macOS photo library? Basically if I make an album in Photos on an iPhone, does it get synced up as an album by the flickr app, or does it just upload the pictures? Similarly, does it integrate with Photos on the mac, or do I need to use some other method to get my pictures that lives outside Apple Photos?

> I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong.

Why is the time "very probably wrong"? I don't understand this, everybody uses NTP or whatever the GSM/telecom equivalent is. I haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.

> If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again?

I rarely search for specific albums, usually I prefer to view all the pictures and search by date. Albums are just a grouping mechanism for sharing. Sometimes "an album" contains just one picture.

When I go in vacation, etc, I might create a named album that I can reference later, but other than that, yeah, albums are throwaways that are just for grouping a set of pictures at a moment in time.

> haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.

Not talking about mobile devices. Talking about cameras.

A dozen of us from work flew to have lunch at Noma in Denmark. We combined pictures after. There were nearly as many wrong times as there were people in the group. No software could have machine sorted these.

> Flickr

Flickr integrates with camera roll to upload originals in background but you manage albums and sharing in their app or web, and share via URLs or app. Only you have to be a member.

Ah, of course that cameras always have time set wrong!

Personally I use cloud services like iCloud only for my iPhone pictures. For my "real" photography I just keep files on a NFS server (and Lightroom is a pain with NFS...), I don't import then in cloud services.

> I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day).

What problems do you have with Google Photos on iOS, macOS? I use it regularly with web (windows, macOS) and my android, iOS devices and have no major complaints. For me, it's by far the best photos solution there is.