Google+ is not a photo sharing service

With all the frenzy about Google+ and the ton of photographers there, let me remind you that Google+ is not a photo sharing service. It's a social network that does not primarily target photographers. That's a good thing as I mentioned before - because it allows you to reach a broader audience than on dedicated photo sharing sites.

However, it also means that the wishes and needs of photographers are not getting the weight that one who belongs to this user group would hope for, of course.

The latest confirmation for that was the update of Google+'s so called "lightbox", their full-screen photo viewer: on an otherwise black background, the comments bar to the right of the photo has a white background now. There is also no way to get a "clean" view of just the photo: either the "hide comments" button or the caption/comments are shown on top of the photo itself (ironically, that happens when you click the button to hide the disgrace of the white comment box).

I can't help but think that, while excitedly playing with opacity and fade effects, the developers lost track of the original purpose of a photo viewer. :-S The lightbox is now (over) loaded with social networking features - the share button, the face tagger, the +1 button, the white comments box... it is, to say the least, not exactly an aesthetically pleasing presentation method for photos in it's current implementation.

At the same time, Google is also trying to hide Picasa Web Albums (their original and dedicated photo sharing service) more and more: if you follow the link to a Google+ users Picasa Web Albums, you will automatically be redirected to the Google+ album view from now on - which means you can't "follow" Google+ users Picasa Web activity anymore if you're a "normal" Picasa Web Albums user - the Google+ album view doesn't offer the "Follow" feature from Picasa Web Albums. Everyone's supposed to join Google+.

And you know what makes dedicated photo sharing services like 500px and Flickr really shine? The RSS feeds that they offer. I mentioned before that I love feeds - both 500px and Flickr offer dedicated feeds that contain all the photo uploads from your contacts. It's a super convenient way of following the photo activity of your friends and contacts - via Google Reader for example. In stark contrast to that, Google+ doesn't offer any feeds at the moment. You can still use the method I described in my article to subscribe to a users photo stream, but it happened to me already that the original Picasa Web Albums feed of some Google+ users were empty. Whether that's a bug or intentionally remains to be seen.

Stay tuned...