Google+ and Picasa Web Albums: An Unfortunate Connection

After using Google+ for a couple of months as a photographer, I want to share some comments and observations. Because the longer I look at it, the more obvious it becomes to me that Google did itself a disservice by integrating Picasa Web Albums with Google+. The two systems are just too different. I also think that it is due to post an honest opinion when the service is labelled "a photographers paradise" again and again.

Picasa Web Albums is an album based online photo sharing service - Google+ is a post based news stream. The most obvious problem with that is: in Picasa Web Albums, the visibility/privacy is album based, in Google+ it is post based. The discrepancy between these two sharing models leads to some unfortunate crutches.

Disconnected.

Lets begin with the biggy: unlike Facebook, Flickr or 500px, a shared photo and the post it is shared in ("activity item", ie. what shows in the stream that people who follow you will see) are disconnected on Google+. A photo can exist happily all alone in an album, and while that is not a problem, you can delete the post in which you shared a photo, but the photo itself will remain in the album - an unaware user who accidentally shared a photo with the public might embarrass him- or herself that way. You can also delete the photo from the album, and a post with a broken thumbnail will remain in your stream. A warning message pops up, but the real problem is that post and photo should be one single unit.

Instead, there are multiple types of photo-posts in Google+:

1. a combined "upload and share" post via the web interface when uploading a single photo. In this case, the comments to the post are the same as the comments to the photo, but the descriptive text in the post is detached from the photo.
2. an "album share" post, created for example by uploading more than one photo at once. The resulting post will combine the photo-thumbnails into a single post. Comments to such a post and the descriptive text are not connected to the shared photos in any way.
3. a "photo activity" post for any photo that was not shared using (1) and that receives a +1 or a comment, for example when shared via method (2).
4. a post containing a Picasa Web Albums URL that is copied & pasted into a post. The comments made in the lightbox go to the photo in that case, the comments made in the stream however go to the post (yes, it's a mess).

Because of this disconnection, it is not possible to locate the post in which the photo was shared when browsing a user's albums (I began to add the URL to the post as a self-reference in the comments of the photo so I'll be able to find it again later; it is sad that this is necessary since the "state" of the photo - whether it is already in your stream or not - is known to the service). So if you write a lengthy text along with your photo, you better put it into the caption of the photo instead of the post - anything you write in the post will be "lost" somewhere down your stream after a couple of days and/or if someone browses your albums instead of your stream.

[Google never implemented both the IPTC fields "title" and "caption" in Picasa Web Albums, like Flickr did. They only and ever used "caption" for the verbose description - but imagine how handy it would be if the caption was turned into the descriptive text of the post, and the title just that - the title of the photo.]

For that reason I stopped "sharing" my photos by uploading them with the web uploader. (which is a lame crutch in itself since it still doesn't "translate" all of the metadata properly, like the keywords - oh wait, Google+ doesn't use keywords at all anyway! ...more or than later) and "pull" them into my stream with a comment or a "self+1".

Which directly brings me to the second issue with that: there is no simple "Publish to stream" feature to push a single photo that is in an album into the stream. If you're participating in one of the countless "daily photography themes" on Google+ and wish to contribute a photo that is already in one of your albums, you can't simply "push" that photo into the stream in a new post. The only "official" way to do that is to share it again - and that creates a copy of the photo in your "Photos from Posts" album, with an entirely new set of comments and +1's.

You can use a trick: copy the Picasa Web URL of the photo (not the Google+ URL!) and paste it into the post. It will appear just like a "direct" Google+ photo-share - that's method (4) I mentioned above, so beware: the comments to the post are disconnected from the comments to the photo that way. If you however use this method to share a photo that has not previously been shared into your stream, the first comment/+1 in the "lightbox view" will pull a duplicate "photo post" - method/type (3) above - into your stream.

The only way to "somewhat" connect the comments of a post and a photo is to upload the photo through the web frontend (not the Picasa software, not the export plugin for Lightroom) and share it at the time you upload it - method (1). The post and the photo will still be disconnected, but the comments to the post will also be the comments to the photo. This process itself is so cumbersome that I stopped bothering with it. There's just no way that I do all the work of captioning and keywording twice, first in Lightroom and then in the web uploader.

Organization for no one.

Because of all that, Google seems to prefer that people share their photos one-by-one, by directly adding them to a post. That way, the photos end up in separate sub-albums in the "Photos from Posts" album, each sub-album containing one single photo. Yes, one album, one photo (unless you add multiple photos to a single post, see above). A mess? You bet. Because of that, Google+ simply hides the sub-album structure, and all the photos itself are shown in the big pile of that "Photos from Posts" album directly. In the Picasa Web Albums "back end" it's a mouseclick-orgy to "drill down" to a single photo in one of these albums. If you try to organize that mess through Picasa Web Albums, you'll be annoyed rather quickly. Promised. :P

But you have to go through it in Picasa Web Albums - because in the Google+ frontend, there is no way to organize photos at all! Half a year after launching, you still cannot move photos into albums, reorganize the order of photos in an album, etc. etc. Even Facebook has some of these features (granted, their UI is terrible for that task too).

There is also no way to categorize the photos somehow in order to virtually group them, like Flickr does so nicely with it's Sets. As it is, photos in Google+ are a giant, uncontrollable mess. Using hashtags in posts? Dream on. No categories, no keywords, no search, no organization features - nothing! Good luck in finding that one photo (and maybe it's post, see above) should you wish to edit/remove it...

Photo activity became Streamspam.

Back then, in the "good old days" of Picasa Web Albums, you would receive a notification for a comment left on a photo... if you were either the owner of the photo, or had previously commented and decided to "subscribe" to further comments. Otherwise, if you were following someone, you would be "left alone". And that's how it should be.

In Google+ however, activity on a photo creates a post in your stream. If you just uploaded 100 photos from your vacation and shared the album as a whole, every first comment or first +1 on a photo will create a full "photo post" - type (3) mentioned above - in your stream, effectively "spamming" all the recipients of the album-share. This is good as a crutch since, as I mentioned above, we don't have a "Publish to stream" feature (see above), but it's really nothing but terrible if your "Friends" circle just became unreadable because one of them shared a big album and people started commenting on it.

I call that "Streamspam". This keeps me from commenting on photos in big albums, because I don't want to spam other people's reading stream. An "antisocial" feature if you ask me. Comments on a photo should be notifications to the owner of the photo and anyone who previously commented on it -- but not spam everyone who can see the album! Imagine Picasa Web Albums would send out a notification for every comment that a photo of someone you're following receives. Or if Flickr would send you a notification every time someone comments on a photo by one of your contacts! That's what's happening in Google+ all. the. time. and it's highly annoying.

Verdict.

To be enjoyable in the long run, photo sharing in Google+ has a long long way to go. It would be foolhardy of me to draw any further conclusions here or give recommendations what Google's developers should or should not do.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy being in contact with so many photographers through Google+. I made some wonderful new "cyber friends" through Google+ already. But blind "fanboyism" doesn't bring us anywhere. I'd be happy to see some of the missing features being added really soon to the service. From my point of view, it's about time. ;)

Digital black & white with color filters

I bought a red filter to try with digital black & whites. Why? First, digital black & white has the stigma of being "just another post process manipulation" and second, post processing a color image into black & white involves hundreds of little set-screws to tweak and fiddle with (as I described in my article about emulating an Infrared look, for example) - it can be quite bothersome and time consuming - and I'm not (yet:) willing to spend extra money on specialized black & white plugins like Silver Efex.

So, after a friend who often uses film mentioned that he likes to combine a red filter and a polarizer for "that dramatic look" of his black & whites, and watching the interview/about video with Michael Kenna (whose work I much adore) where it can be seen that he uses a color filter (red or orange), I thought I might try that with digital black & white, in an effort to make the process simpler, practice some reduction and give up some control over the process. Not necessarily to save time, but maybe to add some sort of veracity to my black & white images (even if it might not be visible in the final image to the viewer).

In the following paragraphs I will describe my experiences so that you may decide if you want to try that approach. Let me tell you my conclusion right away in case you do not want to read the entire article now: it is probably not worth the effort in the end. Those who do want to know the reasons now may continue reading. :)

But first, here are two of the first images that I made and showed to the public (via Google+) after the filter arrived.

The first thing worth noting when using a red filter is that the exposure times are getting way longer: depending on the situation, something between 2 and 3 stops. Combined with a polarizer (which costs another 2-3 stops, filter and effect) we're talking about exposure times being 4 to 6 stops (!) longer than without filters. Using higher ISO and/or a stabilized lens, or a tripod is due very often, even in daylight situations (in the shade for example, or when it's overcast).

The two photos above are made with my Fuji S5pro - the camera is far more forgiving, highlight-exposure wise, making it a nice choice for using it with a red filter, since the red channel seems to be particularly problematic for most digital cameras (if you want to make a photo that contains a lot of vivid reds, it might be a good idea to dial in a -1 exposure compensation to avoid blowing out the red channel).

I had set the camera to black & white so that the embedded previews (which are JPEGs, and the only thing you'll ever see on the camera's display anyway as I explained in my "A raw dilemma" post) would give me some sort of a first representation of what the final image might look like. It turned out however that the red filter throws the JPEG engine of the camera pretty far off the track - it rendered rather dull-looking previews that totally lacked contrast and "pop". After a first evaluation and some friendly hints by Tatyana Skymyrka I thought that the white balance might be causing this (I had set it to auto), but even after I manually fixed it to 5300K (daylight-like), the results didn't change.

But thankfully, the imported raw data didn't show any of these problems - I used center-weighed metering (and overexposed one stop to operate the Fuji in it's "sweet spot" and to exploit it's dynamic range reserve). Despite the red filter, I was able to use a totally normal metering.

The interesting bit is of course that you don't have to use Lightroom's "Black & White" develop option (and mixer) since the recorded data is monochrome already - it's just red instead of black & white (yep... really). All that is necessary to convert this data to black & white is to completely desaturate the image by dragging the Saturation slider to -100. That's a great simplification over using the black & white mixer, where Lightroom's Auto mix hardly if ever provides an interesting starting point.

In reality, Lightroom can still differentiate a little bit between red, orange and yellow in these images - so using the normal black & white approach with the mixer gives a little bit more control and fine-tuning (wait... wasn't that something I originally wanted to avoid?!) and is indeed the method I used for the two images above. The latitude for color-channel adjustments is quite small however. The majority of the post processing concentrates on the levels (via the Tone Curve and everything else that influences it, like Recovery, Blacks, Brightness, etc.) - that's the part which makes using the color filter quite attractive. All that fiddling with the black & white mixer - gone, not necessary.

However, in the discussion following the post on Google+ Douglas Knisley pointed out that using a color filter essentially only means throwing away (the color) information, and he wondered if it wasn't possible to emulate the effect entirely in post. I didn't make comparisons with/without the red filter initially, but after doing so there's only one thing to say: he was absolutely right.

And here's why:

Can you tell which photo was made with the red filter, and which is the digital conversion? Well? Clicking on either photo will open it in a lightbox where you can switch back and forth, and the caption will reveal it anyway, so: the first one was made with the red filter, the second is a "normal" digital black & white. The most obvious difference when making the two photos was the exposure time: the version made with the red filter is a 5 second exposure (at ISO200, f/8) and the normal one is a 1 second exposure (same ISO and aperture, of course). This is the ~2-stop disadvantage of the red filter that I already mentioned.

Upon careful inspection, you'll probably notice a lack of detail and definition in the "red filter" photo, even in the web version. It has some sort of a "soft glow" on the detail level. The second photo was digitally converted by simple comparison with the first one*. The "soft glow" is missing, but with a little bit of negative clarity, it's easy to add some of that in Lightroom. Adjust the sharpness and reduce the detail extraction, and the result should mostly be the same.

Here's a closer look at this softness (click on the thumbnails to open them in the lightbox). Sharpening for both of these images is minimal (Lightroom defaults).

This may be a desirable feat for a not-so-digital look of the images, but then again... it's easy to take some of the clarity and crispness of the normal version away by reducing clarity and sharpening - but it's pretty damn hard to add it to the red filter version, where it wasn't there in the first place.

Verdict: I think that the shortcomings of using a red filter (longer exposure times, less post processing latitude, loss of detail) outweigh the benefits (faster post processing, more "natural" black & white). It was fun and worth trying, nevertheless! The most interesting realization came with the look into** the viewfinder: devoid of color, I noticed that it was much easier for me to pay attention to details that would influence the frame and final image.

The same goes for switching the camera to black & white mode: it is so much easier to evaluate an image composition-wise if the preview in the display is black and white. Unfortunately, that's where two different interests collide: it doesn't make sense to use UniWB for the best exposure control with a linear tone curve and then render the preview as black & white, rendering the color histograms (that are crucial for using UniWB) useless... oh well, can't have it all. :)

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*) I made a Lightroom preset from that and you can download it here. It contains only black & white process and mixer settings.

**) notice how I said "into" and not "through" the viewfinder? Memorize that. It's an important difference. ;)

Consistency

I've just posted a new triplet of images over on my main website in a category that I call "small sets".

I don't know about you, but the DAMN effin' hardest thing for me is consistency in my photos and post processing. I have the tendency to craft every single image individually to get the maximum of what I want and see in the photo, but that leads to rather random results, and I have the feeling that's what is all over my albums. Randomness.

The photos are not as tightly connected to each other as I would like them to be. The albums seem to be a loose compilation of somewhat related photos, but all in all, just too different to form a unit. I think that's why people have rather generic album themes, if any. ;)

I remembered this set of three photos after yesterday's Google+ post* on my photography page because they were also made with the Fuji. It was of course beneficial that all three were black & white already, and I was able to get them into a standard 2x3 aspect ratio (whereas I very often choose an aesthetic approach to cropping, disregarding all standard aspect ratios) with a similar appearance.

I like to split-tone my monochrome images for a bit of a sepia look at the moment (oh really?!) and using black & white for a more uniform appearance could be considered cheating, but I've just spent hours on processing images from last Sunday's hike, trying to get consistent results in color, and it's a freaking nightmare. :)

By creating small sets of images like the ones combined in the linked blogpost, I'm seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. I'm still pretty far away to get a consistent look over photos that were made over a larger span of time, but it's a start.

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*) more on digital black & white with a red filter in a later post.

Previsualization

A photo friend on Google+ used this term yesterday: Previsualization. It probably means the formation of an image in your mind, already knowing what is "in there" and can be brought out in the photo by whatever means. You know... technical solutions for aesthetic problems, that sort of thing. ;)

I've recently shifted my approach to publishing photos: I still have my "monthly albums" in my old PicasaWeb account, but lately, I do not update them as regularly as I used to anymore. Instead, I collect photos that fit sets, themes, portfolios... whatever you want to call it.

One of these sets is the Huckinger Seen (lakes) in Austria which used to be one of my favorite places back in Europe for walks with a small dog, and with or without a camera. I recently "rediscovered" the image below, re-edited and added it to the set. I also submitted it to Seen.By where it was accepted.


Falling Slowly // Autumn, Huckinger See near Hofstadt/Tarsdorf, Austria. October 2009.

What's so interesting for me is that is took me such a long time to "finalize" the image and end up with an edit that I am content with. I know very well why I raised the camera to make that photo. The photo is all about that yellow-orange glow of the autumn leaves and their reflection on the water, and how that little island stood in the moor waters of the lake in solitude and silence. But back then, I didn't manage to bring out that moment in my edit (as usual, I provide the unedited image for comparison).

I want to put two things on record here:

First, it requires certain skills in post-processing to be able to turn the previsualisation into an image that matches your idea and vision. Skills that have to be acquired over time. I'm a Lightroom user for more than 4 years now, and the way I approach an edit today is very different from the approach I took in 2007. I work a lot more with local adjustments and color manipulations, as well as graduated filters and also vignetting (a technique that I frowned upon for quite a long time, I know). I know where to go and what to tweak, what's possible and what isn't, and what pitfalls and obstacles might be on the way, and how to avoid them. I think I'm a slow learner in that regard, but a thorough one.

Second, my edits benefit from time and distance. Previsualization or not - I find that very often, I end up with rather bland and boring edits when I come home with a fresh batch of images and begin working on them immediately. Maybe the memory of the scene what it actually was like is too fresh and limits the amount of editing that I allow myself in post processing, I don't know. When I look at these initial edits a day or two later, I often think: "That's not it. That's not the picture I wanted to make." Letting some days pass before beginning to edit the photos gives me the distance and freedom to bring out the actual quality of the scene as I previsualized it.

I know, that maybe sounds contradictory. But when I looked at the unedited photo, I remembered and knew exactly where I wanted to take it immediately (and two years later, I have acquired the post processing skills to get me there in a relatively short time). Don't ask me how that is possible, but it works for me - at least most of the time. I think what attracted my eye once to make me raise the camera and make an exposure, the perception, the "vision" just stayed with me.

Photography can be weird, fascinating mind-stuff. :D