My Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has such vast powers compared to my iPhone 4S that I can’t figure out how to do anything anymore…
Apple offers Photo Stream (now “iCloud Photos”) where photos taken from one’s phone show up on one’s desktop computer. After that I would copy them into regular folders and pick the ones to publish using Google’s Picasa, then push up to Google+ for sharing with friends and family.
What is the Android equivalent? All of the photos go up to Google+ automatically. But I can’t figure out how to bring them down to Picasa. The automatically uploaded directories don’t appear as folders that I can import from Google+ into Picasa. And there doesn’t seem to be a catch-all “sync everything” feature. What are people supposed to do? Once the photos are in the cloud keep them in the cloud and do all of the editing with a Web browser? The interface is very slow and cumbersome compared to the Picasa desktop app.
One thing that seems to work pretty well is Dropbox. A single setting has everything from the phone go into “Camera Uploads” and I can use that folder the way that I used iCloud Photos (actually it seems to work better; I had trouble attaching or uploading files directly from the iCloud Photos folder, which didn’t work like other Windows directories). Somehow, though, I can’t wrap my head around the idea that I need a third party service (Dropbox) to connect two Google services (the phone and Picasa).
Am I missing something obvious?
What is the best workflow that people have found to go from the Android phone to archival directories on a Windows machine hard drive and then to push the best images up to Google+ via Picasa?
The ‘obvious’ thing you’re missing is that Picasa is legacy stuff. The meat that matters now is Google+. Picasa will slowly and surely be folded into it.
the Dropbox method is how I do it too.
Amazon Cloud Drive. Phone –> Amazon –> Desktop Computer –>Your favorite folders. I use it all the time.
You also cannot share a photo directory like you could with Picasa unless it is a “post” on Google+. I believe the other commenter is correct: Picasa is a legacy product and “Google+ photos” is going to replace / subsume it. On the back end, I believe they’re already using the same storage. Expect to lose functionality. This seems to be a trend around the new “+” driven Google products and design thinking.
It’s a work in progress. Over time all the stuff you expect from Picasa will be filled into Google+. In the meantime, you can try using Google Drive to store photos as there’s some integration built in with Google+ already. I get the feeling that Google made a decision to avoid spending any development time on desktop apps outside of Chrome and Drive.
This seems to be a known issue. It did work until some recent time ago when Google changed the way that the Instant Uploads worked from presenting a single folder to multiple date-based folders. Picasa no longer recognizes the new format.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-discuss/nPOdc1E3TsM
Amazing that answers to the same question you asked last year
is same as this year.
Ya a 2011 phone will be slower than 2013 phone with 8 cores.
amazing how that works right.
You are suppose to use Google Drive to store and Snapseed to edit.
Why would you want desktop or third party software.
I remember looking about 1 year ago and people asked for this feature on Google forums – google said “they’re working on it”… meanwhile there’s
Folder Sync: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImRrLnRhY2l0LmFuZHJvaWQuZm9sZGVyc3luYy5mdWxsIl0.
there are other similar apps. Dropbox might be better (?) but you can enable G+ sync with a Google Drive folder. https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2423575?hl=en
Sync your computer with Google Drive.
Edit with Picassa on your local Google Drive desktop folder which will sync back with your google drive, and show up on G+, from there share as you wish?
Then again if you don’t want automatic syncing b/w GDrive and G+, just use Dropbox and upload to G+ manually as usual.
Not sure how much this helps but I can:
+ let G+ on Android upload my photo,
+ visit picasaweb.google.com and see my photo
+ select Actions / download to picasa
and then I am asked to download it and launch picasa
And then picasa desktop launches and picasa finds my photo in
Web Albums
${DATE}
And on disk the photo is in:
My Pictures \ Downloaded Albums \ BIGNUM \ ${DATE}