On Thursday, February 9, 2017 at 2:13:17 AM UTC-7, Google Picasa Web Albums API wrote: > > As the v3 changes are rolling out, we're actively looking for situations > where functionality that we aren't planning to turn down is impacted. > Expect replies on some of the other threads on this forum soon. >
Yay, I'm very excited by the prospect of getting some replies on questions that have been raised. I'll be up front with you, the reputation of Picasa / Google Photos has taken a bit of a hit, at least from the perspective of developers trying to work/integrate with it. We all want features, bug fixes, updated docs, etc. but IMO the #1 thing that has people starting to look for alternative solutions is the radio silence. I'm a huge fan of Google generally and would love, love, love to remain on Google Photos. But I'm actively evaluating other solutions because when I encounter a problem that looks like a bug, and then spend many hours confirming that I'm doing what the docs say but getting unexpected results, there's no next step - there's no way to get in contact with anyone who can confirm that it's a bug or point out why my conclusion is wrong, and thus really no hope of a resolution. For example, I found a problem that, after weeks of fiddling with it, I'm convinced is a bug (either in the service or in the documentation at least), so I went to the Google Photos developer website and followed the links to an issue tracker and found where someone had reported the problem a year ago. Several people commented on the ticket saying they were having the same problem, but nobody from Google ever commented on it. Finally, a month ago, someone from Google commented on the ticket, hooray! Unfortunately, their comment was to say that the bug tracker was not used and that we should instead go to the Google Photos developer website to learn how to report issues (never mind that that's how I got to that tracker in the first place). They also suggested posting the question to Stack Overflow with the "appropriate tag" (whatever that might be?) but if it's an apparent bug what I really need to do is get the issue in front of someone on the Google Photos team. Posting issues to this forum seems like it'd be a decent approach, except that many of the threads just sort of die off with no response whatsoever, at least not from anyone at Google. Occasionally I'll be searching for an answer and get excited because I see someone from Google is responding, and then check the date on the message and see that it's from several years ago. :( So... yeah... that's where I'm at: a semi-irrational loyalty to Google has kept me here longer than probably makes sense, but even that's been stretched to the limit and now I'm shopping around. But if the Google Photos team is at a point where it can start engaging with the developer community again, that's welcome news. I just beg of you to not string us along - maybe it'd be good if you could help set expectations. For example, if this forum was going to be checked only once a month by only one person from the Google Photos team to peruse new messages, that'd be really unfortunate - but at least it'd help us in the community adjust our expectations about getting responses. Or, if we could get even just a hint about where things are going, that would help tremendously. I'm aware that there are often corporate policies that prohibit info being shared about future plans and the like, but hopefully a balance can be struck between that and the need to give developers confidence that this is a platform and service worth using. For example, the announcement that we can no longer create albums programmatically is a bit of a shock, but could you at least hint at whether or not this is a permanent thing? Like, perhaps the fact that the 3.0 API has greatly reduced functionality is due to some big refactoring/transition that you can't talk about, but it was needed so that the team could get to a good spot internally so that it there is a good foundation upon which new functionality can be built. Even if you aren't allowed to explain why the feature set is reduced, and even if you can't go into any detail about what features are planned for the future, can you at least comment on whether there are plans to add features down the road? I think many of us are holding out hope that someday there will be a robust Google Photos API like the one for Google Drive and other Google services, but frankly that hope seems rather unfounded right now - we see a contracting API, no indication of where things are going, and very little communication, so it looks like we're heading more in the direction of abandonware and the service eventually being shelved. Are you allowed to share any info at all that helps reassure us developers that this isn't the plan? Thanks, -Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Picasa Web Albums API" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-picasa-data-api. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
