As someone who's grumbled at the semi-occasional glitch and lag in Google Photos I feel bad reading this. It's a genuinely hard problem.
Don't. They killed a good product, Picasa, which didn't have these problems because it didn't need to solve them.
There's no way Google Photos - or any cloud solution - will be an adequate replacement to handle my 100GB+ library of JPEGs, RAW files, and videos, with instant editing and access to all of it -- if only because it doesn't take a second to pull 100GB of data from the net!
Not everything needs to be cloud-based -- but not according to Google's vision. Picasa still does a fine job for me, but I have to preserve my copy of the installer because Google wouldn't want me to have it any more.
And 100gb is comparatively small for a photo and video library. The article mentions testing with 250k photos, which would be well over 100gb (2-3 times that at minimum, significantly more if RAW and high res).
I read the article, paying special attention to section 4, aptly titled "Smoke and Mirrors".
There's always a need to pull in as much data as the user wants to actually interact with.
No matter what tricks you pull, you'd still need about 1s to pull in a 10MB photo over a 100mbps connection at full speed, and most people don't have that. Reading data off a disk is an order (or two, with an SSD) of magnitude faster.
And sometimes, I just want to flip through the library and look at a lot of photos without having to wait seconds for each one to load.
Sure, the layout algorithms are still important, and that's what a lot of the article is about. But all king's horses and all king's men can't make the latency of a javascript UI with a network backend comparable to a compiled program interacting with a disk.
Thank you, but smoke and mirrors aren't for everyone. Google Photos fulfills an obvious need, but it's not a Picasa replacement.
Editing via Paint.NET and exporting to the Web via jAlbum.
Requiring a G+ account didn't help to gain my love.
2) Edit mostly via RawTherapee (with special help from MS ICE & photoFXlab masks & Silver Efex Pro)
3) Distribute & Share with Google Photos (jpgs down-sized below 16MP) [upload with web browswer interface avoids all the confusion around auto backup and deletes]
Remember the old picasa UI? it just showed the photos, that's it, nothing fancy, on complicated calculations in js...
Also off topic ... but medium UI is getting worse and worse, on a laptop, fixed heading + fixed message on the bottom (that can't be dismissed), really? not much real estate left for the actual content. And don't get me started on the pictures that take 10 seconds to load, because of "lazy loading" bound to the scroll position...
Oh, how Google would want you to forget it. It still runs circles around anything that came to replace it, while running on a decade-old machine managing 100GB+ of photos in mixed formats.
Maybe these statements should be qualified. I'm an average user in terms of photos: I take them sometimes, usually from my phone, I don't like having lots of duplicates in various devices and I don't care to manage all the backups by myself; I just don't want to lose them.
I'm not a professional photographer and it feels like there's a world of difference in terms of what UI one might want if they are. Kinda like as a professional developer I don't care for my text editor's ability to print pages, I want it to syntax highlight.