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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

>As someone who's grumbled at the semi-occasional glitch and lag in Google Photos I feel bad

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.

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It appears you didn't really read the article. There's no need to pull 100gb of data.

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).

>It appears you didn't really read the article. There's no need to pull 100gb of data.

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.

I went back to use the filesystem as I was used to do before.

Editing via Paint.NET and exporting to the Web via jAlbum.

Requiring a G+ account didn't help to gain my love.

1) Folders date-labelled when the files were moved from camera to computer 20180712 and files date & sequence labelled 20180712-005.ARW 20180712-005-1.tif as variants are created

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]

I've got 30GB+ of photos/videos in my Google Photos (unclear count due to Pixel free upload). I launch Google Photos, I see the most recent photos. I scrub down to 2011, there's the photos in 2011. It doesn't try to load the entire library in one go.

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