Picasa won. I failed.
Here is the simple task I set myself:
Merge the 80 photos from my phone, and the 100 photos from Angela's phone, into one Picasa album.
10 mins, 15 tops I thought.
From memory, here are the steps I went through.
Google+ has this great feature where every photo you take is automatically synched up to a private album in your Picasa account. Perfect. So all our photos are in Picasa already. All I need to do is give Angela contribute access to my Tongariro Crossing album, and she can then drop her photos into that album. Easy.
So my first task is to share my album with Angela.
Okay, this can't be hard.
A bit of googling around points me at the 'edit visibility' link on the home page of Picasa. No, that's not it. This only lets me set broad-brush access - private, limited to anyone with the link or public.
So I go into the album itself. Could it be 'Album properties'? No, that gives me the same broad-brush options as before.
Aha - it could be 'G+ Share'? Even though I don't want to share through Google+? I go into here and it appears completely wrong - because I can only share with circles, apparently. But after 15min or so of googling I discover that the 'share with' box, with circles to add and remove, actually lets you type into it too. All well and good. I enter Angela's name, and we appear to be getting somewhere.
Now Angela's name appears on the right-hand side of the screen, under 'people I've shared with'. All well and good. (But why can't I add people directly to this list?!). And by myself (I've got used to the fact that the UI is obtuse and irrational now) I notice a little icon, about 5px high, that looks like an up-arrow. 'Press to allow Angela to contribute photos' the tool tip says. Hooray! So I press it. It changes a shade ever so slightly, which apparently indicates she can contribute photos now.
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| My cross/frustrated face. Angela took this. I won't even start on what I had to do to get this pic from her account to a blog entry I authored. |
OK, about 45 min down. First task done. Second task must be dead easy - go in as Angela, and open the album that has been shared with her.
I expected the album to turn up right under Angela's picasa account. 'All my albums shared with me', that sort of thing. Doesn't seem to be jumping out at me? I google some more. No, Picasa doesn't work like that. You get an email sent to you, and if you don't have that email, you'll never, ever find the album. okay then, here's an email from Google+ giving her access to the album. But trouble is, it turns up in Google+, with no way of uploading photos. Bit more googling to work this out. Someone else says she can go into my picasaweb home page - http://picasaweb.google.com/mrgilbe1 - and there it will be. But this advice is old... (a lot of picasa advice is pre-G+ and just doesn't work anymore). Go to that URL and you are handily diverted to my Google+ photos page, again with no way of contributing to any albums from here.
So Angela can contribute to my album - but any attempt to get to a picasa page that actually gives her an 'upload' or 'copy' button is grabbed hold of and thrown across to Google+.
More googling.
Someone else has found that when you hit the 'G+ Share' button, there is a small link at the very bottom that is labelled 'share via email only'. This actually means, 'Share without all that Google+ shite getting in the way'. At last! I can put in Angela's email address, and I can even click to allow her to contribute, straight from this dialog. Wonderful. I fill in the dialog and at last, Angela gets an email that gives her a real picasa link that really shows my photos and really gives her an 'add photos' link.
Right, we're up to about 1 hour 15 now. Two tasks down. The third and hopefully simplest of all to go. Copy Angela's photos across to my album.
Picasa lets you copy photos to multiple albums, and Angela has access to my album to contribute to. So presumably this means she can just take her 80-odd photos and copy them across to my album.
I really presumed a lot, going into this, didn't I?!
If Angela tries to copy photos to another album - she gets a list of her albums. Albums she can contribute to are no-where in sight.
If on the other hand she starts at my album, she can load photos all right - from the hard drive of the machine she's working on. Not picasa. Aaaaargh!!! So what we're looking at is, to get photos copied from one picasa album to another, she needs to first download them to a PC hard drive - all couple of gigs of them - and then upload them again. Surely not!! Surely!!!
At 1 hour 35 I gave up.
There might well be a way to do this. I have no idea. I am beaten.
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