Where did my Picasa photos go when I'm paying for storage?
July 11, 2013 12:36 PM   Subscribe

Okay. So I go to Picasa online today on my iPad and I cannot view my photos (YEARS of precious photos!) without sharing them on Google+. Whut?!?!? I pay for extra Google storage and have plenty left. I do not want to be/use Google+ (I'm not on FB, either).

I tried Googling (ha) the answer but I'm too dumb to understand what is going on. Can someone direct me to a primer (for dummies) or explain how to access my Picasa photos without sharing them with the world?

I don't have access to the originals (which is why I bought Google MB space!).

I seriously hate the G+ strong arm/automatic tactics. "Don't be evil," my butt.

Thanks to anyone who can help.
posted by Punctual to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
At least the last time I looked into this, they've basically merged Picasa into G+

That's not entirely a bad thing though, the auto-retouching, gallery, and lightbox features in the new version of G+ are top notch

what I did do though was put the photos into G+ and just not share them with anyone I didn't explicitly add
posted by Oktober at 12:39 PM on July 11, 2013


You shouldn't have to share them to view them.

When Google moved the Picasa Web View into G+, all my albums had the same sharing permissions they previously had. So you should be able to view them and keep them all set to private, essentially with a different header at the top of the page. No other real changes except the branding.
posted by trivia genius at 12:40 PM on July 11, 2013 [1 favorite]


You can also keep using the Picasa interface for uploading, which means you'll avoid the weird prompt to broadcast your images to everyone everywhere. Like previously stated, the privacy permissions remain, and you can keep your default to private.
posted by harujion at 1:18 PM on July 11, 2013


I sympathize with you and also disagree with google's general push to get people using G+. But yes, in this case at least the transfer of access doesn't have to mean making them accessible to anyone other than you.

More broadly, please consider keeping more than one copy of anything you care about. (If you really don't want to keep the photos on an offline backup drive you control, then please consider also storing copies of them on another private web service such as dropbox or box.net.)
posted by kalapierson at 1:23 PM on July 11, 2013


Best answer: It's not so much that you're in G+, but you're viewing the pictures (and potentially sharing them) through G+. The new photo interface (which has been around for... a month?) is pretty decent if you can tolerate their "cards" layout. When it comes down to it, your pictures are in your Google Drive, but Drive ties with email (for sending large files), Drive ties with Docs (they're as good as merged), and Drive hosts pics for G+. Google is a repository for all the information you allow them to host: files, email, pics, social data, location data (Google Latitude, soon to be absorbed by G+), posts (Buzz, G+), chat data (GTalk) etc. G+ is the interface, but you are not being dragged into using the social aspects of G+ in the least.

Add this link to your bookmarks: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos (must be logged in, of course)

...and now you'll never even see your G+ feed. You can go into your G+ settings to tell it never to show you popular links (it's a slider in there somewhere). Turn off hangouts, disable (if desired) Google Talk, disable notifications. G+ is as unobtrusive as you want it to be; the default settings are trying to encourage you towards a certain level of social activity (either reading or posting), but defaults are for people who don't know what they don't need; defaults are not for you.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:48 PM on July 11, 2013 [8 favorites]


Response by poster: Thank you, everyone! Sunburnt, I could understand your directions (I'm sure the others were great, but I'm so not savvy) and I truly appreciate your taking the time.

Thanks, all!
posted by Punctual at 3:02 PM on July 11, 2013


If you choose to close your Google+ account, you will them revert back to using the Picassa interface. Or, I bookmarked the picassa page and I can now go to it directly whenever.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 4:08 PM on July 11, 2013


If you decide you really don't want to use Google+, or just to ease the process of keeping more than one copy as kalaipierson suggests, you can use Google Takeout to download an archive of all your photos (listed there as Google+ photos, but it should include all the ones you had uploaded to Picasa).
posted by voodoochile at 7:48 PM on July 11, 2013


I use a bookmark for https://picasaweb.google.com/home
That sidesteps the Google+ sign-up page.
posted by mon-ma-tron at 8:20 PM on July 11, 2013


And... adding a ?noredirect=1 at the end of the URL will stop the links redirecting to the G+ ones (and G+ is blocked at my work, picasa isn't, so its pretty handy for me to know).

https://picasaweb.google.com/?noredirect=1

If the URL already has a ? in it, then use a & symbol. e.g.:

https://picasaweb.google.com/187643761237/Albumname?authkey=Gk3nfjd763?noredirect=1
posted by Admira at 8:56 PM on July 11, 2013


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