Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.
Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.
Yeah, it's hilariously good actually. I find myself evangelizing the search. It's brilliant, and for the first time in my life, I don't feel a need to organize my photos.
I love the search. My wife wanted a photo of my son at the park on the slide. So I searched for 'slide'. All my photos that I've taken with any slide in it show up.
Photo search is way-cool in Google Photos. Want to see every photo of beer? Search for it. Mountains, cars, places, a named person, animals, etc. I feel the need less and less to meta-tag my photos.
That's kind of Google's modus operandi though, isn't it? They don't make desktop apps unless there is a distinct need for it (Google Earth, for example). They are all about the web!
Furthermore, Google Earth only existed on the desktop because Google bought Keyhole who made the app. Google would not have made it if it couldn't be on the web.
by the way, I can find a million alternative cloud based photo services, all with comparable features. On the other hand, there are very few desktop picture managers, especially on windows and linux.
Because a free great desktop app, paid for by a freemium (or free-for-ecosystem-lock-in) online service was quite a thing, but never a permanent/sustainable one. I suspect that I will use an utterly outdated version of picasa for quite a while, because it already wildly exceeds my demands for an offline snaps-management application in its current version. Hope they did not sneak in a kill-switch in a previous update.
I've got a rather large collection of large photo images. Images which I can and do want to work on, crop, tune brightness, contrast, etc, before publishing them. Webapps right now are amazingly primitive and crude for even the most basic of workflows, especially when you're working with raw images.
Additionally, in order to save the images I want how I created them, I'd have to pay a non-insubstantial amount of money to store them. By saving everything locally, I can have the full-resolution image for my own usage, and just pay the occasional cost to upgrade/replace hard drives.
Furthermore, I'm almost certainly going to have to have a copy of many of the images on my computer anyways. A lot of the images I make, I tend to want to share in 2 or more other places, not just a random web album. So again, the webapp usage story falls apart.
I'm also not always in a place where I have internet access which is particularly fast and reliable. So, needing a webapp in such a situation means that I can't edit and arrange my photos at all until I get to a location that has internet access. Not everyone wants to be hyperconnected all the time.
Webapps mean you're even more beholden to someone else for functionality than a desktop app. You are limited in how you can post your content, where you can post your content, and even what content you're allowed to post. A desktop application has none of these limitations, whereas they're inherent flaws in the webapp ecosystem.
I'm not a photo power user like you are by any means, but I've been using darktable[1] quite a bit lately and I've gotten to where I like it. Here's the blurb from their front page:
"darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."
Darktable isn't half as useful as Picasa for photo management, and the UI is awful. It does have some nice editing features, but it's a very different product.
Soon we'll all be running all our applications in facebook or googleplus or icloud, in a browser, in a virtual machine, on a proprietary-blob-driven all-in-one device.
Apps will be announced with huge fanfare (the most innovative thing ever), they'll show up in front of you without any action required on your part, they will change drastically in front of your eyes, corner cases will be buggy, and then in a few months to a couple of years they'll disappear forever.
They only downscale if you choose the "free unlimited" option under settings. If you choose the "Original" option they don't -- or at least, I assumed they don't! Unfortunately if you want to store more than 14GB of "Original" images -- a quite trivial quantity for the serious photog -- you have to pay. I'd have to pay $10/mo for the 1TB if I wanted to put all my pics online.
At for example Smugmug.com you can have unlimited storage of original images with a VASTLY better UI for less than $4/mo.
Google of course thinks that wrong, they want you on their platform. Doesn't mean it's what I want as a consumer (with a DSLR and NAS full of RAW images)
You are not their target market - which is fine. There many good options for serious photographers.
90% of folks just want seamless backup and organization of their photos. Phone cameras are getting pretty amazing in quality these days. Google photos caters to that demand.
