Google Photos — another one joins the club

This week­end Google unveiled their new online image stor­age ser­vice — Google Pho­tos.

It’s not Picas­sa, though it can use it. It’s also sep­ar­ate from Google+. Inter­est­ing. Meh. I’ll stick with Flickr. Here’s why.

If you want unlim­ited free stor­age, this may work for you, though when you upload your pho­tos, you have to use Google’s ‘high qual­ity but free’ set­ting, not the ori­gin­al set­ting. This means RAW and oth­er file formats will be converted.

Also, there does­n’t appear to be a way to share the link dir­ectly to the image file — rather all shared links jump to a Google Pho­tos page with the image embed­ded in it. Not a big deal but that means you can­’t dir­ectly embed images stored at Google Pho­tos in a blog post, for example. You still have to use ser­vices such as imgur, etc.

And the image edit­or built into Google Pho­tos cre­ates unusu­al arti­facts around the image while in edit mode.

It’s fine when you accept the changes, but in my case, the image appeared pos­ter­ized while I was edit­ing it, throw­ing a blue tint in some areas. Not great.

As I said, I’ll stick with Flickr.