Google Photos

Just two months ago I complained about problems in Android's Photo management. I've been using Google's new Photos app for few weeks now and I have to say that I'm impressed.

Most of the things I complained about have been fixed. I've tried the app on my iPad and Nexus5 and it works nicely on both. Also the web app works well in browsers I use. The default quality is good enough for me, so I enjoy the unlimited capacity offered.

Photo editing options are quite basic, but good enough for most of my uses. Synchronization has so far worked quite well. Sometimes there is a bit of delay even when devices are on same WiFi, but this has so far been so rare that it has not really bothered me. I've also seen couple of crashes on Nexus5.

Search feature is quite cool. I haven't added any metadata (apart from location) to images and search is able to recognise if the picture is about a skyscraper, cityscape, a person, cat or something else.. I haven't tagged person's names to images since I'm still slightly privacy paranoid about letting google now who is who.

I'm happy enough that Google Photos is my main image library from this point forward. I'm not going to migrate my old iPhoto library, but all new pics goes to Google by default and I will occasionally make local "backup" to iPhoto.

Elop is gone

I can't say I'm sad about Elop finally leaving, but unfortunately this may just be one of the next steps toward new rounds of layoffs among the ex-Nokia people now working at Microsoft.

I'm happy to see Jo Harlow gone. I haven't got any inside knowledge how the decision to go to all-in to Windows Phone -platform happened, but I've always suspected that there was a lot of company politics involved and that Harlow was one of the key proponents of the WP-strategy. After all, she was one of the few old Nokia executives that had better position after the strategy change. As Symbian boss she had most to lose if MeeGo would've succeeded.