software – Page 2 – Just thoughts

In a recent post on another blog – Thought grazing – I wrote about the belief I had been moving towards that perhaps it was time to consider paying for software services that I’d grown to rely on. This was in the context of Google+ being “sunsetted” and the change in entitlements with Flickr that had encouraged me to move to take a Pro membership. That means that I now am paying for the following services – LastPass, iCloud, Google Drive, Vimeo, Flickr, the Adobe Photography Programme and of course my web hosting. These are all services that are core to my personal IT needs, so if I need them, I shouldn’t mind paying for them.

But now, another set of issues has emerged. Out of nowhere, I can’t remember any notification of forthcoming changes, I found that my Feedly account was not working the way it used to. I couldn’t save articles to Pocket as I’d done before, so my whole web reading and bookmarking strategy was in jeopardy. I had to consider – do I look for a different RSS reader, or do I pay-up to stay with what I’ve relied upon for a number of years – in fact all the years since Google Reader was “sunsetted” – note what a nuisance Google can be with their “free” services! Whilst at it, and to anticipate what might be just a little way down the road, I decided to subscribe to Feedly Pro AND Pocket Premium. Hopefully an increase in subscription income for the two of them will provide some security to two services that I really do rely on!

I think I’m now fully covered because I really don’t see Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Photos becoming subscription services … do you?

Back in November I posted on the inadequacies of the new Google Photos offering. Since then there have been a few improvements and some of the things that I was unhappy about then can be circumvented by adopting the “View on Web” approach, such as commenting on individual photos in albums.

However last week, perhaps the announcement that I had feared would one day come was made. Google are “retiring” Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. Let’s not focus on the suggestion that this is a forward-looking development – they use the phrase “moving on” to announce the killing-off of a much-loved friend – let’s just pause to reflect upon what this actually means for anyone who invests time and effort into using “free” infrastructure, provided by a large corporate. The significance of this announcement and others recently from Oxygen Cloud and Copy (Barracuda/Seagate) are that one should be very careful in choosing what IT cloud infrastructure you decide to use and also, and more importantly, be very mindful of what you should do if that infrastructure is taken away from you.

Now this “event” may turn out all right in the end. Google may actually make an API available for developers to upload images directly into Google Photos in the same way as Jeffrey Friedl did to allow photos to be uploaded from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to Picasaweb. And yes, nothing has been lost in this case as all my Picasaweb photos and albums do appear in Google Photos. And yes, I can upload to Google Drive to the Google Photos folder, but somehow, as yet, it’s not as clean and straightforward a way of uploading the images to the cloud for onward sharing, as it had been.

Perhaps, I ought to use Apple’s iCloud – after all as I have a nearly 100% Apple IT ecosystem my investment should be safe there … shouldn’t it?. Or alternatively, perhaps I ought to use Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage – after all as I rely so heavily on their software – they’ll look after me … won’t they?

It’s just events like these that make me wonder whether I want to be reliant on a large corporate and ponder on whether there’s another way, and perhaps there might be … watch this space.

Tag: software

Paying for software services