Google+ has become an online Mecca for photographers in a very short time. While many people still don’t ‘get’ Google+ (it’s a topic for a separate post), many photographers have embraced the new network and – in some cases at least – decided to abandon Flickr for good. Those who abandon or move from Flickr usually claim the service has become stale, doesn’t evolve or innovate and doesn’t listen to its users.
Google, on the other hand, has so far implemented a whole range of improvements to its relatively new service. They seem to listen to – and indeed request – users’ feedback, and I noticed many photographers (and not only) have been more then happy to submit theirs.
So here is my request. I’ve already submitted this directly to Google using their rather brilliant feedback facility on Google+, I also posted this on my Google+ profile. It’s been bugging me for a long time – and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
My photo albums. Why not allow users to decide which albums – and how many – to display in their profiles. By default, if you visit somebody’s Photos on Google+, you’ll see just four albums: images from posts, profile pics, and the two latest public ones created on Google+/Picasa. If there are more albums, and usually there are, they can be accessed via a link.
Now, we all know that we should probably spend more time browsing thought the remaining albums, but in reality I think most people will have a quick scan through one or some of the initial albums when visiting somebody’s profile, while the rest will remain unseen.
It’s possible to rotate two of the four albums by changing their date in Picasa, but Google has recently replaced Picasa with Photos in the top bar (although the old link, if you bookmarked it, still works) and most people probably don’t bother.
Is Google planning to address this? Can we get the ability to decide how many albums to display in our profiles and in which order? Can this order also be decided based on factors like user preference, activity, number of images, as well as date?
There. Maybe somebody will listen. I’m sure I’m not the only one requesting this functionality. Although I know Google is already innundated with Google+ feature requests… (almost 2300 at the time of writing).
Good luck.