[dosdan]

The latest update to Picasa has gone very Google-Plussy if you have a Google+ account. Now the link in Picasa takes you to the Plus site. A Plus account is good for upload limits & sizes, and while I like the look of the photos in Google+ but I don't like sharing links to there as:

1. If you go to the Plus website as a general user, you can't download photos. This does not appear to be configurable. I want to give links to parents of their kid's team playing soccer, so I don't want them to have to create a google+ account first to download a photo they like.

2. There is no slide-show in Plus. I think the slide-show is handy to show off a set of photos.

If you send a Picasweb link to a person, when they use it, it will automatically redirect to the Plus site using either form:
https://picasaweb.google.com/110304554160411023759
https://picasaweb.google.com/dosdan

There is a link at the top to go back to Picasaweb, but in IE8 it appears buggy if you have had Compatibility View enabled.

You have to append ?noredirect=1 to the end of the URL e.g:
https://picasaweb.google.com/dosdan?noredirect=1

Interestingly FF8 is not redirecting to Plus. I don't know if this is because of some add-on or if it's part of FF8's security setup.

The thing is that new uploaded albums from the updated version of Picasa are only visible from Google+, so this is going to be a problem for image sharing.

Dan.

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Last edited by dosdan; 12-26-2011 at 09:18 PM.

[pxpaulx]

Good to know! I also noticed that initially clicking on the first two links took me to the google+ gallery page. When I clicked on your 3rd link I was taken to your picasa albums page. Following clicking on the 3rd link I went back to the first two links...both of those now took me to your picasa galleries page rather than the google+ page (neither link went to a specific gallery, but to your multiple gallery homepage). I'm using the chrome browser if you were wondering!

[dosdan]

I think this is a Google "conspiracy" to get more info about you by "encouraging" you to use Google+. I'm not interested in the social "Circles" concept at all.

Dan.

[Karl Stevens]

If you go to the Plus website as a general user, you can't download photos.

Yes you can - for some photos. It actually looks like a bug to me.

I logged out of Google+ and visited the links you provided and I was able to download photos from 4-255, and 261-277 (I didn't download all the photos, but the "Download full size" link showed on these ones). Photos 1 through 3, and 256 to 260 could not be downloaded. I checked with my own albums, and photos higher than 4 could be downloaded, while 1-3 were never allowed. (I don't have any publically-available albums with more than 255 photos, so I couldn't test the second ranges.)

I sent feedback to G+, I suggest you do as well (and maybe get anyone else you know who has a G+ account to do the same - more complainers might get higher priority in the bug queue.)