I'm traveling the world right now, which isn't something i do frequently, and would like photos from my trip. Of course, in this day and age, what photo collection would be complete without an online share.
I had thought it would be easier, given all the easy and free online tools. This is my (ongoing) experience with the tools as I encountered them.
My workflow in this trip is while I'm at the airport, organize the photos from the previous week or so, then post the album online, with some additional commentary, or description.
I am doing this from a Nexus 5 with Lollipop 5.0.1, and this is my experience with the popular candidates.
First up, Twitter.
I had an unused twitter account, and this was a good opportunity to dig it up. Unfortunately it turns out I'm not a Twitter person. Additionally, the client doesn't have an offline mode, and just tells you your tweets were lost. The nail in the coffin was the limitation of 4 pictures per tweet, which isn't really surprising given the service's microblogging start. I'm not going to share my pictures 4 at a time so it was off to find a worthy substitute.
Next up; Facebook, the 800 lb gorilla of social media.
The android app is limited to 30 pictures per post which is better than 4, but still not good enough. I could split my photos over 2 posts, but that's lame.
Google's attempt, Google plus actually
Next up, their big rival Google plus. This actually worked on the first leg. I managed to make a post, attach as many pictures as I wanted, do a write up, and caption my photos.
Great. This will work just fine. :)
...of course not. If it was, if have no reason to write this post and merely declare Google plus to be the true social network and cut all ties with Facebook.
It didn't have quite the right privacy options I was used to from google docs and the whole "circles" thing is a great idea, but it suffers from the over-under motivation* problem.
Okay, brass tacks. The reason I gave up on Google plus is because the Android app ate my post multiple times, and I burned myself out on it from trying to organize the photos from the second leg of my trip.
It also crashed when trying to set my location. Kinda annoying when you're trying to brag about being 10,000 miles away from home.
Moving on... Instagram. It's not designed for this use case, preferring instead to focus on single pictures, and is unsuitable if I'm trying to post 40 pictures at once.
Next up, Flickr. Yahoo's got a new CEO, and one of the things she did was to have them build a mobile app for Flickr. This should be good.
Open up the app, go through the account setup rigmarole, which is extra annoying due to Yahoo!-ing, and... where are my pictures? Oh, I need to sync them first. No problem, there's WiFi at the airport. Go into settings, click a few buttons, aaaaaand... hm.
Nope, not uploading. New pictures show up, but existing ones aren't. Go check settings again... nope, nothing relevant.
Well, that's a bust before it even started. Sorry, I tried.
Well, keep going. I have the Imgur app installed for cat pics, but there's an account feature and albums are a useful feature they have.
Let's give that a shot. The app is a bit rough around the edges, but I can look past that. Or at least thought I could until I made my selection, hit OK, let it start syncing my photos, and then the act of my poking around the app while it's background syncing causes it to lose the background sync job. Oof. I was hoping the poor presentation was just the ui layer but I guess their apps back end could USD a bit of work too.
It's around here that I start considering writing my own app. Well, what's the annoying part? Getting the photos off my phone and into the internet.
I take a brief detour to nerd out for a second, and break out droidscp. It would have worked too if it weren't for the fact that droid scp is shareware, and it's not really designed for this purpose, so it would work, but is quite cumbersome for this purpose.
Alright, new plan. We figure out a good way to get the pictures off my phone. Dropbox!
Install the app, make an account, click around in settings, and... it's syncing!
I can even make an album! Hell, I can create an album, add a single picture, go back and add more pictures later!
I'm back in the air, so we'll have to see how it goes in the next episode.
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*the Over-under motivation problem is what happens when you get a chance to start New! And Fresh! You go wild, setting up everything perfectly; Proper Organization! Categories! Motivated!
Of course you lose that motivated version of yourself, and three weeks later you don't care, the organizing is a chore and you hate it, and hate what it reminds you of - everything you've ever failed at. Okay, maybe not quite that dramatic, but you get what I'm saying.
