Having used Google Picasaweb for picture-hosting for many years, Google’s transition to Google Photos has been a frustrating experience. The original Picasaweb has always worked better for me than its supposed replacement. Several friends of mine who had also been using Picasaweb have already switched to other services, including Facebook.

The latest nail in the coffin came a few days ago, when the Picasa 3 application failed to upload new albums to Google Photo. The error message was:

Error: Request failed
Click here to View Errors

The link revealed that it was a server error:

HTTP Error 400 – https://picasaweb.google.com/post?tok={long-token-here}[156]

It looks like someone at Google broke the upload servers. When they announced the transition a year ago, Google wrote:

Desktop application
As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates.

For now, the workaround appears to be to use “File | Export Picture to Folder” in the Desktop application to create files no wider than 1600 pixels (below the limit for unlimited free uploads) and then upload those file sets to Google Photo using its web interface.

At the moment it is still possible to share Google Photo images in blog and forum posts but for how much longer? First you must share the album, for example by clicking on the “share” icon in the album in Google Photo, then “Get Link” to generate a link, which you don’t actually have to use. Then you can view an image, right-click on it and select “Open image in new tab”. The URI above the new tab that opens can be used for embedding images in blogs and forums. If or more precisely, when Google also breaks this feature then Google Photos will become unusable for me.

I am looking for a good solution to be hosted on one of my own servers that will replace Google Photos, without size limits and without any hassle for resizing images for public sharing, that will let me control who can see what images like the old Picasaweb did.