I am not trying to convince you to use Google plus photo backup; it’s merely one howto if you have decided to use it.

== Why do I use it

My use case for photos is like this:

I use the camera from the phone, and photos taken would be saved in one location, called camera roll on iphone IIRC. Next, those photos on the device would be backed up (synced) to the cloud (whichever cloud provider you like). The common way of syncing is to monitor this camera roll, and upload photos to the cloud whenever new ones come in. I would take Dropbox as the example for its popularity. There would be one folder dedicated for this camera roll, and new photos go to this folder some time, then, the sync between local device and cloud starts. It seems a bit unnatural that this sync could not be done in camera roll directly, which causes some inconvenience afterwards.

After the syncing is done, all the operations on photos, either on the device or on the cloud, would be propagated across all sites, which is true for the photos copied into third party app, Dropbox if we still use the above example. The photos in camera roll are ignored. The situation is better on Android, for photos is the app that does photo-taking, viewing, and syncing itself, but it still does the copying inside. One hack I found on Android to get back the changes from the cloud is to delete all the photos on the device.

== How to use Google plus photos (effectively)

With all your photos in the cloud, you could put related one in one album with some meaningful naming. The concrete step is the following. (It’s ironic that SNS product needs tutorial.)

  • Go to Photos from the left dropdown menu.

  • Go to All photos. New photos + old photos from all the albums.

  • Select ones you want put into one album.

  • Copy them into one exiting or new album.

  • Annotate the photos and change the album’s visibility.

== View it anonymously

It’s insane to ask users to login to view public info. If you try to see your own profile page in one incognito window, you would see nothing, which is clearly one bug. It took me a while to find the hack. All the photos are also available at picasa, which deals with photos or videos before Google+ comes out. On that website, you could find the Public Gallery url, which shows all the albums you shared publicly.