Photo Album Nightmares

So why no posts? Honestly (and this will be full of foul language, so be forewarned) the issue with Google Photos is such a goddamn nightmare to navigate that it's put me off from wanting to post. I wasn't a huge fan of Picasa, but it WORKED FINE after I figured it out, and now I'm back at zero with Google Photos.

For those who don't know, Picasa is being shut down and changed over to Google Photos. Why? I haven't the foggiest idea. People everywhere are pissed and very annoyed because albums aren't working properly, links aren't working, they have different features, photos aren't showing up in the right order, etc. Nothing is easy to navigate, and nothing is intuitive.

When I first found out about this change, it took me over an hour to figure out how to post the photos to my blog for this post:
http://jcclocks.blogspot.ca/2016/08/english-longcase-clock-w-routledge.html I also had to completely reorganize all of my albums and change all the cover photos for each, because they automatically transferred everything over, but none of the settings were saved. It also doesn't help that my computer is very old, and very slow, and each time you want to do anything in an album, you have to load the entire album (all the thumbnails, even if there are over 600). There are no pages. An album shows up entirely on a single page. You can't set the thumbnail size or the display settings either. The best you can do is shrink the webpage in the browser (which is easy but annoying).

Like I said. NIGHTMARE.

For example: one of the last 3 clock posts I wrote (this one) gave me several problems. This is a simple post. A few photos, and some text (the usual). For the first post, the photos in it are super old, so they were still hosted on my Photobucket album. No problems there. The problem was the 3 new photos I wanted to add. I open up Google Photos, go to my Clocks (blog) photo album, and add the three photos. NORMALLY, the new photos you add appear at the end in the order they were uploaded. NOT with Google Photos. Instead, these photos end up grouped together (but also out of order) in a random place within the album. I assume that this is because they are source images off the web and have old dates associated with the files. This album already has around 500 photos in it, so I had to go through the whole thing to find the three photos. If I want them at the end (where they SHOULD be, and where I want them to be), I have to click "edit album" and then I have to click on ONE photo at a time (you can't select multiple photos) and drag it all the way down to the bottom of the album. This means that all the photos in the album have to load, and also while you're dragging the photos around, the album automatically adjust itself into a collage format, so I have to wait for all the photos to shift around and refresh. I have to repeat this for EVERY PHOTO I want to reorder.

For the second post, the same thing happened, but I was working with about 10 photos. This is not too bad when it's a small number of pictures, but for posts on THIS blog, I deal with about 30-60 photos at a time! It's painfully slow, tedious, and blog-writing is already time consuming enough!

Apparently they have added a "sort by date" option, but now I'm afraid to even click on it, because it could fuck-up an entire album, and there isn't an "undo" because currently the album is considered as having a "custom order". The other problem is that I like to upload photos in a specific order. I will often upload photos in sets (or "batches") specifically so that they upload in a certain order. With the "order by date" it would automatically put them in the normal order, which is also not what I want. According to the Help Forums the albums are SUPPOSED to be in order "as uploaded" but they ARE NOT.

Right now, I think my best bet is to make a test album and try to troubleshoot this issue, but that will take hours of my time. In the meantime, I could be writing about the Farmhouse project (I currently have 129 photos ready to upload, and another 129 to sort through, edit, and prepare), plus I also have several Cornwall Homes posts I could get ready (local houses).

EDIT:

OMFG. Hair pulling.

So apparently you CAN'T make albums in Google Photos. Not in the traditional sense. I don't have the patience to explain it, so here's a direct Help Forum quote:

"earlboss said:
Hi Managing:
In Google Photos, all photos from all sources get thrown together in the Photos collection (sometimes called the timeline) where they are stacked into one big pile sorted by date taken with the latest photos on the top of the pile. This collection contains all your photos and is the source for the photos you want to put into your Albums.

Albums are really just a list of Pointers to the actual photos in the timeline (photos collection), and putting a photo in an album does not remove it from the timeline, so this means a photo could be in multiple albums. The good thing about this is a photo could be in 10 different albums, but it doesn't take up any extra storage beyond the size of the one actual photo in the timeline.

You asked why you would want to create an album within an album, but that is not what is happening, Albums cannot not be nested. What happens is you are creating a new album and that album will contain the selected photos in the original album, so the selected photos would now be in the old and the new albums.
An Example of why you might do this:

You have created an album of your Alaska cruise containing all the photos you want to keep about the whole cruise. Now you want to have an album about Glacier Bay, so you could go into your timeline and go to the date of that portion of the cruise and select the Glacier Bay photos and create an album containing them. It would be easier though to go to the Alaska Cruise album, select the photos about Glacier Bay, and create a new album about Glacier Bay.

...(snip)

Earl"

What riduculous fuckery is that? I'm so pissed and annoyed over the whole mess. I was going to make a test album, and then delete it which seems simple, right? Can't do that. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!