I am using Google+ to upload photos and share them with the family. I did so since the times of Picasa. In fact, I am using the desktop version of Picasa to hold and present my images. One of the main points is the easy way you can geotag photos via Google earth. I also liked the Picasa homepage in the web. It was easy to handle, share and navigate. Now that Google bought Picasa and integrated it into Google+ things start to get worse.

The story  I had to live through yesterday was a typical example. I decided to stop the automatic upload of images from my Nexus to Google+. Consequently, I deleted the auto generated upload folders named after the date of the images. This proved to be cumbersome enough, but I managed. The images will still survive in some „Autobackup“ folder, which cannot be deleted it seems. Now, I uploaded some videos from my smartphone into a Video folder. To my surprise, Google+ now contained one folder for each upload, each of them named „Videos“. I deleted all of them one after the other, each with 5 clicks. Again to my surprise, each of them showed as an empty folder in the Gallery of my smartphone. I had to delete them once more.

There are numerous other issues with Google+. Here are the ones I can remember:

• There is no way to find out the Email address of a person in one of your circles. One friend wanted to change its Email address. Now I have him twice, and cannot tell which is which. It is easy to start a hangout with the wrong address.
• You cannot upload a photo, video or photo sphere to a specific existing folder manually. You cannot upload it privately without sharing with some address or circle. If you upload automatically you need to go to the web site and push the image where you want it. You cannot do this in the Gallery app.
• You cannot switch off the entries in your Google+ start page which Google thinks are interesting to you. I get all sorts of things there, but would like only topics from my circles. I admit that changing this might be possible, but I did not find a way to do this.
• It took me a Google search to find a way to access and administer my contacts from Google+ or Google Mail. I want to be able to delete or edit contacts easily just like on my smartphone.

This is just an incomplete list complaints I stumbled over. Google, listen!