27 Sept 2011

Google Plus G+

Google Plus G+

gplus-logoGoogle+ (or Google Plus) is the hot new thing in social networking. Everyone and their little sister have been clamouring for invites to set up their account in this new playground. Unfortunately, users are having to start from scratch without any of their connections, posts or other media cultivated from other social media sites. For example, Facebook is one of the most popular photo sharing websites and so it is likely that users have a lot of photos on it. Unfortunately, it is difficult to quickly export these photos from Facebook to Google Plus as Facebook does not have any automated tool to do so. Fortunately, enterprising users have created a Google Chrome extension that automatically transfers your Facebook photos to Google Plus.

I am confident there are a number of different methods to transfer your photos, however as I am an ardent Google Chrome user, in this article, I have described the method of exporting all your photos using the dedicated Google Chrome extension.


Installing and using the Chrome Extension

Firstly, head over to the Move Your Photos extension page and install it.
picasa-extension
Once the extension is installed, you will notice a small Picasa icon to the right of the Chrome address bar, near the wrench. Click on this icon and you will be presented with a link to login to your Facebook account. This will grant the extension access to the photos on your Facebook account.
picasa-fblogin
After you have logged in, the extension will start fetching all your Facebook photos. If you have any empty albums on Picasa, the extension will also notify you of this and allow you to delete them.
picasa-fetch photos
Once the pictures have been fetched, you can select which albums or individual photos to upload to your Picasa account.
Note the guide used to indicate which photos have been uploaded (green border), which photos are in the queue (yellow border), which photos are not to be uploaded (grey border) and which images are altogether unavailable (red border).
picasa-upload
Unfortunately, the extension appears to be limited to fetching the photos you have uploaded within specific albums. So, all your albums, mobile uploads, profile pictures, and wall photos are included. However, tagged photos are not included.
Once you have decided which photos to upload, select “Upload” from the bottom of the page. You may have to scroll down if you have a lot of photos.
The upload process will take some time depending on the number of photos you have selected.
picasa-uploading
Once all the photos have been uploaded, they will appear in segregated albums on your Web Picasa account.
picasa-albums
The album is set to private by default and only those with a link to the album will be able to view the photos.
You can now choose which of your circles to share the photos with.

Conclusion

This app is useful if all your photos are stored on Facebook but you feel like switching your allegiance to Google+. It would be a lot more useful, however, if it was possible to upload all your photos (including tagged images) from Facebook to Google+. It is likely, that there are privacy settings that is blocking this type of functionality.

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