Of course I think it's absolutely a mess. (Reading Google documentation is probably the most important thing NOT to do, it just confuses people while generally being completely unhelpful and less than useless.) And this is because Google is a master of failed communication. They just so suck at it, I don't know how can they consistently be so bad at it.
Anyway, the products and the concepts and the engineering and the flow is mind-boggingly simple.
Picasa evolved to Google Photos. The desktop client vanished. There's a Google Photos app, default on [all? most?] Android phones. And it has a backup/sync function, so if you connect your Google account it syncs photos to Google Photos. (This can be disabled, and there are probably countless apps that can/do backup to Google Drive though!)
Google Drive is completely separate, except they added an optional feature pseudo-folder. Which was bound to confuse people. Because [I guess] they exposed the underlying "files" from Google Photos. (Of course they are just blobs on a blobstore and tables in a DB.) So they connected that API/DB from Gphoto to Gdrive, and made it look like files. Which is stupid, because the semantics was never defined/cleared for users who are not somehow imaginary-systems engineers.
Of course I think it's absolutely a mess. (Reading Google documentation is probably the most important thing NOT to do, it just confuses people while generally being completely unhelpful and less than useless.) And this is because Google is a master of failed communication. They just so suck at it, I don't know how can they consistently be so bad at it.
Anyway, the products and the concepts and the engineering and the flow is mind-boggingly simple.
Picasa evolved to Google Photos. The desktop client vanished. There's a Google Photos app, default on [all? most?] Android phones. And it has a backup/sync function, so if you connect your Google account it syncs photos to Google Photos. (This can be disabled, and there are probably countless apps that can/do backup to Google Drive though!)
Google Drive is completely separate, except they added an optional feature pseudo-folder. Which was bound to confuse people. Because [I guess] they exposed the underlying "files" from Google Photos. (Of course they are just blobs on a blobstore and tables in a DB.) So they connected that API/DB from Gphoto to Gdrive, and made it look like files. Which is stupid, because the semantics was never defined/cleared for users who are not somehow imaginary-systems engineers.