Adam Lasnik
Hi everyone,
You deserve powerful opportunities to share your excellent photography with others and to have it seen and appreciated by people around the world.
We hear you. We are working to identify and fix bugs, and are aiming to be more transparent and timely in sharing status updates with you.
At the same time, please realize that we often are constrained from promising specific updates and timelines, because plans can change and bugs can sometimes prove to be harder to tackle than we anticipate.
But before sharing the status update, I respectfully urge you to review this note that emphasizes the importance of respect in the forum, and clarifies the role of our talented and dedicated volunteer moderators. They've been doing an excellent job in escalating feedback and bugs to our team, and they are neither responsible for nor in control of any Panoramio product updates or fixes.
With that said, here is a non-exhaustive but hopefully helpful list of where Panoramio stands:
- Forums: We read the forums at least weekly, and the moderators escalate critical issues to us more frequently. In order to increase awareness of the forums and expand and improve the community discussion, we recently added a link to Forums within the top-right gear icon in Panoramio, and we also posted the above-linked welcome note. We also now have small 'g' and 'm' badges next to all posts in this forum by Google-employed Panoramio Team members and Volunteer Moderators respectively.
- Feedback: We do appreciate feedback, even if we aren't able to always make the changes you (and often we) would like to make. We recently added the powerful Send Feedback tool (see the gear icon in the upper-right of Panoramio) that enables us to get feedback from a wider group of members, see helpful screenshots, and immediately get more debugging info regarding browser type and so on to help us more efficiently fix bugs and consider requests.
- Groups: We are prioritizing fixing things that completely prevent members and managers from basic use of Groups. We have no plans to add additional functionality.
- Panoramio Map: We recently fixed the Recent tab, and we also pushed a fix so that your photos should indeed be showing up in your Panoramio map view very soon (within January).
- Forum: We recently fixed the problem that was preventing you from hovering over a post and accessing that member's Panoramio profile.
- Stats: We're aware of and working to fix a bug which results in no stats being shown on some photos that do have views - UPDATE: I believe we've fixed this now.
- Google Earth and Maps: We're aware of a delay in some photos approved for Maps and Earth being shown there, and are working with those teams to get this fixed.
- Old vs. new interface: We will not be bringing back the old interface.
- Export photos to Google+: We have seen in some circumstances that duplicate copies of photos are made to Google+ from a user's Panoramio album and we're investigating.
- Google(+) and Panoramio: It's not currently possible to change which Google account you've connected with your Panoramio account, but we're aware of the interest in this ability and are investigating options.
- Look first: If there's already a thread about your issue, please do not open a new one.
- Give examples: If one of your photos is displayed oddly, if you can't add members or photos to a specific Group, etc... please share the specific URLs!
- Offer balance and warmth: From time to time, thank a moderator. Tell us something about Panoramio you love. Be welcoming and patient with a new member who has great photos but may have overlooked an FAQ, or accidentally opened up a new thread.
Adam Lasnik
- Some stats are missing from early June.
- We've turned off the Export to Google+ option; we don't anticipate being able to turn it back on for a while, sorry!