I don't use social media. I have a Google+ account to share photos (and nothing else) with my family, but the bugs make that harder and harder, so I'll have to abandon it. (Any suggestions?)
Google photos is extremely buggy too, and doesn't work the way I want it to work. It's almost impossible to upload a large number of photos from a desktop machine. It inevitably dies during the upload, then I have to figure out which pictures exactly didn't upload. And then I get duplicate pictures in the album, albeit not always.
Also, the phone app is extremely adamant that I upload ALL my photos to Google, which I don't want to do. If you only want to selectively upload stuff, the interface really gets in your way.
Google photos is extremely annoying because it requires me to give names to albums, while Google+ is perfectly happy with untitled posts. You can share without creating a new album... but only from your phone, not from your desktop, and if you do it from your phone you very quickly lose the reference to the untitled "album". Nor to mention that you don't have a chronological view of what you shared with whom.
Google+ had a very good permission model, Google photos lacks this, AFAICT. Also, I use a paid Google Apps account, and very often people with free Gmail accounts can't see the photos I share with them. I couldn't determine what causes this, or how to fix it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not.
Minor gripe, but I strongly dislike the reverse chronological view used by the phone app.
With Google+, the people I shared photos with received an e-mail notification (albeit not always... again, another frustrating bug). With Google photos they get a push notification on their phone, which they dislike (perfectly understandable, IMO). Also, they could just click on the link in the e-mail and see the pictures in their browser, Google photos requires an app to be installed.
I could go on and on.
Even if Google photos would not be so spectacularly dysfunctional, I would still prefer to move away from Google services as much as it's possible.
I'd rather just use a simple, paid service where I could upload pictures (in original quality, with full EXIF data) either from the desktop or from a mobile device, and where I could share untitled posts (albums) with people who'd get the notification via e-mail and access them via the browser (or some app, but the browser must always work). The albums should be downloadable as zip files (in original quality and with full EXIF data) by the people I shared them with.
I tried SmugMug, and it kind of works, except that it doesn't support a "naked" custom domain, so example.com doesn't work, but www.example.com and pics.example.com work. This might seem like a minor gripe, but I want to do it right if I do it at all.
I use google photos to share with family without ever touching Google+. I have a shared "family" album with everyone invited to it. Any time I have new photos to share, I add them to that album and everyone gets a notification to check it out. Also, my significant other and I have our entire photo libraries shared with each other.
