Actually, speaking as an android user who LOVES that I can auto upload my pics to the GOOG, I absolutely hate that Google has any social platform at all.
Because G+ exists it makes Facebook a competitor. Can I easily share my auto uploaded pics with my Facebook friends? Not at all.
Can I change where I upload my pics to? (Ie : not picasa) not at all.
Picasa is about lock in. Not about user experience.
You can upload all your pics from your phone to facebook with a couple of clicks from the Android Gallery app. A lock in would be if you were not allowed to, or at least if they went out of their way to make that harder for you. But instead they go out of their way to put the share button and inter-app communication (intents) to allow you to easily share your pics with third parties.
I understand your frustration, and I too would like some kind of API to let us better control auto-upload. But "lock in" seems a bit of a stretch. You're asking to go out of their way, again, to better support competitors. When there's already a lot of support for them in place.
Auto-upload is a feature provided by the G+ app. There is absolutely no reason why Facebook can't include that functionality in their app. (It would be nice if this was as nicely integrated as contacts in the dialer, but it's not yet. It's due to developer time constraints or the fact that nobody has thought about it yet, not due to lock-in. Remember, Google is the company that lets carriers ship Android phones with Bing as the default search engine!)
Being able to leave once an for all is different from open interoperability with other systems. Both are a form of lock in protection, and Picasa only supports the former.
"Lock in" is a particularly loaded term, and I have to disagree with its use here in that they've given you a way to export everything should you want to. Not doing the work to integrate with other system is not "lock in".
I think Google and Apple already see the facebook threat, and are trying to limit helping it grow any further. Even without G+, you may not have had this sort of FB integration to Google. The only reason Microsoft is sidling up to FB is in an effort to get some traction in mobile and the web space.
I suppose 'lock in' was the wrong choice of words to use.
I understand that the data is only there because I chose to auto-upload it, and I also understand that I can easily re-upload the photo to facebook, but my point was that Google themselves are actively preventing me from doing something like that through the Picasa interface.
I think you understood the meaning behind my point, but I'd argue that they shouldn't even be in that space in the first place.
The very first thing that any photo-storage/sharing site should be looking at, after the service itself is working, is social sharing and interaction. Google are restricting the interaction on their platform (understandably, I might add) because they have built a competitor to Facebook.
That's passively preventing. (YouTube lets you share to Facebook and Twitter, so the lack of this ability from G+ is a lack of a feature, not one of Google's design goals. Code takes a long time to write and everyone wants a different feature. Eventually we will have them all, but right now, not enough code has been written :)
Prioritizing G+ over an open API (and a "Chinese wall" between the apps and the platform) is still preferential treatment, and is the sort of thing that got Microsoft consent-decreed.
I am not saying Facebook is better, but you can't say Google is better, either.
Because G+ exists it makes Facebook a competitor. Can I easily share my auto uploaded pics with my Facebook friends? Not at all. Can I change where I upload my pics to? (Ie : not picasa) not at all.
Picasa is about lock in. Not about user experience.