They make very much sense with social as long as social doesn't have to mean "share publicly".
There are photos on G+ that I'd like to show my family. This is "public" from G+'s point of view, because I'm not going to make them log into G+.
Nothing goes wrong if other people see these photos too; however, I don't want people who have me in their G+ circles to get notified that I'm now "sharing" these photos that they have no interest in, and I don't want some boring photos to represent me on my "feed".
This use case worked on Picasa, but G+ broke it.
Right now I find the extremely concealed download link and e-mail them. This is not how a photo product should work.
What I meant isn't that any product gets it right ATM but rather that there isn't a good technical or, I guess, social reason for why galleries couldn't be a killer social feature. It seem there are a few economic/marketshare etc reasons though.
I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone. There are so many different uses for photos/social, that I don't think there's any single way that `makes sense`. All services have a slightly different way of sharing, but I'd say there are some specific themes here:
- photos as messages (like instagram)
- photos as art (like old flickr)
- photos as galleries (g+, new flickr)
- photos as... memories? current events? sharable stuff? (like facebook, twitter)
I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social. People share galleries with family / friends - many of who aren't even on the same platform and don't want to be.