Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.
This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).
Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons—
[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.
[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.
I'm actually glad to see this. Unlimited storage is unsustainable.
I don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem.
You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts.
I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space.
Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?
> Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?
Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:
> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes
> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
Possibly, but given its google I wouldn’t assume it’s more (or less) respecting of user privacy just because it costs something.
For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
I agree, and would like to pay Google (would have already done so earlier), BUT, there is this gaping trust gap. I find it hard to trust that my account won't one day be randomly banned with no option to communicate with a human customer support agent.
Based on a cursory search, these bans are not so uncommon, and it is just scary
Right, this is the problem. I'm sure many of us would be happy to pay for someone to handle comprehensive photo storage the way Google Photos does. But Google can shut you out forever at any point without a warning, and it probably still is data-harvesting to bolster its services even with a paid version.
Unfortunately there is no thing in the world that is proof from change, especially things you aren't paying for. If you have a problem with it you can use any of the other free photo upload services that will accept 15GB+ of your photos and will guarantee that free service for life.
I don't have a problem with it. This is a good thing for the industry that Google can't continue to offer unrealistic and unsustainable products for free. They set expectations that were hard to meet.
I think this serves as a warning and reminder to users.
> I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch.
Wouldn't it be 'bait and switch' if they did that after less time, say 1 year? 10 years is more than reasonable. And if you disagree, that's fine, but I'm curious to hear what number of years would you consider reasonable then? I'm not excited about the news either but I think it's _fair_.
I'm not sure more time makes it better. The logic here is that they baited you for so long that it suddenly became fair?
Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is.
Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & switch. Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation, while competitors to it went out of business, and now, they are forced to pay for continued service. That is a bait & switch.
The moment we have to start saying, "well, they should have known better" or "how did you expect this to be free forever" puts us into victim blaming territory. Just because someone could have been aware of a bait & switch/scam, doesn't make that practice not a bait & switch/scam.
> Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation
'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope.
> while competitors to it went out of business
This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.
People don’t join a service like this intending it to be a static archive. They were told that this was an easy way to automatically save space on your phone and protect your photos in case something happens to your phone, started building a social network with their friends and family, etc.
It’s not hard if you have a computer in addition to a phone, enough storage to hold a full local copy, and don’t mind spending time getting all of your friends and family to switch.
They will still comb through your gmail/google docs for ad related data to serve up to you and enlarge you customer profile. Please don't be under any illusion that won't continue. They're just adding a price to extract even more money from you, not just as data source, but now as a paying customer + data source for advertisers.
That would țruly be an awesome offer. I'm not sure that I would take it (stingy should be my middle name) but offering it would be a very respectful gesture by Google. Follow up question: would we trust that paying changed anything?
Hey, you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately, unfortunately. We've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past, too. This is the sort of thing we ban accounts for, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on? They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
Not only that, but a product that is financially self-sustaining is much less likely to get killed. The majority of products Google kills are the ones that doesn't get traction and run at a loss. If you want Photos to have a future, you'd be happy that it's trying to be cash positive.
I tried Nextcloud a long time ago. It was buggy. I really, really wanted to pay for it at the time, but it didn't quite work.
Should I try it again?
I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source?
I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.
It's a lot better now. You should read on the history of owncloud/nextcloud to answer your proprietary questions, but the short verison is: nextcloud is open as can be and in really good shape. It will most likely never be quite as magic as Google Photos, but it's close enough to not miss GPhotos. Email me if you want to keep chatting about it or if you want to get a login to my intance to check it out :)
There's a lot of anger just because 'Google'. Whatever reasons provided that would not be appropriate for others will seem okay when applied to Google.
> This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).
I am already paying for Google Drive, and a huge part of what sold me on paying for it was that Google offered free photo storage if I was happy with a potential slight quality degradation.
When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data.
Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free.
Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago?
Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.
Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one.
The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.
> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)…
This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.
Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
Expecting them to not only exempt you from paying for your previously uploaded photos, but to also allow you to continue to upload photos for free indefinitely seems unreasonable to me. That's not what I'd expect from being grandfathered in.
We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged.
But there are plenty of other breweries! Adobe hasn't closed shop, neither has Microsoft (OneDrive), Dropbox, iDrive, pCloud, or for that matter SmugMug, Flickr etc.
It's not entitlement to say that, if it would end like this, they never should have been giving away such vast amounts of free beer in the first place.
That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.
If you have an agreement with someone to give you a free beer for life, in exchange for your personal data, they should be allowed to back up? After already extracting all value for your data?
It was not a "free beer for life", but "free beer in exchange for personal data". They stop providing the beer, you stop providing the data (new photos). Seems fairly reasonable.
Turn it the other way around... would you find it reasonable to be obliged to continue to share your data for as long as they provide you with free beer? Or can you withdraw from the agreement?
If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.
2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.
3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc.
4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential player in either sector.
Read your own links please and FYI Google Drive/Storage was far from the first to offer free storage, not by a long shot. Dropbox and Microsoft were offering of free storage years before Google even launched Drive. Free hosting in the photo sharing space predates Photos/Picasa by literally decades and even in their specific form they were never without major competitors from the likes of FB/MS/Flickr/Photobucket/IG etc.
Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.
Techcruch, arguably an entity with some experience and credibility in assessing product and service offerings, noted both "unlimited" and "free" in describing Google Photos.
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
Techcrunch never claimed what you are claiming. Yes, at launch the service was both unlimited (in storage capacity—not duration) and free. They never said that state of affairs would last forever, and it would have been unreasonable for anyone to assume that it would.
This seems like a fallacy. VC subsidies benefit consumers until they run out of money or raise prices. As long as the market remains free, there will be new entrants. The problem is regulation that keeps competitors out. In some cases Big Co. lobbies for this regulation, but often it is government that kills competition by attempting to tax said Big Co., or adds expensive compliance.
We want to build a new car. A fancy electric car. We raise money from investors, build plant, hire engineers, designers and workers, establish a supply chain and a distribution chain. How should we fairly price the product?
A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.
B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.
The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.
I can see an argument for this for Tesla, because of the capital costs. I can see an argument for this for Uber, because of the network effects. But I cannot see an argument for this for Google Photos, because the network effects are not that strong, and the capital costs are directly proportional to how many users you have. (You don't need to scale our your datacenter/cloud until you actually have users to justify doing so.)
So while I agree this can be an issue in general, I'm not seeing the argument for it here. I think it would actually be relatively easy for a competitor to get started in this space.
I think you're underestimating the cost of leaving Google Photos.
Sure, it's not too bad but I need to migrate off a new platform literally 5 years of photos (+ face tagging), explain it to all my relatives, make them install another app.
Or I can just start paying 2$ per month.
I'm not too bothered but it's a clear bait and switch.
To be fair I wasn't sure if this was coming or not given Google is not exactly a small business and could afford to spend some storage money to lock people in better in their ecosystem.
What I said was it's a fallacy re: your statement, "SV's dirty secret is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: .... to gain a dominant position in the market... then jack up the prices and fleece the customers."
Consider there is also a capital cost to rapidly accelerating change in consumer behaviour, e.g. app-based ride-hailing, which can also open up new markets.
Google's "business" model has been in question for years now, I now am extra glad that I already downloaded all my data from Google, acquired my own domain and set up a nextcloud server. If I need more space, I buy another/larger hard drive, and never need to worry about data collection, services shutting down or prices changing.
Yes I do, offline and offsite backup of important and valuable data stored on a HDD at my parents. Not the most seemless or user friendly options, but the privacy and security of my data is more important.
I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
Yeah, that's a good strategy I suppose even if you do need to cart around a HDD to update every so often. You just need to make sure your parents backup is updated periodically.
The carting around and updating is made simpler with a tool I have found and love, free file sync. One of the few tools I buy into (even though its free).
No one ever hikes the prices up significantly after running at a big loss. What usually ends up happening is that loss making companies adopt a model where their shareholders are the actual customers that the business makes money from. The goal becomes to IPO and leave index funds and pension funds holding the bag and playing hot potato with it. In a perverse way it's kind of sustainable. Hate not the player, but the game.
I've been lurking HN for years. I'm not the one insulting anyone or accusing people of being in bad faith.
>>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
>Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
No, it isn't. It's a descriptive statement. If you describe politics as "what we do together", which is the only definition that makes a discussion on Google's business practices (which is totally in the spirit of the website), then essentially everything is politics because of the effect discussing the world has on what should be done.
And "competition" in this case isn't just other photo cloud service companies, it's also the entire habit and ability of offline bulk data handling. Having opted for a smartphone without microSD because storage was low priority, having favored the ISP when it was time to decide between spending money on more bandwidth and spending money on an NAS, these things. People have become addicted not only on the mental level.
Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.
It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA:
As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
-“ Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).”
The level of snark in your comment is really unnecessary. There are many valid points in the comments on why we are upset but you’d rather just straw man us instead of acknowledging thosey or even leave the snark out and make your case.
Time to dust off my side project, Timeliner [1] which downloads your Google Photos (and other content from various services) and indexes them in a local SQLite DB.
Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.
I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested!
(One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)
I don't really understand this. I've been in computing for 45 years now. Programs come and go. I store files I want to keep in the most generic format practical. Storing a file in some program's special format is not a good plan for reading it 40 years from now.
For photos, I store them as jpgs in folders named after the year. Within those folders, there might be sub-folders named with a topic, like "disneyland" or "christmas". I'll "tag" photos by selecting a name for the jpg, like "bob and sue.jpg".
If more is needed, I'll just add a "notes.txt" file in the folder, with whatever text seems appropriate.
I have no worries about ascii text becoming unreadable, and few worries about jpgs becoming unreadable.
Please don't misunderstand, with your 45 years of computing experience. :) (which I highly respect) I never said the files are stored in sqlite. They are just indexed in sqlite. The files are stored on disk like normal.
SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years. There are very few pieces of software that I am able to praise like that with a clean conscience; SQLite is definitely one of them though. You might find it worthwhile to read e.g. about its memory allocation strategy, or its testing strategy.
Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.
> SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years.
My timeline is much longer than 20 years. I have family photos going back to the Civil War.
Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be ubiquitous. Good luck with those today.
I switched my mail from Outlook to Thunderbird because the former stores the email in some undocumented unreadable binary format. TB stores the mail as text, so I can recover the mail without needing TB. I have mail going back 25 years now. Some of my earlier mail is now lost because, surprise surprise, the mail program no longer works and the data is stored in a proprietary format.
I unzipped all my old file archives a few years back out of concern that some of the old DOS archive software would disappear.
What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4?
What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really share. It's really a big question for me how reliably store things for long periods of time.
I copy them forward to new media every year or so. It's how I avoid bit rot and media obsolescence.
My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.
Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.
My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.
I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.
I hope you at least have at least 1 on site and one off site and 1 physical media backup of all those if you want to keep them for the next few generations...
For how much longer? And how much resources do you imagine will be spend to fix bugs/issues opening these files? I don't think this example is strong enough to deserve a mocking wink
notes.txt will work just fine, then, even for several thousand photos. I don't see a need for a database until you've got far more than that. The tree file system works tolerably well as a "database".
As for searching, I know how to use "grep" and "locate".
Tags are more flexible than folders. An actual index let's you search by tag. Folders don't let you search for all photos of your mother, or in 1987, or in Alabama, or some combination thereof.
Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.
I know, but folders work perfectly fine even up to a few thousand files. It doesn't take me long to find a vacation picture from 1966, for example. I look in the 1966 folder, which doesn't have a lot in it. The preview thumbnails from file explorer quickly let me hone in.
It'd take me far more time to set up a proper tag database than I'd save looking things up.
It's still infinitely better than a random shoebox with random snapshots in it.
Looking up something by its clustered index is indeed pretty easy. That's not the only access pattern into most data sets, which is where tags can be handy.
I agree with your last two points, as my family's digital photos are also stored in a fairly similar clustered index style where you have to know the date at least pretty closely to start your search unless you want to scan "all Thanksgivings" [which itself is just a series of clustered index lookups]
Yes. Binary file formats are common (like Microsoft Outlook, pdf files, etc.), and are very fast to read/write. Text files have to be parsed. I've written lots and lots of dumpers for binary file formats generated by other programs.
Oof, I feel the trauma on this one. I've been bitten by too many binary file formats that I don't care to store aggregate amounts of content in them (unless it's just metadata).
Metadata is more useful with older photos. Right now it’s obvious who’s in them, but in 40 years being able to just put names to faces can be difficult.
I just note their names in the file name. If there are too many, I make a copy of the photo, bring it up in an image editor, and type the names of the people next to their heads. It works like a champ.
Bits rot. If you want your data to last the next 40 years, plan for spending a few hours every 5 years migrating your storage. It's a far better plan than trying to predict what the world will be like 40 years from now.
It would be easy enough to use the SQLite DB for normal read/write and search, and also save a human readable .txt dump periodically such as when making backups, or asynchronously on every save.
Creating a cadence that also stores the data in EXIF isn't really that hard if that's your concern. You could even get SQLite triggers to do external calls to update the tags if things change. This is all pretty trivial.
There are a lot of converging ideas out there, for "self-hosted NSA of yourself" type software which gather your own data from services you use and index it / make it more accessible to users. Would love to see something serious come out of it.
I followed Timeliner early on and really like the idea, but yeah it's a bitch to get traction for this sort of thing. You need people willing to implement backends for basically everything, then maintain them.
Yep, I've also seen Perkeep and several other similar projects. They're all a bit different and I'm happy with something simple and bare-bones, it just has to be good at getting the data off.
It's so annoying that Google strips the geolocation data. What would be the reason for this? It has been frustrating following along with the ticket that goes nowhere for years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228
As andybak says, almost certainly privacy. It's very easy for an unsophisticated user to share photos that, for example, effectively show where they live (or where someone else lives). I believe Facebook strips geo data as well. (A service like Flickr does not although I assume there is a switch somewhere that tells it to.)
Well it's being done through the API, which is presumably OAuth'd under your name, but again, this API is generally used by other sites to interact with your photos library, and it's very easy for someone to just approve the OAuth permissions for sharing photos, not realizing they are also implicitly sharing their location.
One scenario is you're at a party at someone's house. If you post a captioned photo from the party that's geotagged, you're identifying where they live.
Ironic indeed. I can’t help but wonder if Google stores the geolocation data privately where only they can access it for their own data mining uses before removing it from the photos.
You can see the location on Photos website/app, it's not hidden from the user. You also still get it when you Takeout the photos. It's explicitly stripped when sent through the API, because said API is generally used by other websites for getting your photos, and it's not clear to the user they are actually leaking their location when uploading a Photo to "ShareYourRecipe.com".
I would start with the assumption that Google is collecting and storing every single possible data point about every single thing you share with them, including this. I have zero doubt that they store this info privately for their own use.
but the result is a mess - why can't Google just give me all my photos in a logical folder structure, but instead I get duplicate folders with .json files and pictures which are in a completely different folder.
I have one primary collection but I also have probably 30TB of old drives lying around with photos scattered all about. Is there something I can do to mount those drives, grab all image files and then dedupe/catalog them (at least by date)? Ideally this would work with videos as well.
Considering you're using Linux, I'd do something of sorts:
1. get all image files with "find", considering they are with a known extension
2. run jdupes on the dump and deduplicate them.
3. run exiftool on them to automatically divide them to folders based on any metadata field you like.
4. Index all of the images with digikam and further organize them there.
Another path would be to add all drives as "removable collections" to digikam and manage all of them there. digikam also has fuzzy search so it can find not only identical but similar images so you can deduplicate them.
Both ways are applicable to videos as well.
I'm currently using the second path since Digikam is already my primary photo cataloging and managing tool for years and, it works wonders.
---
On mac, Gemini II and Retrobatch would allow for a similar workflow but, I didn't use them as my primary workflow tools. Gemini also has similarity search so it can deduplicate similar photos.
I'm not using Windows for more than a decade so, I don't know anything on that front.
This looks like a great approach, thanks for putting it together. I'm hoping to dump these disks to an image b/c the filesystems on them are all over the place...some of them are IDE lol, then just loopback mount them for this process.
From the comfort of a terminal[1], a few options comes to mind,
git-annex[2] will allow you to index all, or just some, of those files where they are - and keep track if you shuffle them around. The really useful feature in your case, is that git-annex will keep tabs on even your disconnected harddrives, flashdrives or cloud storage. It will let you know if you have redundant copies and how many, or if you're about to trash the last known instance of IMG001.jpg. It will point you to specific storage media if query some file not currently local.
Note that it's not entirely as trivial as I make it out to be - git vcs experience helps. Some love it.
In your situation, I'd might try borg[3] - No experience, but I heard appreciative voices about it and docs seem OK.
Personally, I always end up using rmlint/fdupe and unix tools, but that's a secret.
I've been pleased with PhotoSweeper on my Mac. I started with the free Lite version, then went ahead and bought the full version.
I set it at the highest match setting. If you adjust it to a lower setting, it will match things where somebody is looking at the camera versus looking away.
PS: I was going to say that they have a PC version but it looks like the 3rd entry for me on DuckDuckGo is actually spam that says there is a PC version, then feeds you to programs that are "like PhotoSweeper". I wouldn't download those.
I bought a Synology NAS mainly for images/videos/personal files and run hard drives in RAID setup. You could explore other NAS solutions like QNAP or open source.
Synology's photo station is slightly jarring... the whole indexing operation isn't optimized at all so if you have like 500k photos it's going to be spinning for a while.
There's an ancient-but-maintained image cataloger / asset manager called NeoFinder, available on Windows and Mac. Would love to find an OSS equivalent.
Same problem. The other issue is having a 2 cameras and 2 phones in the family and grouping together events. Its easier just to save them all and not try.
This is awesome. What would it take to hook up the storage to say block storage (say EBS or GCS) so that we can have more durabality interms of storage instead of having to manage a NAS at home? For me there have been a whole bunch of needs (photos, videos, docs) where storage has been the major stumbling block.
I extracted myself from Google Photos in 2019. Geolocation was a nightmare. I ended up using exiftool to merge the metadata from JSON available in Takeout.
Takeout sounds like an interesting workaround. I just do a takeout download once a month and figure that if google photos vaporizes or I lose my account I can write a python script to bake back in the JSON metadata that comes with it.
After downloading, can you upload to a different cloud photo service? I'd love to have a way to sync them automatically, and having a non-cloud backup would be nice too.
Sure, but doing it automatically (and handling things like making sure they're not duplicated) would be more convenient over cobbling together a solution.
> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
The Google Photos interface itself isn't that big of a product (I think), if you can lose some of the sharing features, I guess it'd be quite an easy app to make that can be run off a v-server or Amazon at considerably less long-term trouble. The big big issue is the seamless auto-upload from phone to Google Photos, that's the fantastic feature that locked me in.
True but their AI adds a lot of value. Searching for people is invaluable (though to be fair if you have the files locally, Windows Photos does that too.) Searching by item in the photo is less useful but I can imagine people use it now and again. And the automatically created videos are a nice bonus.
But yeah, not enough for me to pay them for it. If I'm going to pay someone, I'll pay someone else.
MegaUpload and Plex offer both of those things. Using Plex allows you to control the full storage and interface, then you can sync those to a cloud service or keep on a HDD yourself.
There's also Yandex Disc [0] which is still offering unlimited photo uploads from mobile devices. Although it wouldn't surprise me if they followed Google's lead on this and curtailed their offering as well. As they seem to pretty much mirror everything else Google does.
Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos.
the long term cost of buying something like a 12TB USB3.0 external hard drive and periodically letting it synchronize from your master copies, then unplugging it and storing it at a trusted family member's house is a great deal less than paying for 12TB+ of "cloud" storage indefinitely forever.
Google Backup & Sync makes it very cumbersome to retain a local copy of your photos. They used to sync them to Google Drive, so you could at least use Backup & Sync to have local copies. However, they got rid of that feature some time in the last year.
Then I use Google Backup & Sync to create a local copy on my desktop, scheduled SyncToy job to copy it to the NAS, and the NAS has a scheduled job to backup to Backblaze B2. In my setup, these irreplaceable photos & videos exist on my phone, Google, my desktop, my NAS, and Backblaze.
If you are relying on Google Backup & Sync to restore a large amount of data after a data loss event, you are in for a world of pain and disappointment. It simply does not handle any significant amount of data well. I had to stop backing up "My Computer" with Backup & Sync and just switched to using Google Drive. The files in Google Drive seem to be the only way to "restore" a large amount of files after a data loss event. If they are backed up under "My Computer" in Google Drive and you have a decent amount of data (50GB+), you will have no way to restore these files. The web interface will simply time out when you try to download them. The Backup & Sync client won't even attempt to download these files, even if you try the dead-end workarounds suggested on the web. You won't be able to drag them into your "Google Drive" folder as a workaround either. The whole thing is atrocious.
Google Backup & Sync is a fucking joke, and Google should be ashamed of themselves for releasing such a shitty product which does not actually help consumers protect against data loss. Consumers will only realize this at the point they are fucked and trying to restore their data.
For the 'I take pictures on my phone, poof its on my computer' needs, I replaced Onedrive Camera Upload with a Syncthing folder and haven't had to look back.
Onedrive is of course a different product than Google Photos, and the last time I used Google Photos, Google Now was still a left-swipe sidebar, so YMMV.
Maybe if you commit 100% to the Google system or work solely on your iPhone/iPad it is.
I wanted to look at pictures on the big screen of my desktop Mac. Leaving Google Photos in automatic upload on my phone meant that photos would all get uploaded but the ones that I culled would be deleted from Apple Photos but not Google Photos.
Using Google Photos on my phone would let me delete both copies (Apple and Google) but it was much harder to make out differences. 27" screen vs 6" screen.
I was using Google Photos in the unlimited free quality mode so their copy shouldn't match my original pictures.
So Google Photos ended up as a place where I dumped photos as a backup. I bought more storage on iCloud.
If you delete from Google Photos on the web from your desktop, the iPhone client will prompt you to allow deletion of those same photos from your iPhone’s Photos app (and hence iCloud, I think).
So, just do your deletion on the Google Photos web client on desktop. The culled photos will be culled from Apple Photos as well.
Why not just pay $30/yr to get access to all the features which Google Photos (and other Google services) offer? I know $30 is not the same everywhere but if you are in US (and assuming you are in tech given you are on HN), you'd spend that much in a dinner without thinking much. There is something about paying about online services which brings a lot of resistance in us (me included but I think I am getting over it)
Realistically... if you wanted to pay $30/year for a set and forget photo album, is Google the best place to do that?
Given how they often they deprecate things and how hard I've heard it is to restore a disabled account, I feel like some kind of smaller company dedicated to photo storage would be much better anyway
Photos is a billion user product, how many of those have they deprecated? The disabled account thing may be a real concern, but statistically it's more rare than getting into a plane crash, yet we still fly planes. Also, if anything, monetizing the product and allowing it to be self-sustaining financially makes it far less likely to be killed. I'd much rather pay for a product that brings me value, since now I'm a real customer get treated differently from a free user. Also AFAIK Google has never killed a paid service either.
I would be curious to know what the competition looks like, but I don't know of any other service that lets me do "Show me photos of me and my brother at the beach" and actually return relevant results. The face/object clustering is near flawless, and even works with pets.
Umm.... no. The disabled account thing is pretty common. Perhaps it's safer than flying a GA Cessna 172 in a storm, or being an air force test pilot. But probably not even that.
And as for killed services with a billion users, well, free unlimited Google Photos is now a killed service.
As for killed paid services, Google Play Music, Nest Secure, Google Photos Print, Google Audio Ads, and a ton of others.
Not really, it's mostly frequency illusion hanging out on HN, but considering Google has multi-billion users, those dozen or so incidents are nothing in comparison.
> free unlimited Google Photos
That's a feature, not a service. And name me one other company that provides unlimited free storage.
> Google Play Music
Technically migrated, all your data and purchases are still there
> Nest Secure
Hardware is a completely different ball game. The existing users can still keep using their hardware just fine. Every single device eventually stops being sold.
> Google Photos Print
Again, a feature. You didn't lose any data. You can still print photos using other services.
> Google Audio Ads
Not familiar, but I see it's still around? Do you have a link to the announcement of it being killed?
Just for something to think about regarding the disabled/locked accounts, remember that we only hear about those who have the means/social-media following to make a Big Deal about it or those with the right friends inside of Google who might be able to nudge the proper team to take a second look, and the only stories that happen to pop up are "success stories" if I can call them that. As far as I can see, the average person is screwed should The Algorithm (blessed be thy name) decide against them.
Given the scale of Google and how many people have access to the Internet today, I'd generally be willing to bet that there are many, many others with the same fate but who simply can't get enough traction behind them for anyone (let alone Google) to care enough.
> Not really, it's mostly frequency illusion hanging out on HN, but considering Google has multi-billion users, those dozen or so incidents are nothing in comparison.
It's not at all uncommon.
I've done business with Google multiple times in my career, and I could name a dozen such incidents. They're just not public.
For the most part, there wasn't anything the user did; just Google algorithm bugs. In one case, a startup lost all of its data because one Google system expected another Google system to implement a fraud detection measure, and the other Google system didn't. Completely internal to Google, but poof, all of a sudden, account gone, all data gone, and no way to fix it.
In another case, GCE lost a contract worth millions of dollars to AWS because Youtube had algorithm bugs. Poof. Youtube system broke. This was early GCE days, and they were looking for successes, and we were sufficiently high-profile that we had a dedicated engineering team. They pushed on Youtube. Youtube said we weren't important enough to help.
Most of this stuff is either under NDA, or otherwise just private, but it is why my current employer, as a policy, doesn't do business with Google. That's a big contract too; I'm not at a startup right now, but at a big company.
> And name me one other company that provides unlimited free storage
I think you're unintentionally arguing I shouldn't rely on Google-unique features, since I might lose them. I already knew that. I've learned that lesson painfully over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
That hurts Google in B2B. If all customers take that philosophy, Google fundamentally can't have unique, differentiating advantages beyond price. It doesn't matter what unique AI algorithm Googlers come up with for the Google Cloud. I won't use it if I can't count on it still being around when I ship my product. And I can't. The only time I will use Google is if it provides unique customer access (e.g. Android apps or Youtube eyeballs), which hopefully the antitrust thing will help with.
I'm not sure if you're just stating a personal preference there, or hinting that Flickr are somehow morally superior to Google. But Flickr had their own 'google Photos moment' a few years back, when they were bought out by SmugMug and immediately got rid of their 'free for life' 1TB storage.
I am pretty much all-in with Google and do what I can to protect my Google account, but one risk you can't get rid of is if Google cancelled your account for whatever mysterious reason, which is unlikely but would be catastrophic.
I still like Google Photos, but ideally I'd automatically sync all my photos to a backup service and have things set up so I could make it the primary replica if needed.
IMO, no one should be treating any online photo site as their primary photo storage. At the risk of seeming paranoid, I have everything local and both backed up locally and to Backblaze; the online photo site I use is strictly for sharing and, I suppose, yet another backup of last resort.
If you're easily generating 200GB per month in photos and videos then a NAS would probably make more sense. But keep in mind the vast majority of people don't take that many photos.
Hmm, good point, I guess nobody has ever lost access to their Google Account or (in the future) run out of storage space. After all, they're just photos, not important memories or anything.
I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos.
I've used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos.
Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind.
Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on "enterprise cloud storage" and "workplace sharing".
Apple: I love the privacy features of Apple, but what I've come to realize is that, with a very big photo library, no iPhone or Macbook can analyze them all and share the results with all my devices. Only a server can analyze 10,000+ pictures, identify faces, organize by date. All in a slick and fast UI.
There's definitely space for Google Photos competitors. Build a product that automatically triage photos, using and sometimes guessing the exif data. With face identification, location identification, automatically creating albums from photos batches (like if you take 40 photos in 2 days).
Managing our online pictures will be extremely important in the future (it is now), because we take more and more of them.
I never understand people on HN complaining about Ads on YouTube, life long Storage on Google Photos costing $.
Probably for 90% of people on HN, it costs more (Opportunity cost) to type a comment complaining about ads on Youtube compared to a month subscription. But for some reason people like to complain.
I am happily paying for YT Premium but also using youtube-dl ocassionally. There is great content on YT. On the other hand, I stopped paying and using Netflix. There was not enough interesting content for me.
It's not about accepting or not accepting paying to view videos. It's about how Youtube decimated competition and now the user cannot choose another pricing option and is left with the only option of paying the amount Google wants you to pay.
I'm trying to use Google Photos but find it hard to manage albums. Like I have a few thousand photos, I want to find all the ones that I didn't assign to albums yet. Doesn't seem like there's a way to do so.
I also want to press one shortcut key to put a photo into a certain album and at the same time archive it. As it is, it takes several buttons and a mouse selection and a mouse click (with some delay in between), which is super painful when you have to repeat it thousands of times.
Edit: Hmm, I saw there's Google Photos API. If it's easy(ish) to use, could I possibly write some small python or JS scripts to get this functionality? Or is there a reason this isn't as simple as it sounds?
I agree that Google Photos is better than iCloud in important aspects. However, for iPhone users, iCloud is so much more convenient that it makes up for the slight degradation in search quality etc.
Also, in general, do not rely on Google or Apple as backup of your photos. Use something like PhotoSync to back up to a second cloud location, and also keep a local backup.
I disagree, all that photo meta data/db is Google's, you can't export that out of Google. If google bans you or removes/changes that indexing you will loose it all.
> I've come to realize is that, with a very big photo library, no iPhone or Macbook can analyze them all and share the results with all my devices. Only a server can analyze 10,000+ pictures, identify faces, organize by date. All in a slick and fast UI.
How big is your photo library? I have about 100GB and that’s all worked perfectly well on iOS/macOS for many years - even on the old 2010 MacBook Air I used until it stopped getting security updates.
You can see a difference in quality but it’s a judgement call: Google Photos definitely indexes more things in pictures but it also has a much higher false positive rate - for example, it took until 2018-19 before searching for “cat” didn’t have two pages of results for my dog before any actual cats.
... And apple can't find cats correctly at all. Which would you want? Google can put a name to your cat and index by typing the name, and in that case it only finds you specific cat.
Which reality is that? Apple photos is consistently worse at finding them. I've never heard anyone say their image recognition is anywhere near as good, and that's my experience as well.
Do you actually use that? Maybe it's just because I have few photos, but I always thought it was a massive gimmick. If I wanted to see photos from a specific vacation, I just remember when it happened, or look up the location in the geotagging thing. No ML needed. I've never once wished I could see all my photos of "dog on beach" in one place.
> Do you actually use that? Maybe it's just because I have few photos
I use it all the time.
I wanted to recommend to a friend a restaurant I'd visited in San Diego, I couldn't remember the name of it but I knew I'd taken a picture of the food there.
"Food San Diego" and all my food pictures from my trip to San Diego pop up. Tap more info, boom, map appears with the restaurant name on it.
If I wanted to remember what year I went to San Diego, well, I'd either search in Google Photos, or in my timeline on Google Maps. (which is another way to find the name of the restaurant!)
It is life-changing feature for those of us who don't remember when they took picture of what. Even with a few thousand photos, looking up something important in seconds (instead of an hour) is huge.
Google Photos' face recognition feature is pretty good.. until Google started to think person A and person B are the same person and you want to fix it manually: which is basically impossible.
I used to use this feature heavily, and have to give up. Don't get me wrong, I still think Google Photos is the best in class. The point is, even the "best" is not enough due to the lack of options to fine tune it. And once it breaks, it jumps from "holyshit" to "unusable" straightly.
I wrote a very long article to detail it somewhere else
before, here is the gist of it:
-------
* There is no way to tell Google to "split" a person/face. All you can do is remove wrong results (person B) from person A (you can also say it's "wrong person" on web, but not in app). You can't manually re-tag them as B in batch.
* These removed results don't seem to get re-recognized as other people; it's either not get re-analyzed at all, or often times, they will be re-recognized back to the wrong person again!
* You can't multi-select more than a few hundreds pictures and remove. It says "can't remove results" on both app and web if you select, say, 1000 photos. This is extremely annoying since I have people that have 10k images and I have to do so in small batch.
* You can manually assign a face, but can only do so one by one. And that's assuming Google actually detects the face, no matter how obvious it is.
* The people you added manually (by selecting a face from a photo, and manually add a name) are somehow treated as second-class citizens. When you visit https://photos.google.com/people, their names appeared at the very end of the list of named people (no matter how many photos you have for him/her), and they are almost never considered as face-recognition candidates when you upload new photos. I guess Google simply doesn't use the manually assigned people/face in their AI.
* And the final nail on the coffin is, even if you went to the trouble and fixed all these problems manually, which I did, nothing stops Google to recognize the newly uploaded photos wrong. That means you need to repeat the process again and again.
Also from an AI/machine learning point of view (I'm guessing, I'm not in this field), the more tricky cases that the user allowed/confirmed, the model for that person became more overfitted. So eventually it started to think other people are the same guy/gal.
This is typical, but the problem is, you, as the supervisor, can't tell the AI that he was wrong, and re-tag the training set as easily.
I think all this can be easily fixed if Google can add a way to "split" a person, and then force the AI to re-train the models based on the photos from now two different people. But I won't hold my breath for a free service.
Google photos is one of the worst among the lot.
It is Apple of photo apps. Very little user control. No way to manually tag stuff or name stuff. The only reason I use it is for the free storage.
The design philosophy treats users as dumbfuks.
I'm looking to move everything out.
And what a shame iCloud's included storage is. One device's backups can dangerously close to 5gb without trying, and any additional device backups will easily push you over 5gb, effectively forcing you into the $1/mo storage plan or $4/mo if you want to share 200gb total with your family.
That's exactly what happened to my mother, she owns an iPad and an iPhone and she's constantly being squeezed for money because her two devices' backups max out her storage. She rarely takes photos and doesn't upload anything to iCloud drive, it's just her backups.
Perhaps I'm having getting whooshed here, but sunset has a racist connotation just as bad as "grandfathering" (or arguably worse). Plus it means something different. When I hear that I product it being sunset, to me that means 100% dead, even for preexisting users
What is the racist undertone to "sunset?" Currently I assume sunset is just a play on sunset being the end of the day, which is a pretty universal experience.
During the Jim Crow area, many towns and cities put up signs that read
N*****, Don’t Let the Sun Set On You in $CITY_NAME
African-American laborers could come into town for work during the day, but any who found themselves there after dark were liable to be lynched or otherwise hassled out of town. While African-Americans were the most common target, Asian-Americans[0] and Jews were sometimes the subject of these warnings/threats. The cities that put up these signs and highway billboards became known as Sunset Towns (although in the last 2 decades the term "Sundown town"[1] became more popular[2]).
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide that was written to help black people plan roadtrips. It acknowledged that "the White traveler has had no difficulty in getting accommodations, but with the Negro it has been different". The Green Book warned about Sunset towns and had pointers for finding friendly lodgings. Sunset towns weren't limited to the Deep South: New England and California also took part in the practice, and Route 66 was notoriously difficult for black travelers.
Afroman immortalized a Californian sundown town and its racial housing covenant in his song "Colt 45"[3]:
Well, it was just sundown in a small white town
They call it East Side Palmdale
When the Afroman walked through the white land
Houses went up for sale
Well, I was standing on the corner sellin' rap CDs
When I met a little girl named Jan, I let her ride in my Caddy
'Cause I didn't know her daddy was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan
> If you have a Pixel 1-5, photos uploaded from that device won’t be impacted. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality from that device will continue to be exempt from this change, even after June 1, 2021.
All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.
It may just be cleaner to write it this way because the guarantee was different between generations, but the choice of "High quality" looks intentional. Pixel 1-3 (I don't remember 4, but definitely not 4a) were guaranteed unlimited storage at "full resolution", and for subsequent models the guarantee was changed to "high quality".
I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.
Pixel 1 is unique in that they forgot to put a deadline into the deal. They didn't make the same mistake for the next ones. And, yes, unlimited original quality still works for me as of today, but I'm not taking any chances with deleting my local copies.
Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good luck putting it back together. I did a poor job on mine, part of the bottom bezel didn't stick and there are weird green glitches on the screen when you press on that part. This thing really wasn't designed to ever come apart.
So, anyway, I have a Pixel 4a on its way to me, and I'm paying 50€/month for a server with much more disk space than I know what to do with. Are there any decent self-hosted replacements for Google Photos?
If you click through the blog post to the support page listing for Pixels they do suggest that Pixel 1s will continue to get unlimited uploads, and Pixel 3s will get them until the original expiration of Jan 31, 2022. The expiration for Pixel 2 will have already expired.
It appears that it's locked to the device you're using, so I would guess you're limited to "high quality". That's a real problem for, say, people taking photospheres, which generally clock in at around 40MP, and will be reduced to 2MP at "high quality".
Oh no, that's terrible. I really need to migrate, I guess. I was getting tired for paying for Google drive anyway. Onto someone elses family plan, I go.
Worth noting that promise has an expiration date though: my Pixel 3XL says "Unlimited storage for full resolution photos & videos uploaded from your Pixel before 2/1/2022". You can find this in the Backup & Sync settings page in the Photos app.
I bought a Pixel 1 and never got the free storage of raw photos. Eventually had to export everything to dropbox and convert everything to lower quality within photos. There is no way to fix this.
Somehow I suspect that is less about fulfilling their promise to the consumer and more about “let’s not piss off regulators in any more ways than they already are”...
For ~15 years (since the launch of GMail) Google has differentiated itself on storage. Both in terms of products offerings and in terms of company image.
To me it signifies a change in the market. They don't feel like they currently need to compete with Apple or Microsoft on any of these fronts right now. The market is pretty stable and there are more battlefields ahead. So time to apply some levers at the points where everyone else is charging (iCloud) and get ready for the next big consumer adoption battle.
It makes sense right now but changes the playing field enough that some (old) disruption opportunities might start to open themselves up (again). I guess Google doesn't feel like those are a threat any more or right now tho'.
It'll be interesting to see what happens next. Bandwidth between handsets/eyeballs and datacenters is possibly one of the next most important costs and Google has a good story there. Lots of peering, a good network, and control of the software on both ends, so they are well positioned to make the most cost-effective use of that bandwidth.
AFAIK Google deploys massive HDDs to get massive parallel I/O. Possibly they changed storage strategy to mainly use SSD (lower capacity, higher IOPS) , so they no longer able to provide wasting capacities?
I think its more that as better privacy laws come into place, its hard to make money through ads and give free stuff away so they are dialing things back for the long run.
Partly that and partly the fact people have shifted to the cloud and are willing to spend money on good services (if you can guarantee bits on disk and provide a useful UI, I'm in - Google does both better than I can).
Has anyone found a good family friendly alternative? In particular I would really like to:
- Pay for the service (sustainable/trustworthy business model)
- Be able to very tightly control access to albums as I really don't want kid photos ending up on facebook or similar due to crazy aunt kathy (in google photos anyone with access can add anyone else and until recently there was no way to remove people)
- Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security)
- Confirmed and well-tested backup as a feature (sha1 of the backup matches my local, original copy, no stripping of the geo data!)
- Decent ios and android clients that can auto backup all photos on the device
Well, perhaps apart from the fact that you are giving your photos to the company that makes money on targeted advertising and invests bajillions into AI technologies that learn from data.
Some of us are distinctly uncomfortable with that, especially given what has been done to Gmail — your mail is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you.
Ok, I stand corrected. Your mail WAS fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you.
I am constantly amazed and how people trust and defend corporations like Google, given what the incentives are. Why do you think Google provides services like GMail or Google Photos? Look at their revenue streams: it's an ad-tech company.
>I am constantly amazed and how people trust and defend corporations like Google, given what the incentives are. Why do you think Google provides services like GMail or Google Photos?
I'm not sure how you got that out of my comment. I was stating a fact.
According to Google, it's “apps” – but this isn't Android apps; it's something that lets them directly fetch your emails from Google. I think it might be associated with OAuth, but despite their incredibly clear privacy policy I'm still not sure who exactly it is.
Don't worry; I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen unless you click through a pop-up.
Are you just saying "Gmail has an API, and it is possible to authorize apps to access your Gmail via the API", which will be listed (along with every other app with access to your Google Account in any way) in your account permissions page @ https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
I like Jottacloud. Quasi-unlimited storage (realistically up to 5 TB without issue) and a small but long-running company. Bonus points for BSD and Linux clients. https://www.jottacloud.com/en/pricing.html
Probably not the answer HN is looking for, but if you are in the Amazon Prime ecosystem, their access control using “groups” is really nifty. And you are technically paying for it (unlimited photo storage for Prime members + optional additional paid storage for video.)
The only option that I know of is Dropbox. they're a classic player in this space with an acceptable track record (afaict). They have a nice app with auto-uploading of pictures, they dump them into a single folder with zero modification, preserving all metadata. Creating a photo album to share is as simple as putting all the jpegs into a folder and choosing "share" in their UI. You can create share links with the usual expected gradients of public accessibility, or you can share them with only specific authorized Dropbox users.
Minor nitpick: Dropbox doesn’t preserve the original filename (e.g. IMG_1234.JPG), instead changing it to a timestamp-based filename. It also doesn’t preserve Live Photos on iOS.
You're correct, turns out Dropbox does rename the files and I'd forgotten.
It seems you're right about some quirks in their automatic photo saving system on iOS. Ive been using them with Android exclusively and had good support for auto saving pictures of all kinds.
I do use paid Dropbox on iOS and aside from the two defects I mentioned, it’s very reliable. Actually there’s a third: the Dropbox iOS app cannot reliably run in the background, so mass uploading is only possible when the phone is plugged in and the screen switched on with the app in the foreground (e.g. overnight) - but this is the fault of iOS.
Is there an alternative you’d recommend? I also use Dropbox for its cost-per-TB and Linux client.
You can have a try at https://www.notos.co/ for the privacy-minded sharing part. This is my main focus for the product.
No mobile app (yet) or sync as backups and sharing require very different products and my focus is on the later for now.
kDrive from Infomaniak is pretty good. It also has iOS and Android apps for automatic upload from your phone. It's a privacy focused company and have been around a long time.
They also offer file sharing with passwords and backup solutions.
For context, if you assigned each photo a unique integer ID, the list of IDs (just the list of numbers, not the data itself, not even any other metadata) wouldn’t fit on the largest HDD available today.
For what it's worth, this (sort of thing) was one of the reasons why I joined Google. And lo and behold I do in storage infrastructure now. :) (Alas, I am not at liberty to speak for the company or share any numbers.)
I appreciate that working for Google isn't everyone's cup of tea for a myriad of reasons, and would never pretend otherwise. And yes, the interview process can be onerous. But we are hiring! Certainly the 'technical scale' bit didn't disappoint me.
As with any other big company, if you're wondering how it is to work there, I would strongly recommend looking up acquaintances in the company and getting an inside view of the workplace dynamics to get a sense of what would await you and whether you'd enjoy it, even if experiences across this large an organization will vary greatly. If they're not close personal friends chances are if you just know them casually, they would still be happy enough to give you an unfiltered and honest summary of their experience.
10mb per file only if you average videos, multiple sizes/formats and assume some redundancy. The single photo file stored by Google averages 2 megabytes.
Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad "Backup and Sync" program for MacOS, which over the years has added thousands of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I'm happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.
That is more of the G Drive itself than the software. I had several issues with G Drive like not showing the current version that was revised 10 min prior, sometime it will take from an hour to a whole day to show the changes to other users in the shared folder. My job use GSuite unfortunately, so I am stuck with it.
The same issues happen with third party applications. I use rclone.
Duplication, missing items, quotas, stalled sync ... Some days, it just doesn’t want to work server side.
If Apple can put iOS’s ‘files’ app API to use in Finder these companies might just be able to drop macOS native (macOS only) apps in exchange for only distributing catalyst apps.
I am actually very much in favor of paying for what I use.
Truth is that upfront payment for storage and convenience is a much more sustainable model than subsidizing this through spyware and other services. Also given the amount of storage needed his seems pretty inevitable.
The problem with this is that there’s not a way to pay google $x/year to not see ads and also not be tracked everywhere you go (obviously requiring you allow cross-site google cookies) and/or limit what systems your browsing data is piped to. With this announcement, it’s just more income diversification since search ads might be pulled from them via antitrust.
I have Google One for $20/yr and iCloud for $12/yr and they provide sufficient value. Google Photos is the best photo app there is. It really takes advantage of Google's skill with hard CS problems and their platform advantage.
The search is unparalleled. The Google Location History integration is beautiful.
Just today I used it to find a dish I ate in a place years ago by finding the place in Location History and clicking through to the photo of the dish that was integrated into the view. Jesus Christ. This was the promise of AI assistants. It is here.
> Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used.
15 gigs of photos is nothing.
> Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I'm relying on cloud storage.
I'm a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mutual fund, saying they hadn't heard from me in a few years and were going to hand my account over to the government if they didn't hear from me soon.
Two years is nothing when you're my age. I have piles on the floor in my office that need attending to that have been there 5-10 years.
I can’t tell if this is just hyperbole, but if an account is inactive and unpaid for 2 years, I don’t see why they’d be expected to just sit on that data forever.
I can’t imagine being 5-10 years behind on things that “need attending to”. What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?
My 20 year old self would have agreed with you. But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically.
> What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?
Unopened mail, things I need to organize in case of a tax audit, broken things I was going to fix, things that simply need to be put away, things I can't decide whether to keep or throw away, etc.
My father's sophisticated organizational method was the "chronological sort", aka the most recent stuff was thrown on top of the pile. The bottom slowly gets compressed into a rock-like substance.
I feel like there’s interesting personal opinion in your comments in this thread, but it’s losing potency because you’re surrounding it in this aura of being older and wiser than anyone else in the thread.
Things like “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically” just sound condescending.
These days, 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing. If I go on a trip for a week to take pictures, I can easily shoot 50-100GB of images. (Using my full-frame DSLR, shooting in raw, average image size is over 50MB, meaning < 20 images per GB).
I don't think I'm making too many assumptions when I say RAW photos from a DSLR being uploaded to Google Photos is not anywhere near the intended use-case.
However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.
Interesting, I didn't know there was a camera that could do it directly. I always did want that for my Sony a6000. But for jpeg, not raw. After sitting in front of Lightroom for hours upon tedious hours adjusting vacation pics, I will never shoot in raw again.
I think Google is missing a clear opportunity to compete with Instagram and the like. Google Photos is nearly default on just about every new and recent android phone in the world and its "partner" sharing feature (limited to just 1 partner) resembles a private IG-like share experience.
Imagine having that breadth of user base already active in your app but not simply adding a public network around it (with adequate privacy controls). Add a few ads here and there and it could pay for itself...
Please, no. Photos has way more personal photos of mine. I would prefer to pay and have my content be there without ads.
Also, maybe I am the odd one out here but I don't like concept of public sharing. The only reason I have wanted to upload pictures on Instagram instead of individually sharing photos with my friends is to make my dating profile look better.
I think they’ve been bruised by Google+. I will never trust Google to not add a version of this that keeps your email handle different from your supposed username. Even if they do, I expect them to pull the rug out from under the users in the future to tie the image account and google account together.
Social media like Instagram has actually shown that people appreciate having to explicitly upload select images to their online persona.
It's simpler and it also removes overhead like "wait, which photos can people see again?" Facebook had to build a complicated "view your profile as X" system early on just to address this trepidation.
Please no. Photos is where I put _all_ my photos. I don't want any social complexity layered on at all, ever. I'll gladly pay for the dumb storage solution they've got now (and, in fact, I do).
I remember the frantic meetings at Yahoo when Gmail killed the market for storage upgrades. They caused an immense amount of work (more so than affecting revenue and costs; the premium quotas at least in Europe didn't generate much revenue and the quotas were there more out of fear of excessive use).
A lot of adoption of Google services was driven by not having to worry about quotas. Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage in a way people have been unable to compete with them for years.
No, but neither photos or e-mail sizes today are anything like what they used to be either. And remember the quota is the general Google Account quota, not separate to photos. I already have 8GB of other data in Drive.
Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation.
So while this may not be a big problem at the moment, we'll see. I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying, which isn't awful, but it's a question of when not if, and image / video sizes still keep creeping up.
That's with my photo-taking being at a far lower rate than it used to be when my son was younger. I'm not a very social person and don't travel much at the moment - a lot of people will hit those limits far faster.
> I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying
When gmail launched, I had to clean my old email every other week on all my addresses. A few years of normal usage before you have to remove old stuff is very reasonable.
My free Google Drive is even larger than my O360 one that my workplace pays for.
> Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage
Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.
As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.
>Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
You've just given me a horrible thought. What's the betting Google retains the free tier [albeit at a reduced level] and starts sticking adverts in amongst your photos?
But is moving stuff or $5 a month cheaper? This is how iCloud got me. I pay $1 a month for space as I didn’t want to deal with figuring out what stuff on my phone I was willing to move or delete.
Or stop pack-ratting everything. How often do you go back and browse the photos you take. For me, it was "never" and I stopped taking photos. I probably take less than a few dozen photos a year with my phone, and I don't back them up because I will probably never look at them again.
I must have around 5000 photos in my archives and backed up to Google Photos / Amazon S3, etc. This includes old pre-digital ones from various family albums, which I've scanned. I have a strange compulsion to archive 'stuff' like this for posterity. Even though, logically, I know it's of no interest to anyone else apart from me and, after I'm gone and the 'rental' is not being paid on it any more, it'll all disappear forever.
Still, even though I very rarely look at any of it, I'm nonetheless comforted by the fact that it's in safe storage. At least for as long as I'm around.
Ironically, one of the few things that actually gets me looking at old photos again is Google Photos "This week X years ago" feature, that pops up in the mobile app. It's fun to bore the missus with such nuggets of info as "Did you know, this week 7 years ago, we were in <some place> visiting <some person>?"
At the prices involved, it will take years before not pack-ratting becomes a break-even operation.
I take photos every day and I look at loads of them. The biggest mistake I made in my early twenties was not taking photos. Every year since I started taking photos, it's been great.
Hosting yourself is better than Google reading and disabling your account because you used a couple words that might violate it's TOS. I can't imagine a researcher trying to write a book in Google Docs about 1960's civil rights without tripping Google's abuse engines. It is creepy
You need redundancy with google too. I personally use google, but I have a home server that pulls my photos and emails via the google api. Then I backup that to a 2nd internal drive and the cloud. I use a time4vps storage server, if anyone is interested (https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)
I have a synology setup with a syncme app on mobile that I run every month or so to dump pics on home nas. I have a amazon glacier backup plugin on NAS that backup's periodically. thats it.
Even if the house catches fire I can still get my stuff out of amazon.
"Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"
I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.
> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.
To be fair I would consider this a feature. This is how I expect trash to work. Someone takes it away on occasion.
> Google Docs to be counted as storage space
Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a user you don't really have any insight on how much space a doc actually uses. I guess they are going to create some metric?
> "Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"
All these limits were placed within the last few months. It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users
> I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.
It's paid.
> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.
It used to be unlimited. Now it isn't. Which is what people expected.
> Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a..
Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files? They previously excluded docs and it lead to hacks like these - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
> It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users
I agree that it's a company wide policy, but I'm not so sure it's to reduce load. It might just be that they want more subscription revenue and to reduce their reliance on advertising, which has current antitrust issues circling around it.
> Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files?
My point is that there is no "file" for Google Docs. They are some rows in a database somewhere. Probably some update rows and the occasional snapshot proto.
I guess it is no less arbitrary than a MS Office file, but since you can see the file on your disk you know the intrinsic size.
I'm definitely not saying they should give away the storage for free. But it is an interesting problem for how to count this in a user-understandable way.
Google will basically need to re-invent their whole business to do this and there are few signs this is where they are going. They still track the hell out of everyone. They still make the overwhelming majority of their money from advertising.
This isn't going to make Google stop being creepy Google. They are just trying to get some of their sideline projects to break even.
Don't they make more by treating their customers as products (though i wouldn't call them customers because they receive no support, whether they pay or not)
How do they make money from giving their users free photo storage? I think the only path for that to be profitable was to grow the username for future subscription revenue.
“As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.”
Big players do this to lock out competition. Give away a product or keep the price absurdly low until all the competition is wiped out. Then slowly start turning up the cranks to maximize profits.
I don't think it's to do with that. I think it's just a reflection that google is a large company with lots of different products, half of which are providing de facto free cloud storage, despite the fact that Google has a cloud storage offering. Also, by pushing the storage limit to onto a single Google account (rather than individual accounts for each product) they can push you into their suite of products (if you're already using the app with a rainbow coloured box icon they can push you to look at those other icons: like rainbox coloured box, or other rainbox coloured box, and the rainbow coloured box with a squiggle)
YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space.
In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable from a business perspective.
(I am not referring to the meme sites like Imgur who host images at a far lower resolution with a far higher compression ratio, which is of course useless for photos.)
YouTube generates $15b in revenue on ads, plus YouTube Premium memberships [1] and so the cost of storing and serving all of the data would also have to total in the billions, after paying ad revenue to creators as well as other costs. That could be the case, although if they were taking a substantial loss it's unlikely they would hold on for as long as they have.
YouTube also has the benefit of having monopoly power over its market - to their credit, no one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions. But since they have all of the creators already, and starting a competitor is extremely capital-intensive, there aren't any competitors at anything near their scale. For the most part the usual way to find other YouTube creators is YouTube, via their recommendation algorithm. There is a significant lock-in effect.
Since they have monopoly power, they should be able to find ways to monetize their platform, even if potentially contentious. They recently turned on mid-roll ads on all videos longer than 8 minutes (unless the creator opts out) [2] so it's not like they're out of ideas.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but we simply don’t know because Google doesn’t report YouTube financials separately. They could still be taking a loss and subsidising it with general search revenue.
Historically, YouTube was acquired circa 2006, it was bleeding money massively and in constant legal battle with the music labels, until things started turning around circa 2010.
It's a great reality check to replace "cloud" with "someone else's computer". Computers tend to run out of space. Then you either delete whatever you don't need, or buy additional storage, which costs money.
Google is running out of ways to keep up with revenue expectations, it's becoming quite obvious. Even Chrome has small ads at the bottom from time to time now, the desperation is quite clear.
Nope, it has/had a line of linked text that promoted the new Pixel phone. Not graphical and definitely not malware. Was on the tiled start page a few weeks ago. An ad by Google, I took a screenshot, I’ll try to find it.
Well, luckily Google One is quite cheap. You can get 100 GB for 20 euro per year to get started and even the 2 TB plan is cheaper than for example Dropbox and iCloud when paid annually.
Free, however, meant that photos could stay online potentially past the end of someone's life. Now the dead will have their memories & photos that they've shared vanish. This is a dark day.
This helps me personally a little bit, but it's sad to see that going forward the world will need to find a new way to organize & make available their visual media, especially after death.
Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
Yes. Everyone is focussing on the curtailing of free uploads for high resolution images. But I don't think anyone yet has mentioned what is far more concerning for me; the fact that Google'a announcement also says that if your account is inactive for two years, they MAY [my emphasis] delete your data:
>What happens when you're inactive
When you have been inactive in a product for 2 years, we may delete all content for that product. But before we do that, we will:
Give you notice using email and notifications within the Google products. We will contact you at least three months before content is eligible for deletion.
Give you the opportunity to avoid deletion (by becoming active in the product)
Give you the opportunity to download your content from our services.
Important: As an example, if you're inactive for 2 years in Photos, but still active in Drive and Gmail, we will only delete Google Photos content. Content in Gmail and Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) will not be deleted if you are active in those products.
That is pretty concerning for anyone who believed that, in the event of their death, their Google Photos archive would still be around for their surviving friends and family to enjoy.
I was rather expecting that our presence online didn't disappear as soon as we went inactive. I don't want my message board messages to all get erased when I croak. Same goes for the pictures I share with others online too.
Not sure how this is not-an-issue for so many people. Thanks for the reply though. I really don't understand how I'm so far downvoted for what seems like the beginning of a new era where information starts to delete itself, whereas before it survived.
Any downvoters care to register dissent? At -2 now. I see almost no one discussing this. This is how more than one person I know had planned to preserve some of their mementos for the future. This option is now cut off. Why the downvotes, chums?
Personally I like this new direction Google is going. I am someone who much prefers to pay a few bucks a month over having my data used for ad targeting. Ideally I'd like to see them make all Google platforms ad-free for Google One subscribers.
You don't think some team at Google is using photo metadata for ads? There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata, or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence. I'd be astonished if that isn't the case today or won't be tomorrow.
> You don't think some team at Google is using photo metadata for ads?
Do you really think they are committing fraudulent inducement when they explicitly say that they aren't when selling the service?
> There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata
Marginally, probably not much when they already know that from your cellphone location data, your browser location data, the credit card data that they buy, etc.
> or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence.
Again, something they probably get a lot clearer a picture of from buying credit card transaction data than photos.
> Do you really think they are committing fraudulent inducement when they explicitly say that they aren't when selling the service?
Their TOS is 8 miles long like every other SaaS company. I'm sure somewhere in their is a counter clause that says they can do whatever they want with any of your data across all products.
I am very confident that photos metadata is not used for ad targeting. I know enough about the infrastructure and the folks that run it that it would take a seriously tin-foil-hat type scenario for this to be happening without the team's knowledge.
I work on Google Photos and prior to that I worked on datacenter level infrastructure.
I wonder if they will ever fix the problem when you actually do upgrade to google one, there is no way to make your old photos go from "high quality" to "full res" without bringing them on to a desktop device, uploading them a second time, and often getting duplicates.
I'm a paying customer and I can't even back up my old photos in full res that are on my device without a TON of work.
That is supported on at least Android (I think it is on iOS as well, but I'm not 100% sure). When you switch the backup options from High-Quality to Original quality you should get a prompt asking if you want to re-upload the photos on your device in Original Quality.
So if I upgrade my photos don't upgrade to full res automatically, but if I download them they are actually full res?
I don't have the original photos anymore, that's why I'm asking if Google keeps the full res and I'm able to retrieve them with a paid plan.
I don't think this change is so bad in isolation, but one thing I'm beginning to feel is that Google are removing things & changing propositions so much that at any point in my life, I'm trying to adapt to their newest whim on at least one of their products.
I had purchased a bit of music through Google Music and it was nice. I kept it downloaded on my device, played it whenever I wanted, and it integrated nicely with Google Assistant, as promised. This year, Google decided to migrate all that into YouTube Music. I thought that wouldn't be a problem; just a new name and change of UI, surely? Well, YouTube Music is incessant about nagging you to subscribe. Unless you subscribe it doesn't work well with assistant and won't play without the app open. I only wanted to listen to the music I had already purchased on the same terms on which I had purchased it, though. Luckily, it was just a handful or so of music and they've agreed to refund it. But now I'm still in the situation where I will be looking for something to replace the gap. This is just one example.
At some point, I'm not going to be bothering with Google products anymore. I already feel a moderate bias against using their stuff. I'm switching from Google Cloud to Vercel, for example. I just hope Vercel doesn't get acquired by Google.
I haven't yet done anything about Gmail, Drive, or Photos, but I feel a bit insecure about such important stuff currently being in Google's hands.
I've found Microsoft Office to be the best deal for online storage. $70/year gets you a bunch of useful apps and 1TB of storage, or $100 year provides 1TB for up to 6 accounts. Nothing else seems to come close.
Yup, on Android photo upload works the same as Dropbox/Google. It doesn't have the AI smarts of Google Photos though. Just tried searching for 'cat' and the results were useless. But the storage works.
The android app exists but it's wonky as in sometimes the thumbnails of your photos simply won't load They are there, you just have to click on a blank thumbnail to watch the photo.
I can get a 1TB storage server from Time4vps for about $60 (they charge in euros). That gives me the ability to store stuff with sftp, rsync, or more full featured backup solutions like borgbackup.
Sounds like a bad deal, comparatively. Microsoft skips the low-level interfaces but gives you redundancy and usable UIs and services (on top of an API)
Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Nice of them to announce so far in advance and let existing content stay free for now, and that should help them avoid an abrupt exodus.
This seems like a big win for Apple though, especially with their new focus on services. As with other apps like maps, they’ve by now basically caught up with Google who had started off with a huge lead. When Google photos first launched with facial and object recognition and ability to search photos without ever tagging them, it was pretty incredible but now that’s basically table stakes.
For any iPhone and Mac users who haven’t been paying specifically for cloud photo storage and will now need to, I don’t really see much reason to stick with google photos over the native solution using iCloud or Apple One. I’m sure that’s what I’ll do eventually.
Pretty upset about this. I added the app to my mothers phone as it auto backs up everything at high enough quality for her at no cost. Trying to explain to a 65 year old woman with no computing skill how to set up a recurring subscription for online photo storage is going to be a tough ask.
Google One family subscriptions would be a good fit here. You can manage the subscription and just add your mother to the plan.
It's what our family does.
My mother is at the same age and I set up the subscription for her and she never has to think about it. Or, you could share your subscription with your mother.
It's funny how people make assumptions about technology use among the elderly - myself included. She got a 16GB iPhone a few years ago and filled it with videos within half a year.
She wants her photos/videos with her at all times, but then she would need at least 256gb phone which she cannot afford the contract for. Google photos was a perfect balance for this, as the app works very very well as a photo browser where everything is in the cloud - meaning she could offload all the photos and videos (at an acceptable quality for her [impaired] vision) from the phone.
Is there another photo hosting service, which has such a great face recognition (including videos), and flexible search by time, location, people in photos, etc.? I made Google Photos my primary, because we accumulate thousands and thousands of photos, so, no other service I know offers such quality search. But maybe I'm wrong.
Google Photos still feels like the safest way to keep an archive of thousands of images across my family, agnostic to devices. I’d rather have High Quality backups than losing the originals on some outdated hard drives.
The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.
The search function in Google photos is really the main factor why I'd want to continue using it. I wish there were a photo search index I could run on my own hdd.
Curious what indexing features you find most useful. For me the killer feature was how ocr rendered a lot of photos searchable by the text contained in the photo. But also cool how you can search “mountains” and see all your photos related to that.
I like being able to search by location and peoples names. Similar features are present in my phone's gallery (Samsung) but it obviously works only on the photos in device. Google photos searches all the photos taken by my wife and I over the last half a decade.
Apple's Photos app has a decent search-by-contents feature. Even better, the analysis is all on-device -- it isn't server-side, and doesn't rely on you uploading your photos to iCloud.
Samsung gallery also has same features but it works only on the photos stored on the phone. A big plus with Google photos is that it operates on my entire collection even when I clean pics up from my phone.
Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts:
I would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account actually be deleted? I can hardly see Google digging through their tape archives to delete cold-stored data from dead accounts. It would be so much hassle and be more costly than just leaving it as is.
It could very well be the same situation with actual 'live' data in data centre, belonging to dormant accounts.
Say you have a multi-TB hard drive in a data centre somewhere and, on that multi-TB drive, you have one or two users whose accounts are deemed to be now dormant. Would it really be worth Google's while to delete those one or two users' 'stuff'?
OK. the data savings would add up with thousands of inactive accounts, spread across data centres. But if all that freed up space is in relatively tiny amounts, dotted around thousands of hard drives, it would be a nightmare to manage and keep track of. Unless Google has some kind of system in place which is constantly shuffling data around to effectively 'de-frag' entire data centres?
Deleted photos, accounts, etc are definitely deleted and purged from our systems.
We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law).
Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams.
From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis.
[I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]
Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner.
Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.
I am what you would describe as a “privacy conscious person” so over time I’ve been moving out of Google products.
Instead of making me pay for additional storage [1], I wish I could pay for the ability to use all of Google’s products with increased privacy (no tracking, no reading my emails, ability to turn off YouTube recommendations etc.). I would pay for that because the products themselves are great.
My main issue with going from a free service to paying for storage isn't that it's not free anymore. It's that, at some point in the future, I would run out of storage and I'd need to pay more per month. I'm only good at estimating how many GBs of photos I produce per month. Also, what if I accumulate more than 2TB of photos? I don't even see an option to upgrade past that.
It's very hard for me (and many other people) to estimate how many GBs of photos I would produce total because (1) I don't know what camera technology would be like in a few years and (2) I don't know how many years I will be alive and producing photos for.
I know that they can't just our old uploads free forever, but I'd like the product framing to adapt to my mental model rather than the other way around. They can still price it such that it's profitable for them.
Another issue I have is vendor lock-in. Sure, I can take my data out of Google Photos, but I can't take my data out for 5 years, and at some later point decide to use it again, and have it be in exactly the same state as it was before. A lot of metadata (edits, social interactions like comments/shared album data) would be lost. To me, these "non-exportable features" almost feel like ads, since they entice people to modify their content in ways that can only be shown to them in the future if they continuously pay for the service.
I've got a few issues with this but my biggest one is the combination of Drive/Docs/Gmail storage with my Photos quota.
I have 18GB of that stuff ... so I'm done before I take a single photo. If I had a 15GB runway starting on June 2021 that's plenty of time to consider my options. Now I have no runway, gotta start researching how to move a decade of photos.
Reading the comments, I realize many seem to think that the Unlimited High-Res was their original photos. It is a high-res version but not your original photo resolution. I always shoot at the highest available resolution where I can (along with RAW, when possible).
For those, worrying about Google banning your account and losing your photos, here is how I do mine. Still not the best but hope to inspire others.
1. Our family shoots mostly with iPhone, and DSLRs and the first point of consumption are Apple Photos.
2. I have Google Drive Backup to back up the "original" resolution photos to Google Photos. This helps to share with friends, families, and others who are pretty much not on the Apple Ecosystem. This also serves as my second backup and I like the cute things that the Google Photos team does to the photos. A lot of fun moments for the family.
3. Besides the digital house-keeping that I quickly do every Month, I do a checklist of Backups, trimming, minimizing, etc, every year (usually in JAN). Here the Photos from Apple Photos are exported to the yearly folder but I'm not happy that the exported photos pretty much have scrambled metadata. I'm fine for now, as this is my last resort if the above two sources kinda die.
This is not yet something that I'm happy about and will continue to look for something in the lines of every tool (such as Apple Photos, Google Photos, and others) being just clients to a primary source available on my local NAS and somewhere online (with backup replicas -- cloud such as AWS, Wasabi + elsewhere).
On a personal note, I do skip lunches once a while each month to cover up for the 2TB Google One and Apple One Family plans, which I'm fast running out too. That lunch-skipping is good for health and pays for the monthly plans.
They don't actually want peoples data for free any longer so they are failing at capitalising it which could mean a bump on the road for big data but maybe it's the real deal and they are saturated with what they can deal with and hence more data becomes a cost to them going forward.
Could also mean that the big G has reached it's max market valuation in abstract terms..!
Didn’t Dropbox do something similar but at the time (2011) I believe, it was 2gb but unlimited.
Still, to this day in 2020, I receive quarterly emails of them threatening to close my account (next month they say)...and not provide access, which is fine because... I went over their limit with half .mic 4K movie blob of Avatar (or blue ray or whatever), since my ps3 ran out of space.
I wonder how much typical account uses free storage. I was recently helping a family member troubleshoot their over quota Google Photo backup, originally setup for full quality, since I thought 15GB was enough for life time. Was surprised to find they shot close to 60GB worth random shit in the last few years after putting them on my One family circle. I guess explosion in camera sensors and high res recording is making a lot of croft.
I think Google should start throwing some deduplication photos in Google Feeds everyday, help them clear up some space and help users clear up their gallery which is often filled with so much useless shit that it's hard to use. There's something about physical film where each shot was precious and developing photo came with it's own sorting / curation process. Online photo are pretty tedious viewing experience compared to physical albums, I know a lot of people who practice inbox zero but virtually no one who keeps their online photos kempt.
I would be happy to pay up if I could be sure that my account is safe at Google. I am mentioning this because of multiple reports of people who saw their account being closed because of an unnamed TOS violation, and no way to get it back.
The people working at Google might not be able/allowed to comment on this, although I would appreciate their view on this issue.
Yep. This is giving me anxiety too. I know us technical folk talk about what a backup solution really is and that the cloud is not a reliable backup solution.
The reality is a lot of folks don’t think this way and don’t want to have usb hard drives laying around or NAS in the living room next to the router.
People are storing their digital lives with Google. And they’re having them destroyed too, without any recourse.
Now, am i the only one who wished that, rather than just catalogue and organized bazillion photos, photo storage services would actually help us curate our own photos?
At some point I wish there was a service that would help me narrow my 30K+ photos down to maybe 1000 o so.
I originally started down this path, trying to automate "culling," but found that (at least with the transfer models that I played with) ML-based "quality" scores weren't that great.
For those who are considering or already self-hosting, I'm genuinely curious whether it's worth the time/effort vs privacy comfort of mind? Google One prices seem reasonable (except the lack of middle tiers). Even the price aside, they also claim to not use data for ad targeting, and I personally haven't seen ads based on my media content (but obviously I'm just one anecdote).
I feel like the only real concern around Google is accidentally violating some obscure policy, and getting perma-locked out. Then why not stay on Google Photos in addition to duplicating it somewhere else, instead or moving away completely. Haven't really looked elsewhere in depth, but nothing else seems to offer even close to the polish and especially search functionality.
That does seem pretty nice for self hosting. But isn't a physical device in your house just as vulnerable to fire, water, etc damage, in which case you want another cloud solution anyways?
Google Photos was so many leaps and bounds ahead of what I was doing before to save my smartphone pictures, I'm not even thinking of leaving.
Automatic backup, dead simple albums, easy sharing, browsing on web and mobile. It may be the most satisfied I am with any Google product. Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Maps are probably the other top-tier ones. There are untold numbers of mid-tier and crap-tier ones.
If you're interested in self hosting and willing to put in a bit of work to collect data from your online presence for archival, take a look at Perkeep (previously known as Calimstore) [1].
I only use them because it's free. Sure, the creations are cute (especially the kids ones). But if I'm going to have to start paying someone, I'm afraid it won't be them. I suspect I'm not the only one making that calculation either.
I'm happy to see business models for services I've come to rely on emerge from the shadows, notably with Google, Spotify, and various news sources. I would like assurances that direct payments imply a reasonable expectation of data privacy however.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/alphabet-... probably has something to do with decreasing profit margins, or they are projecting a bad recession where firms will expend less on advertising. Also they don't actually need to buy the good will of us with free bytes (we are just clicking on adds & feeding the machine with data). They own the market, so why should they?
I read that as: "Our database for learning any AI model we'd like to have has grown big enough, so we no longer have use for you being the product. Pay us to be able to grow dataset." ;-)
Pay Google for privilege to have your data harvested? No thanks, I left Google Photos years ago when I could understand they provided something "for free" in exchange for your data, but even pay them for this? What a joke.
I am sure there will pop up companies happy to harvest your data for free.
Personally I just do multiple physical backups, it ain't so convenient, but I have control over my data.
Btw. there is Yandex Disk for people who don't wanna pay for OneDrive or Amazon Photos. For cold storage is maybe cheapest Backblaze.
Any open source software for displaying and organizing photos as albums?
I already take care of the uploading (I have a big nextcloud server with multiple copies), however there is no affordance provided for collecting albums and sharing them.
And just to clarify, an album to me it's just a list of paths to photos and the ability to generate password protected links that I can share with family members.
Oh, right, the photos shared through this way should hide all exif tags to prevent leakage.
I have all the photos in a single folder, i would not like to change that, especially because some photos should appear in multiple albums. How do you manage that?
My use case is essentially ONLY virtual galleries. I want to bookmark the photos I like the most, then organize based on "whatever comes to mind" (e.g. horizontal-sleeping-daughter, playing-with-toys) and share those galleries.
Someone at Google gave me a gmail invite many years before it was public and that was the start, for me, of using their services.
I find paid for Google services much better. Google WorkGroups/GSuite provides CloudSearch. Buying books and movies is easy and avoids having everything in one Amazon account. It is easy enough to control how much information they collect.
I would like it if Twitter and other services I use offered paid accounts with some privacy guarantees and no advertising.
I wonder if this is antitrust related? Offering services for free just because you have excess cash certainly prevents competitors whose only business is photo-related.
I started saving my photos with Google for two reasons:
- I’m an iPhone user and didn’t want a single company to have access to all my assets,
- it was free and this compensated for the discomfort of using a non-native app.
Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers. Since Apple tries to rebrand itself this way, I would expect more former customers to go there.
> Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers.
Photos data isn't used for ads according to the post.
Are you concerned about photo analysis for tagging? You can upload to Google Drive in that case and manage the photos yourself like any other provider.
What really pisses me about google is that they're a company where the user is the product AND they pretend to have users pay them.
If a company puts their users first, I can understand why they'd charge them; that's their business model.
But for a company with interests so orthogonal to their users, it just amazes me that they decide to charge -- and also, that their users would be willing to pay.
If I need to pay to upload new photos, I would choose a cloud service based on the features it provides.
Of course I can keep the old photos in Google Photo and upload new photos to other cloud service, but I would lose the ability to search "all" photo in a single place.
Now, I just want to have a function to download all photos from Google Photo and consider switching to others.
I think it is OK. The problem is how they did not predict they would not be able to keep the product as is. So a lot of people created a dependency on it. The app itself will need to change. It is now the official photo backup app. Now it will have to come by default disabled or it will incur costs. Also, it should be tied to better Google One offerings.
"... more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded"
So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m / month in storage and a mere $140k / month growth. (And Google's internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2... the discounts they offer to public Google Cloud customers per petabyte are pretty big).
In comparison, Facebook is getting hit with more than 10PB of photos per month. YouTube surely dwarfs all of that. (Google Photos may be harder to monetize, but traffic is also way way lower).
Surely Google is being exceptionally stingy with this move to charging for Google Photos. Google Cloud itself has many many contracts that are north of $20m per month. This move is likely less of "the gains to ad targeting from private photos fell short even during the pandemic ad surge" and more of "the YouTube price hike went swimmingly, how can we gouge more for services now that the pandemic has shown people will pay?" Also probably with a sprinkle of "we're starting to have high employee turnover, how can we make sure the product doesn't become a zombie risk in 5 years?"
Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object detection, gene.) Running all that for 28 billion photos a month costs a lot of money. (And that excludes all the engineering cost of building front ends, android apps, integrations, etc.)
All the software infra and processing was built years ago for Google Plus, so the ongoing engineering costs are minimal. The compute might be more than Backblaze, but it's predictable (the majority happens on upload) and it's a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of daily search indexing, YouTube, etc.
The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.
Another datapoint: Flickr Pro is as low as $5/month for unlimited full-res photos. So Google Photos (beyond 15GB) at ~$1.6/month would get to undercut Flickr yet won't even offer unlimited space.
I'm confused.. it was unlimited before? I received an email saying my google drive quota (16.5 of 17gb) was reaching its limits and I needed to buy google one to go over that. It looked like Photos was taking up the most space and I assumed that was included in the google drive cap. Did they just get me to sign up earlier than I needed to?
Hell, I guess this was doomed to happen, but I did not think of it when I transitioned to Google Photos. Dropbox has been pretty bad for syncing photos from my device, so I started using both, now I'm thinking that maybe I should just use some Apple service for it since I only own Apple devices. What do people use to sync their photos?
I'm the cofounder of Lomorage, https://lomorage.com,
we believe the digital assets should be taken care by ourselves, store locally, backup locally, that is the primary, and cloud backup is the tertiary backup, a good complementary, the price of existing cloud storage is too high, and some of the companies(Shoebox, Canon Irista) doing the business gradually shutdown the services, this is a money losing business, it’s not the efficient way to manage huge amount of assets centralized (flicker CEO’s open letter sent last year confirmed this), they have to either make it more expensive, or make you the product. Cloud service is convenient for the user, people don’t need to buy expensive hardware, don’t need to be the professionals to maintain that, don’t need to worry about the energy fee to keep it run 24x7, but things are changing, single board computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more energy efficient, storage are getting cheaper with larger capacity, software are getting more intelligent, people are having more and more concerns about the privacy, it’s now viable to host the Photo service, your private cloud, at your own place.
Do they extract data from your photos (meta + image recognition) for your user ad targeting profile (and probably the other people in your photos). I always assumed that was the tradeoff in using them to store photos for 'free'. If they do extract data, I wouldn't expect them to stop once they start charging either.
Im fine for paying for Google photos IF:
Google signs an agreement stating they will not use or share my photos in any way.
They agree that I can migrate all my account data if they want to disable/lock my account.
*In other words, keep the control for the user/customer.
I hope that they can handle all those deletes on their spinning hard drives. Append-only is easy, since you're never deleting and there's no chance for fragmentation. Once you get deletes, you're going to get fragmentation and performance goes to hell.
Whatever... I just wish they actually let you manage your own content. I guess I could just download it all, but I certainly can't sort by size or really do just about anything useful in staying under the limits, so I feel really strong-armed into paying.
A new tool will launch on June 1 that will make it easier to manage quota usage. The goal is to make it easier to understand what is using quota and reduce the amount of quota that is used.
It will show things like your largest photos and low quality (blurry, dark, etc) photos that you can review and decide what to delete.
I prefer not to manage the content actually. It is way better for Photos to group on dates, location, content. That way finding content becomes way easier on different dimensions.
Funny how Google pushes the automatic syncing between partner accounts. These automatically imported images go against the storage cap, and most don't realize it.
There should be an option to filter those imported images for easier deletion. I haven't seen one.
I do pay for some storage and I bought phones that said unlimited for life. Because of the second I feel a bit burned and am likely to avoid products from google in the future.
I always knew they'd do this so I've been backing up all my photos locally.
Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
A little bit of good news, IMO. Next, they need to do like Reddit and start making "dead" account names available for re-use. (Something Reddit does for sub-reddits and which Google seems to not do for, say, BlogSpot.)
Edit: I say this as someone with old, dead google accounts I will never recover and I would rather the data be deleted than fall into the hands of nefarious third parties. Also, we bellyache about the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin as an environmental hazard, but we think Google should keep abandoned accounts intact indefinitely? Why?
All systems need some means to clean out the cruft and recycle stuff and not just permanently freeze it for people who may be dead, who may have forgotten they made that account while high that one night, etc.
Allowing email addresses to be reused is a huge security and privacy problem. It means that any email which was still being sent to the old address -- including account recovery emails -- becomes accessible to the new owner of the email address.
Deleting data from "dead" accounts is fine and good. But they need to stay dead, not come back to life.
I'm talking about recycling BlogSpot addresses. Currently, it's common to see a BlogSpot blog with a single post from ten years ago and it means all the best URLs are gone and will never be available.
That's vulnerable to a different sort of hijacking -- SEO spammers recreating blogs with URLs of deleted sites that previously had a lot of incoming links. It'd also risk destroying historically important content that was published in "one-off" Blogspot sites.
Reddit doesn't let you adopt a subreddit if the mod is active anywhere on Reddit, even if you as a user can't see it. The subreddit has to be completely abandoned and the mod account has to be dead.
I see no reason why Google can't have similar policies that if the Gmail that controls the blog is completely inactive to the point where it gets deleted, any blogs it controlled can now be recycled.
Subreddits are built upon user activity, and need active moderation to keep that under control. A policy of allowing the subreddit to be passed on to a new moderator if the previous moderator is gone -- which doesn't even remove any existing content -- is eminently reasonable.
Blogspot blogs, on the other hand, are primarily about the author's content. Destroying that content simply because the author is no longer reachable (e.g. if they have died!) is not a reasonable policy.
I think you are not really hearing my point. I'm saying there are many blogspot URLs that have been claimed and that aren't really in use. In most cases, these are not sites with substantial content of any kind.
There's currently no means to recycle them that I know of. I deleted one of my own and can't reclaim the URL. It just no longer exists. Period.
That's too bad, I guess the ROI of freely hosting images in exchange that they continuously feed it all to their Machine Learning to train it over time isn't worth the cost of permanent storage.
Pixels have always had that special selling point but newer ones have an end date of free storage for original quality. I think only the Pixel 1 has lifetime storage.
On one hand I wonder if it makes sense to get an old Pixel 1 from eBay so that I can continue to upload free photos forever (or at least until the Google Photos APK is not updated anymore for the old Android version running on the Pixel 1).
On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if Google just closes the accounts of people who upload large amounts of pictures and videos (taken on another phone) with the Pixel 1.
I pay pCloud for 500 GB of storage and while it is nowhere close to "Unlimited", it is far greater than the 15 GB Google gives me if I want to save my photos in their original resolution.
Timely. I just got my closet server on the internet with WebDAV behind auth and SSL. Also installed PhotoSync on my phone. I do miss the image GP browser though (a little).
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) has an unlimited storage plan for $20/month. You might have to contact them to sign up for it. The plan is called Enterprise Standard.
Of course it's not especially wise to switch from a gutted google product to another gutted google product, but there aren't many good options for high capacity cloud storage at a reasonable price.
You can get Lots-O-Terabytes drives for cheap. Just store them there, and don't worry about your cloud storage going dark. Get two drives and make a backup.
For those of us that already pay for personal GSuite, does anyone know if we ALSO need a Google One subscription now? Or if the GSuite space will be enough?
For anyone with a technical inclination, we knew this day would come eventually, thus Google did as well. But for the layman or casual user, one would assume the unlimited space would remain free forever. Companies really need to be upfront about the sustainability of their free options and the forecasting of when those things will change. Google had to have known that they couldn't sustain an unlimited free plan forever and should have stated such from the beginning.
I'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.
I ve been waiting fr this. I am going to build my cloud storage product. Only difference will be in pricing and bucket size.
Here is how it ll go
Steps of 10 Gb - 20 rs/month
no fixed plans like google or apple. This will save users some money.
mc-mu(u+1)*1.69/2
this is the cost equation, basically this will give u the amount of money you will lose by going with a fixed plan say 100GB over my suggested 10GB steps.
eg. if u only generate 1GB per month you ll lose ~4400rs due to unused space if you go with 100GB plan.
I never understood why people used this service. I'm not a professional photographer but I care about image quality. Google's "high quality" option really means "16 Megapixels or less" which is lower quality than most modern cameras can capture, so by taking advantage of unlimited storage, you're sacrificing image quality.
I did a "deep dive" trying to compare my raw photos with what I had on google and I could spot nearly no difference even after zooming way in. The one difference was a 5MB vs 700KB file size though. I was actually quite impressed. But I think these were all 12MP photos.
In light of multiple companies attempting to redefine what the words "free" and "unlimited" mean, I would like to propose the following update-for-the-21st-century definitions:
Free: A product or service that is entirely without cost to the end-user until after it has already been purchased.
Unlimited: A reasonable amount that should in no way exceed average consumption.
Photos is the most annoying thing I didn't want to migrate over when trying to de-google myself. It's handy to share the kids' photos with relatives.
I guess this will make it easier.
An instance of NextCloud can do wonders and there is even an app that does face recognition.
Probs they expect a 2TiB plan user to never use a significant amount of the 2TiB. Whereas the 10TiB plan user is more likely to use a higher percentage of allotted storage.
I agree. The price/GiB between looks like someone was throwing darts.
I wish there is a straightforward pay-as-you go option. However there is the mental downside that everything you store is costing money, whereas the package deals you feel free (until you hit the limit).
it's a shame, google photos is a really good product. but not that good that I'd pay extra - I already have 1 TB of storage from Microsft 365. I guess it's time to move on in June.
can someone recommend an easy way to migrate Google Photos straight into Dropbox? (without having to download the Google Takeout exports locally (I've got like 400 GB of photos...))
I wouldn't trust Amazon's consumer offerings, after they removed the unlimited offering from Amazon (Cloud) Drive [1], and continued to remove API access after that [2].
Not only that, but I have quite a few files that were corrupted on Amazon Drive, so I wouldn't trust them for long-term photo storage either, unless the photos were also backed up to other services.
I would never "pay" for Google products. I'm 101% sure they would still harvest my data for their advertising business even if I pay them. Then why should I pay for giving off my data?
Storage isn't free and is finite, therefore it was never unlimited. Nothing that is offered for free but has an underlying cost and finite is ever really unlimited.
This is a welcome step towards realistic marketing.
It at least allows to host it on your own or ask a friend to do it for you. It's of course hard to have all the features of Google Photos, but it's FOSS, so anyone can contribute.
It's more the huge myth perpetrated by the fediverse movement: "It's your data. If you don't like <service> you can take it with you" that irritates me, more than any particular functional limitations.
Tldr: low quality but unlimited storage is expensive, so it will go away in June. However everything uploaded before will not use space for some time. High quality storage has never been unlimited so no changes.
A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
I guarantee Google still makes money from those users. Google Photos adds value to the Google ecosystem, attracting more users and more paying users. The more history you have stored with Google, the harder it is to move. It also promotes other Google services users do pay for.
I'd guess this is a move by someone in middle management to increase revenues for their product, without seeing the bigger picture, where this move probably has negative shareholder value.
> A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
This doesn't exist. But you can schedule a year of e.g. 2 monthly incremental takeouts at takeout.google.com and stop-limit your dataloss scenario to a window.
btw: I think it should exist. I think google should clarify its 'we terminated you' process to include the takeout function for export of the data they currently hold hostage.
This is exactly what I do. Every 2 months I get an email about a new backup being ready. If I know I have done a lot of stuff on my google account in the last 2 months I'll download a fresh archive of it and dump it to my NAS. It's kinda a tedious process since I have to go through and download all the zip files they have.
Does PhotoSync keep the GPS/location data when downloading from Google Photos? Their website is not very specific and slightly outdated (Picasa login anyone?)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. PhotoSync copies the photos from your device to some destination (NAS, SMB, S3, whatever.) It doesn't interact with Google Photos. When it copies stuff it copies the original HEIC/JPEG/RAW/whatever, so the GPS EXIF is preserved.
Google Takeout. Or RClone can be used to download with some limitations (bursts dont download, GPS EXIf data is stripped, videos are true original nitrate).
I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my NAS to backup the true original files.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You don't have to like $bigco or $ceo, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Note these guidelines:
Well, Apple gives you 5GB of photo storage and only for Apple devices. Google was giving unlimited storage for any devices, including Apple’s.
It is only fair that in future they will give that perk only to Google device users:
> As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
Among big players I believe Amazon still offers unlimited high-quality photo storage.
McKinsey is a management consulting company https://www.mckinsey.com/ which is famous (or infamous) for promoting highly 'streamlined' business practices. They're known for turning around failing businesses into profitable ones but also for the enron and 2008 scandals with the housing bubble. Though I'm not too familiar with exactly what 'McKinsey' would imply, it seems to just be a shorthand for whenever a business starts charging for something that was previously free. Aka luggage fees.
Possibly McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm [0]. Read that article to see some companies its consultants ruined by recommending the wrong business strategy.
Also, from that link:
McKinsey's alumni have been appointed as CEOs or high-level executives at Google, American Express, Facebook, Boeing, IBM, Westinghouse Electric, Sears, AT&T, PepsiCo, and Enron.
McKinsey is a management consultancy that, among other things, often advocates costcutting through skimping on services, outsourcing abroad and currently, automating a number of auxiliary functions such as customer support and other cost centers.
Wonderful. So now they also want people to pay for getting their life data-mined. It's like cable TV - started without ads, now has more ads than content, and nobody seems to mind enough to cancel.
I guess Google thinks they have enough training data, and can this stop offering free storage. Or maybe they think it is sticky enough to start charging and not lose clients. Either way, I wish them luck.
This is a good thing. I've been having trouble weaning myself off this service, one of few Google services I still use, but now I have just over six months notice to find something different.
I'm happy to pay someone for storage, but not Google. So now I'll get on that.
While I instinctively knew Google is not to trust with the word "free", especially since "you're the product" isn't applicable as easily here as with other products, I still decided to thoroughly test Photos for a long while to see if they'd introduce some limits. They are a corporate entity out to make money (and externally pressured to make more quarter by quarter), so I fully get it. But for Photos, it almost seemed like it could be a long play for them. A fantastic place to upsell users into all the other Google products. One that could just possibly stay free, forever. So, the fool I am, I started recommending it to just about anyone. Helped onboard relatives, many friends and so forth.
And now, this. We're at the next step of a funnel they could've (and should've) been more transparent on from the start: they're starting to apply force to add "a form of payment". After which, naturally, they'll be able to keep on raising those prices freely with such an impressively solid lock-in at hand. The more data stored inside Google Photos, the harder it'll be to migrate it away.
I am, once again, contemplating to give up entirely on the "cloud" and figure out something else. The issue isn't paying for services, but I do have a problem with intransparent funnels. It's not about paying a buck or two a month, it's about them now being able to raise prices without mercy, regardless of actual storage pricing going down!
To migrate away will be quite the effort once we're storing past 100 GB+. Frustrating. Fully to be expected, but still. Google is acting so desperate, their struggle with milking the good ole' advertising cow is becoming more obvious by the minute. I wonder how long Chrome (not Chromium) is going to survive until it'll end up in a monetisation funnel.
I don't get this honestly. None of us will like if our photos are used for ads as they are deeply personal. How do you think this should be monetized then?
Definitely not with ads, sorry if it came across like that. I meant that Google Photos (as a product) already got me to stay logged in to my Google account. So it can be a driver for Google account usage. The sharing features may be useful to get other people to sign up for Google (and Google storage for other things).
I used to run a free site that had a lot of users, and I mostly kept it up and running because I placed ads for my other (paid) SaaS services on it, and it converted like crazy. So my ideal scenario for Google would be to have a few of those launching pad products, where they show we can trust them on their word (and with our data), and that makes me want to invest more in the wider brand (buy a Pixel phone, get Google Home devices, Chromecast, etc.)
This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).
Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons—
[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.
[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.