Actually, there is a setting in Google Photos (at least the web interface) which lets you choose between "High quality" and "Original" (Menu -> Settings).
"High quality" recompresses large files, but gives you unlimited storage space for these recompressed files.
"Original" doesn't recompress or alter the files at all, at the expense of using your Google Drive/Email/Storage space.
I'm not necessarily on board with auto photo backup (I don't completely trust it - some photos should just remain private), but I like that they give you this choice.
What I really (really) hate is that they've moved the delete button. It's no longer a button on the toolbar at the bottom (on the Android app), it's in the menu and labelled "Delete local copy". I take a lot of throwaways while trying to get the right shot - deleting photos is an every-day part of my workflow (I delete more than I keep). This has now gone from one quick tap to three (there's a confirmation dialog when you finally click the delete button). This is a very frustrating change.
Author here: Note that I did select Original and it still seemed to compress the RAW file in Google Drive view. Single downloads do yield the original.
How do you give your partner full access? I've got 20k photos going back 17 years. My wife (another account in my Google Apps account) should have full access for searching, etc. Is that on the roadmap (just sharing isn't really a solution)?
Thanks. It's SO important to at the minimum have a coadmin or partner/spouse account. Our whole life is in there and my wife can't get to them, which means they literally don't exist for her.
Given that it doesn't have an API, I don't understand why it was announced at Google I/O. What is supposed to be a conference for developers has somehow turned into a place for Google to demo a ton of random new end-user product features.
In your opinion, only those products with API's available today should be announced? That sounds overly restrictive. By the same logic - Projects Jacquard and Vault shouldn't have been announced either.
I think it's fair to announce products so devs can be ready when the API becomes available.
First of all, "there were a couple things tacked on to the presentation that maybe could one day be used by a developer" is a pretty desperate argument, given that the keynote was three hours long and focussed on a ton of things that don't have any API at all, like Photos, and did not mention a single implication for a developer even for the things which had APIs, such as Now on Tap (which means that developers had no reason to bother going to the sessions on that feature, as it was clearly something designed for end users only; apparently it actually has a couple APIs).
However, sure: I'll bite. No: announcing random stuff that we can't play with and that they won't talk to us about is totally useless for developer. This entire event was just about causing people to go "wow, they are smart". I am a developer quite interested in 3D video, and so despite seeing Project Jump and going "ugh, another end-user product announcement", I figure I might as well talk to the engineers about it: only, they aren't willing to say anything about what might be available or how it works or essentially anything about their plans... so good luck "getting ready".
Regardless, the next thing you really need to defend, as this is what we are talking about: what are you, as a developer, doing to get ready for Photos? Google I/O has become less and less developer-focussed ever since it started (I have gone every year), and has turned into more and more of just a showcase of their end-user products. This year as the epitome, and all of the developers that I know who attended were quite disappointed; even the ones who still liked last year's somehow were now also saying "this event seems to have lost its purpose and is no longer useful".
I think a keynote should be more of 10,000 foot view
> Regardless, the next thing you really need to defend, as this is what we are talking about: what are you, as a developer, doing to get ready for Photos?
You can't imagine how unlimited storage of images and videos have no implications to devs and how we view curation of photos? Thats one less limitation to worry about.
I 100% agree that I/O is becoming less and less developer focused. Lots of non-developers want to attend (I blame the freebies they gave - looks like that has stopped so it might get better). I/O (or any other 'developer' conference) goes beyond the technical. There is a lot of self-promotion, PR, recruitment (in the HR sense, and recruitment into the 'developer ecosystem')
Unfortunately, it's a bit iffy for individuals that have unreliable internet. The download link expires after a while (last time I tried to do a large export).
Sorry about that. Did you try the move to drive option? One of the reasons we added the ability to move the finished archive to Drive was to allow users with unreliable internet connections to use the Drive Sync tool to sync the finished download down to their computer. I know it is a little inconvenient but it should make it possible to download a large archive over an unreliable connection.
It does, there was a lot of debate on whether it should or not. If you have strong opinions one way or the other I would love to hear them as we are open to changing that behavior.
If you don't want that behavior, or just want to export part of your drive (or photos) collection you can expand that product in the Takeout UI and just select certain folders.
What does "compressing" a RAW file even mean? Is the actual content in the smaller downloaded version in some other format (e.g. JPEG)? Or is it simply truncated, either due to a bug or else stripping the actual RAW data, leaving only an embedded JPEG image?
It seems implausible that anyone would consider it a good idea to reencode a RAW file as a matter of course. Transcode it to process and/or compress it? Sure. But what comes out the other end isn't usually a native RAW file. (native RAW -> DNG workflows don't count.) This assumes that such a thing is even possible: e.g. that all RAW formats they'll see permit an alternate compressed encoding. If they did, someone needs a good stern talking-to. Pretty much the last thing that anyone who uses RAW files would expect is a workflow that tampers with the files while still allegedly remaining in the native RAW format.
> What I really (really) hate is that they've moved the delete button. It's no longer a button on the toolbar at the bottom (on the Android app), it's in the menu and labelled "Delete local copy".
Once you select one or more images, the delete button shows up in the toolbar. Just one tap. http://i.imgur.com/EH2M5iM.jpg
No, that screenshot is from the new Photos app (I took it from a review video of the new Google Photos app). And I've tried it myself on my own phone (which is an iPhone, but it looks just like this UI otherwise).
Interesting. I'm on 1.0.0.94391081 on a Nexus 6 running stock 5.1.1 and I don't see that when I highlight multiple photos in thumbnail view. http://m.imgur.com/foXI16d
According to Google Play Store I have the latest version of Photos (I see all the other changes, including the welcome walkthrough).
I don't get a trash icon in either photo or thumbnail view, with 0, 1 or more photos selected.
I don't see an option to change the view. Does this mean I need to be signed in to do that? If so, that's a really poor design. I should be able to delete photos just as easily whether or not I'm signed in. I'm not sure why the toolbar UI needs to change depending on signed in status.
The Trash option available while signed in vs. Deleting locally mean different things. The first is moving the file to trash where it can be recovered for a little while, the second is blowing the file away from your file system. We wanted to keep these features distinct and clear.
Though I can understand for those using the app entirely signed out this can be frustrating. Thanks for the feedback. I do hope you sign in however, there are a lot of things available to you signed in that simply don't exist in the signed out view.
It would be useful if the app made the differences clearer - you can see the confusion in this thread alone where people just can't see why my delete icon is missing and theirs is present (and the ensuing downvotes because it looks like I'm just doing something wrong).
I have always used the app offline, so it's quite frustrating that a major part of my workflow has been made more difficult. I'm not sure what the benefit was in changing this behaviour for offline users - there's always been a trash/delete icon. Now someone has just taken it away.
Ideally, I'd love to see it return and the confirmation dialog to disappear (or be configurable with a preference). Or if you're using it offline, add a confirmation dialog ("You're PERMANENTLY deleting this") with a "Don't show this warning again" box. And possibly add a "Deleted (Undo)" toast (delay actual deletion on the filesystem by 3-5 seconds).
I think most users understand the semantics of deleting a file, and if this change only affects offline users then the affected users already know that delete means delete forever.
I would actually consider signing in at some point, but I now feel my hand is being forced just to regain some fundamental functionality.
Additionally - what about users who can't use the app online? For example users with limited data packages or users who travel a lot (where roaming data can cost upwards of $5/MB).
You can delete multiple photos simultaneously if you go to the main photo grid and make a selection (long press, then either drag or tap) and click the trash icon at the top.
The trash icon doesn't show up anymore. When you select multiple photos you still have to go through the menu to select "Delete local copy".
Even if it did show up, I like to review the photos full-screen and flip back and forth, then delete. Having to remember which of 5 shots was the best and select the bad ones in thumbnail view would just be painful. I think mine is a fairly common workflow too, as I've heard a few people complain about the same thing.
I just tested on Android with the latest build and I get a trash icon in the expected places - in the bottom right corner in the single photo view and in the top right corner in the thumbnail view (once at least one photo is selected).
Hi! I'm on 1.0.0.94391081 on a Nexus 6 running stock 5.1.1 and I don't see that when I highlight multiple photos in thumbnail view. http://m.imgur.com/foXI16d
According to Google Play Store I have the latest version of Photos (I see all the other changes, including the welcome walkthrough).
I don't get a trash icon in either photo or thumbnail view, with 0, 1 or more photos selected.
I'm not singed in on the Photos app (I wasn't signed in on the old app either) as I'm not entirely comfortable on the dependence on web services or the auto upload features (which I do appreciate can be disabled). I'm not sure if that makes a difference.
Honestly, the old Gallery app was perfect for my workflow. Offline, gave me access to metadata, etc.
Can you be more specific about which features you are looking for?
There are geo-tagging feature in the new app:
* For any photo you can click on the "info" icon (i with a circle around it) which will show the photo's location (if we have geo information for the photo)
* The search functionality makes use of geo-tagging information - so you can search for photos from a specific place.
Is that what you were looking for, or is there something else?
I can't really comment on what might or might not happen in the future, but I can pass on requests/comments to our PMs and/or help you out with the application.
I have build 1.0.0.94391081, and I get the trash icon both when looking at individual photos and when selecting one or more photos. Which build do you have? (And which device?)
I have the same build! How strange. I'm on a Nexus 6 (stock 5.1.1), UK based but SIM-Free (not carrier branded). See my other comment for a screenshot of what I see.
It's frustrating as I have to click the menu button, then Delete, then OK. I used to just hit Trash icon and that was it. For one-off deletions it's only a little slower - for working through a days worth of shots (or worse, high speed drive shots transferred from my camera).
That is strange! I'm also on a stock 5.1.1 Nexus 6, but in the U.S. I guess you can at least be happy that this appears to be a bug (which means hopefully it will be fixed soon) as opposed to a bad design decision.
Google's old desktop app "Picasa" is still my go-to for organizing photos. I make a file system folder for each "album". Everything stays local on the fs and there is no doubt about where the originals are (compared to iPhoto/Photos.app, etc etc). OSX' built-in Time Machine to an USB drive + rsync to a NAS takes care of multiple backups. I can easily drag&drop files into apps and upload forms with no doubt that I'm working on the best possible copy (original).
Too bad the app appears to have been going unmaintained for some time now. It doesn't even support retina displays on OSX (in a photo app!)
Me too! I don't like it when programs insist on storing my photos in their own, non-human-readable directory structures and file names. Otherwise it becomes a nightmare trying to use them in other programs. Even iPhoto->Photos managed to break my library.
I just wish that Google would bring back the simple online photo sharing that they used to have with Picasa. The Google+ merge ruined all that.
If you're willing to keep your photos in Dropbox and have the space for it, take a look at Carousel.
Carousel respects whatever folder naming convention you have. All photos in your dropbox show up in Carousel's photo list.
Pictures on Carousel are always saved to the "Carousel" folder in your dropbox, but you can move them around to respect your preferred folder structure without damaging anything.
Not sure. My intuition is that photos are completely read-only; I don't think it will ever change them, so tags might be stored in some other opaque storage.
I do know that Carousel uses the DateTimeOriginal EXIF tag to set the date. You can use this command to re-tag photos, for example:
Piacasa is the best, both native and the online version. I still use it but its a bit confusing now that it some how has the Google plusiness added to it online
On Windows the good old "Windows Live Photo Gallery" program that come with Vista (and is available for Win 7+ as download), is still a good alternative. The good thing it doesn't force one to use a database based album system. The photo files stay were the are, it only reads/extracts the metadata and optionally the user tags can be embedded back to the original file.
And do not even try to edit your local desktop photos (desktop uploader will not recognize at all) or try to delete local photos. Google photos only works OK if you ONLY use your mobile phone for taking photos. If you have an normal camera like e.g. a DSLR and want to sync that with Google photos: Forget it. You will only have a lot of more management work with Google photos. Google photos is again a dead end for your data. What we need is a good two way sync for the desktop and more management possibilities in Google photos (because there are NO management features). If you look at Lightroom and their cloud sync (if you have an Adobe Cloud subscription): Adobe is lightyears ahead in syncing. Google clearly does not care at all about the desktop.
99% of people don't subsequently edit photos in photoshop; Google's tools are adequate. You're in the 1% who are power users, and so might find the mainstream solution inadequate. For that reason, software like Lightroom exists.
I agree and I don't know why you get the downvotes.
A large majority of users [1] take photos with their phones, upload a select few on social media, maybe with some basic filters/edits, and forget about the rest.
Google Photos is designed for that use case, and not for the 1% power users.
Yes I think Lightroom started to offer online services a while back. I also use DSLR and the bandwidth is not there yet to upload it from a mobile. At the same time, an average user (99%) wants to take a picture with a mobile phone and upload it most of the time, that scenario is perfectly fine with Google.
Google used to be known for not aiming for the lowest common denominator. They've gotten so large and crafty though that apparently "works good enough to capture the majority" has replaced "make something great for everyone".
I think targeting a smaller community is always easier and works better but all the investors would like to see is plan for world domination, aka "make something great for everyone".
Haha. So many downvotes? I wonder if anybody has a good solution which does not require 4-5 steps and two copies of an image to get photos on Google photos, edit them with Photoshop locally and resync that changes ;) with keeping my folder structure.
In my photos, it recognizes both Weddings and Graduations. And you do combinations like searching for "Judi Graduation" or "Beer in Soho", "Jim at Yellowstone", etc. - amazing stuff!
The only place I can see it getting info like this is a social network, and that means G+...
In all seriousness, could they cross-reference dates in G+ posts and photos to see that you mentioned being on your honeymoon when it was taken? Seems like something they'd do if G+ was actually a thing people used.
There's the Google Search looking for good place to stay on a honeymoon, the email or hangout message sent to the SO mentioning it, the calendar event, etc.
Even just seeing that you're on an irregular stay in Thailand (which it got from your Android) right after your marriage can be telling.
I am seeing that it uses tags and faces that I previously put on photos within iPhoto and are evidently stored with Exif. So if you used iPhoto to tag your set "honeymoon" it will pick that up.
I've never really treated my photos like special data that require an interface beyond my OS. I keep them in an encrypted folder on my backup drive, on my laptop and on my cloud service.
Maybe it's different if you have kids or something... but my folks only have about 60 photos of my entire youth and that's 40 too many.
Yes, it's different when you have kids. I don't give 1 shit about any photo my kid isn't in, but all photos he is in, regardless of quality, must be preserved FOR ALL ETERNITY!! I suspect that feeling is common among parents. That's why your parents have those 40 other pictures :)
I'm surprised the main timeline is a flat list. I have 30,000+ photos and sometimes have 300 photos of the same event. It's impossible to browse the overall contents with every photo shown.
I created a prototype[1] 5 years ago of a hierarchical timeline using timestamps. It had it's own problems, but I would have thought by now someone would have figured out a solution. Machine learn a hierarchy where each coarser level has a subset which reasonably summarizes the next more detailed level.
After just a day of playing with it, I love the Google Photos service for what it is, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be a viable backup solution. If a service offers anything more than strictly "file backup", it's a sure thing you will lose quality and/or won't be able to get at it easily. I already have a good backup system utilizing my free $50/month Azure benefits that come with my MSDN subscription so I'm not really concerned about it. I personally don't care much about sharing features but if Google can actually make this a good backup + sharing system then they will win. For me "good" means my original files are kept as-is and that upload/download is relatively quick. I'm fine with days, not weeks. Azure (CloudBerry) took less than 5 hours for my 100GB library over 35Mbs upload FiOS, but Google Photos isn't even 1/10th of the way done after a day.
I love how it has mashed-up my photos into categories, stories, animations and collages. Literally love it, it IS great. But backup system, it is not.
It's not super automatic but CloudBerry Explorer for Azure [1] is free and has a pretty good folder sync feature. I basically just keep all my photos and videos in single a folder on my desktop. Whenever I copy my families phones or tablets to my PC I just run the saved sync, it's usually pretty quick. I have over 90 GB of stuff so it actually took a long time for CloudBerry to analyse the folder for the first time, after that it figures out what's new and needs to sync pretty fast.
So if you use Original, does it still use up your storage, even if the photo is under 16MP, or video under 1080P?
From what I have read, they compress the files when 'High Quality' is chosen, so I'm guessing if you select original, it all counts towards your storage?
Been playing with Google Photos this morning and marveling how it is able to categorize beer, bridges, kangaroos, koalas, etc. But of course it gets some wrong. Anyone know how to change a categorization?
I just realized that this post makes me sound like an Aussie! I guess I should have thrown in that it also automatically recognizes bars, beaches, sunsets and sharks!
when I saw "unlimited free storage" I had to try :)
my interest was more on the video than the photo,
when you click the option "High quality (free unlimited storage)" the help mention it goes as far as 1080P for videos which is fair game for something free.
So I uploaded a couple of 720P videos, and redownloaded them to compare if they were the same, what formats was supported, etc.
The good: it works kind of like a private Youtube, it does process the video so when you watch it online you end up having it to auto 360P, which sucks a little. But if when you redownload the video you get the original one (not recompressed).
The bad: the UI and file naming is a joke.
I understand they wanted to make it simple to use and organise a lot of photos and videos, but not being able to see the filename to quickly select a bunch of files and put them in a group (or collection) is beyond me.
But let focus on something even simpler: select an item and no file name ? I mean com'on google, am I not suppose to find/search easily trough my stuff ?
No regex in file name search either ...
My guess is the photo part was the main goal and the video part been added quickly without much of a thinking about it, I do hope it would get better.
So far disappointing, if I was to upload all my videos there, I could not organise them easily and worst I could not find them, it would be useless.
He probably meant something like "*.jpg" which is common and works fine on Microsoft Windows and Apple OSX. And probably not the full Regex syntax as known from grep or Perl/PHP.
A wildcard search, then. Sure, that's more common (although sometimes hilariously broken), I can give you that.
I'd expect wildcard searches too, but only because Google is a search company. When I see a search box, I'm usually happy if it does a contains search instead of an exact match, that's how low my expectations have become.
for an image, not seeing the file name is OK as you can differentiate images by just looking at them
but for videos, sorry I need a way to differentiate them, and a thumbnail is not enough, I need a either the file name or a way to search more than plain keywords
Sometimes when uploading a video to youtube it's initially made available only at low quality while it's being transcoded into all of the different formats for different clients and bandwidth rates. I'd recommend checking back in a day or so to see if the quality has improved.
I have my cellphone automatically back up pictures to both OneDrive and Google photos. Handy enough.
But, I like the OneDrive (or Dropbox if you don't mind the politics of Dropbox) model: keep all photos and videos in chronological order, edit file names, if desired, to add description after the file stamp, and generate one off share URI links for friends to share pictures.
That said I appreciate having the extra backups, even if lower resolution, on Google photos.
Unfortunately, the "high quality" option is really low quality in reality.
Images that are crisp and sharp becomes very blurry on Photos. Some 12Mpx pictures that I have got downscaled to 0.3Mpx on photos. However it does not happen to all photos... Some of them deserve the "high quality compression" badge. It just seems to be aleatory. Please fix this issue!
I have been using this for a while and one day I realized it is skipping some pictures when backing up. I went through all of my pictures and noticed ~5% is missing. This was the last day when I trusted Google with picture backups. On the other hand Flickr offers similar solution that actually does what it is supposed to.
Are you sure? I haven't used the new Google photos, but Google+ photos confused me for a while because it defaulted to displaying "highlights" instead of all photos, where they picked the best one or two out of any similar pictures in the same timeframe and hid the rest. My photos were all there, i just had to use the all photos view.
Yes, I went through all of the settings, and it was weird because I set up backup all pictures from the very beginning. One thing, that is also happening on Android, after an upgrade the app loses some or all the settings.
I have an example from before the new version of the Photos app came out. This might have changed since then.
If I take a bunch of photos and then send some of them through Hangouts before I get home to my WiFi those photos doesn't get backed up. I'm guessing it's because Hangouts uses G+ albums for the photos, so technically the photos are on Google's servers, but they're not where I expect them to be (in Auto backup).
scenario:
uploading a bunch of video files all named in the same pattern
when coming back to the google photo interface to put those files in the same group, searching their name does not return the full list, only part of it.
Only by searching "recently added" I can then find and add the missing files.
The one thing that screwed me over is that the Upload by default compresses the files to lower res. I lost some high-res photos this way.. this should not be a default setting.
1) you have to do it one by one (or in very small batches), because the zip export is broken
2) you get a different view via Google Drive
(I don't use those service, cannot even begin to imagine why one would upload pictures to Google or use Google Drive, but - that's my take away from the article and my own interpretation)
it should actually kill the cloud because storage is cheap. but all cloud providers go out of their way to make their platform painful to use without their cloud.
Apple makes backing up photos with iphoto annoying. Google makes backing up photos via an app much easier than via usb or rsync on your home network... etc
Storage in terms of raw bytes really is dirt cheap, but storage in terms of erasure encoded, encrypted, multi-homed, highly-available file systems isn't. Just buying a hard drive isn't going to get you very far. The durability of a file on a cloud service is going to far outstrip that of your local hard drive or even a fancy NAS.
Cloud services outliving my (not so fancy) NAS. So, where's my Webshots account? (since we're talking photos, let's take a photos example. It shouldn't be hard to find an example of a dead web service for any other kind of data, either)
_My_ datastore still exists and proudly provides those files from my redundantly stored, checksummed, auto-repairing local filesystem.
No, I don't have an off-site backup. But neither had Webshots once they decided to shut down.
Since I've never heard of "Webshots" that seems like a bit of cherry picking. Flickr and Smugmug have both been hosting photos continuously for over a decade.
"By 2004, Webshots was grossing $15M/year, had more than 200,000 paid subscribers, and was the #1 photo sharing site and top 50 media property per ComScore. In the same year, Alexa ranked Webshots the second largest English language privately held Web media property (behind weather.com)."
Let's pretend for a moment that this is even a good idea. The $500 server you mention has one (1) 1TB hard drive. Let's suppose you add another one for $75. Now you have a total of 1TB of raw space at a capital cost of $600 and unknown operating costs, let's say $160/year in electricity.
1TB of space on Google Drive is only $120/year in opex and zero capex.
True, but 1TB is probably the absolute worst spot on the capacity/price curve for a home server. For 4TB of space on a home server, your opex costs are identical ($160/yr) and your capex costs are only $120 higher. Yet 4TB on Google drive runs $480/yr. Go beyond that, and the cost delta continues to improve. That Dell server takes 4 drives for 12TB of usable space for a total capex of $1,000, and $160/yr in opex, compared to $1,440/yr in opex at Google. You break even in the first year!
There are plenty of places where self-hosting makes sense. 1TB is not one of them, but many other sizes are.
If you are price sensitive, use a Synology NAS, which has a variety of options for lower opex and capex, and mobile apps that can sync photos to your NAS.
Different people put different market values on privacy of data from 3rd-party cloud providers.
In the market segment which includes HP MicroServer and Dell T20, capex and opex can be amortized over other workloads, using virtualization for NAS VM, router VM, desktop VM, etc. People in this segment may have sunk costs in existing hard drives.
I don't understand all the outrage about Google compressing photos. They're offering a free service; they can do whatever they want to save space. If you don't want them to be compressed, use the fill size option and pay your share of storage.
The answer, as the author points out, is yes. You can get them out via Google Drive. The author also thinks that Google is doing something bad by compressing a large uncompressed RAW file to 2mb, but that's the tradeoff you get for asking for unlimited storage from the service.
Google clearly states that photos synced to Google Photos with unlimited storage get compressed a lot. On the other hand, if you pay Google for more Google Drive space and use Photos to sync your images there instead, there is no compression.
I think he means bad in the sense of "8:1 compression means poor quality photos which shouldn't happen for a photo site" rather than bad in the sense of "google is doing something wrong, immoral or illegal".
Raw already is compressed. My 40D takes raw files around 12 to 15 MiB. They vary in size, so that's a first clue. Also, if you do the math, 14 bits per channel on those images comes out around 65 MiB.
My understanding is that most RAW formats such as CR2 already had lossless compression applied, so any compression would pretty much have to be lossy to some degree, especially a 8:1 compression.
I've uploaded that RAW file with the "Original" (paid) setting. It's ok when downloading in the web app, it seems to be compressed in the Google Drive view.
I uninstalled Photos right after I installed it. Why? Because as soon as you install it and you open it, it starts to indiscriminately upload all of your photos to Google's servers.
Now, I get that this is supposed to be a "cloud service" and whatnot. But I'd prefer if it was very clear when I choose to upload them to the cloud, and I'd also prefer to pick and choose which photos go into the cloud by default. If people want to upload everything by default to Google's server, that should be an opt-in feature.
> it starts to indiscriminately upload all of your photos
It only uploads your photos if you check the "Back up & sync" checkbox when you first start the app. If you uncheck that box, it won't upload anything. Don't spread FUD.
And it’s still illegal in many countries to upload and process private data without explicit permission.
And, as previous cases showed, permissions granted through default-checked boxes, or permissions granted through fine print hidden in the ToS are legally not binding, meaning the uploading is considered a computer crime.
Thilo Weichert, data protection officer of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, did several law cases based on this against Facebook, and almost all of them.
Don't try. There is no way to protect yourself from our absurd German privacy laws. (Except if you are the government, then nothing matters.)
Even the local residents' registration offices simply sell your private data for next to nothing to cheap ad companies.
..but if you are an US company, we hate you for the votes.
Default checked is still illegal. Even if it gives you a full screen of info. As someone who doesn’t read it and just clicks through the options should never lose any private data.
Everything that touches your private data has to be opt-in. Or it does not count as "explicit permission", meaning the upload, processing, etc is illegal.
Nah. Your average consumer wants backup to 'just work' without having to think about it. Having autobackup everything be the default option makes sense. Power users can always uncheck the backup option that is shown when you first start the app.
And it’s still illegal in many countries to upload and process private data without explicit permission.
And, as previous cases showed, permissions granted through default-checked boxes, or permissions granted through fine print hidden in the ToS are legally not binding, meaning the uploading is considered a computer crime.
Thilo Weichert, data protection officer of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, did several law cases based on this against Facebook, and almost all of them.
"High quality" recompresses large files, but gives you unlimited storage space for these recompressed files.
"Original" doesn't recompress or alter the files at all, at the expense of using your Google Drive/Email/Storage space.
I'm not necessarily on board with auto photo backup (I don't completely trust it - some photos should just remain private), but I like that they give you this choice.
What I really (really) hate is that they've moved the delete button. It's no longer a button on the toolbar at the bottom (on the Android app), it's in the menu and labelled "Delete local copy". I take a lot of throwaways while trying to get the right shot - deleting photos is an every-day part of my workflow (I delete more than I keep). This has now gone from one quick tap to three (there's a confirmation dialog when you finally click the delete button). This is a very frustrating change.