[HN Gopher] Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in...
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Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
Author : mvgoogler
Score : 354 points
Date : 2020-11-11 18:10 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| sib wrote:
| 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).
| google234123 wrote:
| You should use compression to not use so much space.
| bootlooped wrote:
| 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.
| akerl_ wrote:
| 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?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| idrisser wrote:
| 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...))
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| Wow. What a disappointment.
|
| 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.
| actuator wrote:
| > 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.
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| I think in general Google is perceived not as a privacy-
| friendly company due to its ubiquitousness. Whether it is
| true does not matter much.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Google One is pretty cheap, but wish Picasa was still around for
| offline backup.
| fma wrote:
| Flickr pro is $5 a month (billed annually) for unlimited original
| quality storage.
|
| Google photos is $3 for 200GB...$10 a month for 2 TB. So if you
| have more than 200GB, Flickr is the way to go.
|
| Additionally, I don't see any mention of Google privacy, but I'm
| pretty confident Flickr doesn't mine my data for advertisers.
| jcmontx wrote:
| Unfortunate. I guess I will have to start to pay for the extra
| storage eventually. I really like the service and wouldn't like
| to drop it.
| jayFu wrote:
| 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.
| Octopuz wrote:
| 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.
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| Yes Pichai, please keep McKinseying the shit out of Google so
| that we can have an Apple-Huawei duopoly soon.
| coolspot wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011
| dang wrote:
| 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:
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._" " _Please don 't fulminate._"
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| What do you mean by McKinseying? Sorry English is not my first
| language. Nothing showed up on Google either.
| olvy0 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company
| kinkrtyavimoodh wrote:
| Apart from what others said, Sundar Pichai was a management
| consultant at McKinsey before he joined Google.
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| 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.
| cglong wrote:
| Interesting to keep photos uploaded from Pixels exempt from this
| new policy.
| zapt02 wrote:
| Probably due to advertising on the box or in-store touting this
| feature.
| seized wrote:
| 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.
| gst wrote:
| 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.
| singhkays wrote:
| I fully expect that to change next year. It already changed
| once from Original quality->High quality
| tsm wrote:
| Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?
| robotmay wrote:
| If you're just looking to back up your photos off your phone, I
| use SyncThing to sync them to my server, which works quite
| well.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This! just set the folder on the phone as send only, and
| backup on the pc.
| galbar wrote:
| I selfhost Nextcloud. Great for syncing files and photos
| robotnikman wrote:
| Damn, and I set this up on my parents phones as an easy way for
| them to back up all the photos they take that 'just works'
|
| Looks like I have some bad news for them...
| pwinnski wrote:
| 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.
| hackily wrote:
| > 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.
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| williamtwild wrote:
| Same for me. It was part of the selling point of the 3. I
| should have known better since it was Google.
| grishka wrote:
| 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 50EUR/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?
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| teen wrote:
| 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.
| bootlooped wrote:
| 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.
| chrismeller wrote:
| 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"...
| rektide wrote:
| Really really really sad that the internet now no longer has a
| free way to store photos for eternity. This was such a wonderful
| service for us all.
| pvorb wrote:
| 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." ;-)
| mierle wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://perkeep.org/
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Shit ... now how do I get my photos out ???. And please don't
| tell me to use rclone - never got it working properly.
| easton wrote:
| https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
|
| It may take them an hour or two to build the archive depending
| on how many photos you have, but there it is.
| izacus wrote:
| Goggle Takeout will give them in a dump.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Google takeout.
| Naac wrote:
| Are there other services providing unlimited ( for now ) photo
| storage?
|
| The only other company I can think of is Amazon which provides
| unlimited storage if you pay for Amazon Prime.
| fuzxi wrote:
| 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.
| robotmay wrote:
| SmugMug and Flickr (same company these days) both do if you
| pay, and I'd trust them far more with photos than any of the
| bigger companies.
| _fn wrote:
| Amazon photos provide unlimited photo storage for Prime
| customer.
| Jabbles wrote:
| 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.
| jcomis wrote:
| 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.
| mvgoogler wrote:
| 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.
| jcomis wrote:
| I'm not seeing this on ios or android
| davide_v wrote:
| 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.
| jcomis wrote:
| Only if you originally uploaded them in full res. If you
| originally updated them in high res and that's it, that is
| all they have.
| scurvy wrote:
| 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.
| llimos wrote:
| 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.
| vvoyer wrote:
| 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.
| identity0 wrote:
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| > 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!)
| kumarm wrote:
| 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.
| ugh123 wrote:
| 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...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| andromeduck wrote:
| You can have both. Private by default but a browsable list of
| explicitly public albums.
| actuator wrote:
| 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.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| 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).
| warrentr wrote:
| 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
| andrewia wrote:
| 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
| plater wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive
| jlarocco wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by a few of those, but SmugMug is
| worth taking a look at.
| pqoek wrote:
| > - Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-
| to-guess urls as security)
|
| I believe all services provide that, because both have their
| upsides and downsides
| traskjd wrote:
| Sounds like you should just use Google Photos as it delivers
| most of that, with perhaps some improvements in 'backing up'
| outside of GP.
| jwr wrote:
| 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.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| >especially given what has been done to Gmail -- your mail
| is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising
| profile for you.
|
| Google has not mined emails in GMail for ad targeting for
| years now: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-
| gains-traction-in...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They _have_ , however, let (apparently) arbitrary third-
| parties have access to said emails.
| mceachen wrote:
| I'm working on one that's cross-platform, and, critically,
| self-hosted. The beta is available for free in exchange for
| your feedback.
|
| It's an early product, but I'm pushing out new features
| monthly. Face detection and sharing are coming soon.
| https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
|
| FWIW, I recommend to my beta users that they personally store
| at least one of their backup copies.
| https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/
| SpyKiIIer wrote:
| Thanks for this, I am giving it a try on UnRAID at the
| moment.
| warrentr wrote:
| Thanks for this! This sounds very interesting and your stated
| values align exactly with mine. I will check it out.
| janoc wrote:
| ipernity.com/ ?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| You could always pay for Google Photos
| ru552 wrote:
| I have all of this with amazon. Included with Amazon prime.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| 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.
|
| OP, if you're on iOS Dropbox may not be for you.
| treis wrote:
| We use Tinybeans and it checks all your boxes.
| benbristow wrote:
| Amazon Photos is an alternative, free if you're a Prime member,
| but it's definitely not as polished as Google Photos.
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/photos/
|
| Microsoft 365/OneDrive also offers a similar facility
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/onlin...
|
| I'm sticking with Google though as I don't use the 'unlimited'
| feature as it compresses your photographs, I just pay for extra
| Drive storage.
| adharmad wrote:
| www.smugmug.com
| renchap wrote:
| 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.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| 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.)
| gowld wrote:
| > - Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-
| to-guess urls as security)
|
| What is the difference between a hard to guess password and a
| hard-to-guess URL?
| gabagool wrote:
| Someone with a hard-to-guess URL could share the link with
| anyone else or just put it online, thereby eliminating any
| sense of security.
|
| Of course, that "someone" could also just take a screenshot
| or copy the image.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| I use Apple Photos with iCloud. Lightroom with 1TB plan might
| work too.
| bbu wrote:
| 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.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.
| spunker540 wrote:
| 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.
| thekyle wrote:
| If you use Windows the built-in Photos app has pretty good
| indexing.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| 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.
| choppaface wrote:
| "... 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?"
| aaomidi wrote:
| Just FYI Amazon Photos has unlimited photo storage for prime
| users.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Now that Google and Apple are charging for photo storage
| that'll be like leaving money on the table.
| ValentineC wrote:
| I wouldn't trust Amazon's consumer offerings, after they slowly
| broke Amazon Drive [1][2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/d0jg8w/your_in...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511935
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| 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..!
| Forge36 wrote:
| I recently ran out of storage (i was using the "original image
| size") So I setup my phone to auto-Backup to my home server.
|
| Best choice I made. Looks like I'll now need to turn off photo
| backup from Google.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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. I
| deleted one of my own and can't reclaim the URL. It just
| no longer exists. Period.
|
| I think that's a problem.
| pqoek wrote:
| 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?
| domano wrote:
| Having mixed feelings about subscribing to Google One last month,
| now it seems that space is going to fill up really fast.
| lunarboy wrote:
| 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| People who are time-poor can consider a turn-key self-hosted
| appliance like a Synology NAS. I've heard some good reviews
| about their Moments app: https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/dsm/feature/moments
| lunarboy wrote:
| 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?
| bootlooped wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos,
| and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded.
|
| I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it's a scale
| I've never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us
| never will.
|
| I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and
| cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to
| contend with.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| smueller1234 wrote:
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| >28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded.
|
| If I've done my math right that's something like 3-4,000 hard
| drives per week assuming 10mb per file and 10tb per hard drive.
| anuila wrote:
| 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.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| (*3 because Google can't lose your data and stores multiple
| copies, /x because neural compression)
| martimarkov wrote:
| They also have data deduplication. I'd guess at a block level
| so it would be less than that
| [deleted]
| floatingatoll wrote:
| If they don't start charging money for it, yes, they'll run out
| of space.
| kinkrtyavimoodh wrote:
| 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.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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.
| rbecker wrote:
| > Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.
|
| Anger could be due to:
|
| 1) Kill competition by offering product at a loss.
|
| 2) Once competition is dead and people are invested in the
| product and ecosystem, start charging.
| wolco2 wrote:
| I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years
| and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch.
|
| If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should
| grandfather that in.
|
| In a year they will start charging for gmail.
|
| In two or three they will start charging for search.
| byte1918 wrote:
| > 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_.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| > In two or three they will start charging for search
|
| I would pay for this now if as a result google started
| respecting privacy.
| mdoms wrote:
| > In a year they will start charging for gmail.
|
| > In two or three they will start charging for search.
|
| Great! They should.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Digital rent control is a terrible idea.
| andybak wrote:
| I'm not sure you've thought through all these examples to the
| same degree.
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| If they start charging for search then 1/3 of Earth will use
| Baidu, 1/3 DuckDuckGo, and 1/3 Bing.
| kinkrtyavimoodh wrote:
| aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"
| mrlala wrote:
| >In two or three they will start charging for search
|
| I would say you win for the most moronic thing uttered on the
| internet today.. but then there are other things going on
| right now which actually do beat you. Don't worry, I'm sure
| you will win another day.
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| Woooosh
| kartayyar wrote:
| What is the bait and switch ? The stuff you uploaded already
| is still free. It's for more usage.
|
| You don't like it, you have the option to take your photos
| somewhere else.
| glennpratt wrote:
| > If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should
| grandfather that in.
|
| They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not
| count.
| echelon wrote:
| For now
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. There's zero bait and switch here, especially when
| Takeout makes it so easy to export all your photos anyways.
| [deleted]
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| -" 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.
| kartayyar wrote:
| It also means they will hopefully clamp down on worse
| monetization features like sending you notifications to go buy
| a photo book.
|
| Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best
| product.
|
| I like this change a lot.
| [deleted]
| dontfiremepls wrote:
| 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.
| murgindrag wrote:
| I'd be more than happy to pay for a privacy-respecting product
| like Google Photos.
|
| I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I
| rely on swept out from under me.
| echelon wrote:
| 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?
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Seems like hard drives aren't getting cheaper by that much of
| a margin nowadays [0]
|
| Combine this with growing usage, this might make their
| projected costs much higher than expected
|
| [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-
| gigabyte/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Technology finds a way...
| harha wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| 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?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| Great time for FLOSS federated project pixelfeld: https://the-
| federation.info/pixelfed
| Normille wrote:
| Pixelfed's more like a crappier version of Instagram. It's
| hardly a substitute for Google Photos.
| fsflover wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tetusaiga wrote:
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Did it ever take off? Last I looked the res spec didn't even
| allow me to upload my decided entry tier DSLR content never mind
| RAW images
|
| I'd imagine modern cellphones and their 40gpixel res crush that
| multiple times over
| Shorel wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ffpip wrote:
| Google is 100% running out of space.
|
| Google Photos no longer unlimited -
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...
|
| GSuite no longer unlimited -
| https://9to5google.com/2020/10/08/google-workspace-drive-sto...
|
| Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days. Before, it stored
| till you perma deleted -
| https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/drive-trash-aut...
|
| Google Docs to be counted as storage space. it was unlimited for
| all before - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-
| update/
|
| Guess the cloud's gonna start filling up soon eh.
| Traster wrote:
| 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)
| kevincox wrote:
| "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?
| ffpip wrote:
| > "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
| Closi wrote:
| > 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.
| google234123 wrote:
| Who throws things in a trash expecing to keep them forever?
| kevincox wrote:
| > 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Google is 100% running out of space.
|
| No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics,
| they want users to be customers, not "products".
| smileysteve wrote:
| I think it's less Google and more FTC; and at minimum,
| Google's desire to have a defensible position when the FTC
| comes knocking.
| bbu wrote:
| and who is gonna believe them that? now the customer is no
| longer not only the product but is also paying for that.
| derivagral wrote:
| This worked quite well for (usa) cable for many decades. We
| can see it start from Google (and the *AAS sector) and end
| with cable TV!
| gizmogwai wrote:
| No. They want users to become customers AND products.
| baxtr wrote:
| The classical newspaper model then. Sell a paper and there
| in sell attention for ads.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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)
| shajznnckfke wrote:
| 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.
| akmarinov wrote:
| You agree to have your photos analyzed and used in
| advertising.
|
| They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of
| you.
| shajznnckfke wrote:
| As an advertiser how do I buy user data from Google
| photos?
| akmarinov wrote:
| Set up a campaign and target a particular group
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > they want users to be customers, not "products"
|
| 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.
| mittermayr wrote:
| 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.
| dmd wrote:
| > Chrome has small ads at the bottom
|
| Congratulations, you've got malware on your machine. Chrome
| doesn't do that.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't know if this is true or not, but I would guess that all
| of those combined pale in comparison to the storage space of
| Youtube.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| And now Gmail is the largest email provider by far. Almost
| everyone else has been sidelined. Same for photo storage.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| Fej wrote:
| 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.)
| jl6 wrote:
| For all we know, YouTube may be haemorrhaging money and they
| just haven't figured out a way of charging for storage - yet.
| user5994461 wrote:
| YouTube is very profitable.
|
| 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.
| chrismeller wrote:
| More like "tapping that lucrative subscription revenue" because
| they finally have enough people locked in
| ffpip wrote:
| A major reason people use Google products is because it is
| free. Subscriptions will not work out well when the user base
| is 7 billion people large
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| 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>?"_
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I tried using a google competitor because I didn't trust
| google. Even for money. They could not compete. How do you
| compete against essentially free.
|
| This is why google needs anti-trust.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| To be fair, current quotas are nothing like email quotas
| used to be.
|
| You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB.
| Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.
| gowld wrote:
| They don't provide tools for deleting data as easily as
| creating data, so users are bullied into buying storage
| instead of deleting trash.
| dmix wrote:
| > 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.
| Normille wrote:
| >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?
| arkanciscan wrote:
| That's my cue to start self-hosting again!
| actuator wrote:
| Is it cheaper and better though?
|
| You will need to setup redundancy if you use your own
| hardware, verify your client and server scripts, take care
| of encryption etc.
|
| Also, syncing anyone from Dropbox to Onedrive can do. I
| like the photo tagging to be powerful when I am looking for
| old photos.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Depends how lazy you are!
| part1of2 wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-
| rea...
| pnutjam wrote:
| 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)
| [deleted]
| jbay808 wrote:
| Now I see why Google phones don't have SD card slots.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 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.
| mittermayr wrote:
| 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.
| actuator wrote:
| 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?
| aaomidi wrote:
| You know how costco deeply subsidizes it's chicken and hotdog
| to incentivize people to use them?
|
| That's how. Not every single thing you offer needs to be
| profitable. Losing money on some stuff is worth it if it
| increases brand loyalty.
| mittermayr wrote:
| 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.)
| nonfamous wrote:
| We are altering the deal. Pray we don't alter it any further.
| mholt wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
| scrollaway wrote:
| Matt, did you see Promnesia?
| https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html
|
| 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.
| mholt wrote:
| 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.
| subsaharancoder wrote:
| Another alternative is Perkeep (formerly known as Camlistore)
| https://perkeep.org/ and there's even a tool to extract your
| pics from Google Photos https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp
| and move them to Perkeep.
| fwiwm2c wrote:
| 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)
| ENGNR wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| Personally I use Flickr and am happy with them.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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.
| murgindrag wrote:
| 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.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > The disabled account thing is pretty common
|
| 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?
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| flashgordon wrote:
| 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.
| mholt wrote:
| You can use rclone to copy the files back up to any cloud you
| want. Timelines are just files and folders.
| jkingsman wrote:
| 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.
| akx wrote:
| And then you're responsible for backing that local content
| somewhere else... maybe the cloud?
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Sure, except no drive sync software is as convenient or
| user friendly as google photos.
| [deleted]
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| 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.
| jdeibele wrote:
| 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.
| seraphsf wrote:
| 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.
| fletchowns wrote:
| 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.
|
| I had to switch to using a third party app to sync my
| "photo reel" from my phone to Google Drive: https://play.
| google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttxapps.dr...
|
| 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.
| mittermayr wrote:
| 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.
| majora2007 wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]https://yandex.com/promo/disk/unlim
| llimos wrote:
| 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.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| A demo or screenshots would go a long way here.
|
| The project seems like it could be very interesting, but
| there's too much effort required to perform an initial
| evaluation.
| mholt wrote:
| I know, but it's not a graphical app.
|
| Contributions welcomed to lower the barrier to entry. Use it,
| contribute to it, or leave it, I guess!
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| mholt wrote:
| You can do whatever you'd like. They're just files like any
| other.
| skybrian wrote:
| Sure, but doing it automatically (and handling things like
| making sure they're not duplicated) would be more
| convenient over cobbling together a solution.
| charlieegan3 wrote:
| You might find rclone helpful. It has support for google
| photos.
| thinkloop wrote:
| > 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
|
| https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations
| fletchowns wrote:
| 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
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Privacy?
| andybak wrote:
| Ironic as it sounds - privacy?
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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".
| ciarannolan wrote:
| 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.
| chrisbroadfoot wrote:
| Zero doubt? Wow, wish I had such confidence to make
| claims about things I know little about.
|
| Each photo's geolocation data is stored. Of course.
|
| It is shown in the UI, as well as indexed so you can
| search by location.
|
| For example, I can search for "photos of dogs in
| Portland" and it'll show all the pics of dogs I've taken
| in Portland.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| fletchowns wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easy for Google to only strip the
| geolocation data if you are not the owner of the photo
| though?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| agustif wrote:
| Vice gave away John Mcaffe's location when he was wanted.
| with geo data not stripped. from a photo shared by Vice
| Editor in the blogpost... LOL
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| jdeibele wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper/id463362050?mt=12
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper-
| lite/id506150103?...
|
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| There's an ancient-but-maintained image cataloger / asset
| manager called NeoFinder, available on Windows and Mac. Would
| love to find an OSS equivalent.
|
| https://cdfinder.de/
| jcims wrote:
| Will take a look, thank you!
| x87678r wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| My problem is I'm paranoid of getting rid of anything now.
| I just want to take one good sweep through so I can do
| something with those drives.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| Jiocus wrote:
| 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.
|
| [2] https://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2]
| https://github.com/borgbackup/borg [3] There's GUI
| implementations of these
| avgDev wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| I've stopped and started shopping for a NAS at least five
| times now. One of these days i'll pull the trigger.
| alliao wrote:
| 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.
| dedosk wrote:
| Integrate the takeout somewhat into www.digikam.org!
| WalterBright wrote:
| > indexes them in a local SQLite DB.
|
| 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.
| e_y_ wrote:
| 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.
| mholt wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| TBF SQLite format is also extremely unlikely to become
| unreadable: https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat2.html
| phoe-krk wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > likely just their indices and metadata
|
| 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".
| joshuamorton wrote:
| 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 on alabama, or
| sooner combination thereof.
|
| Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit
| ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational
| structures for non hierarchal data.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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...
| williadc wrote:
| > Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be
| ubiquitous. Good luck with those today.
|
| Here's a Hacker News story from 10 days ago about an
| update to Wordperfect:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959090
|
| I haven't tried it myself.
| depr wrote:
| Wordperfect files can be opened in MSFT Word ;)
| google234123 wrote:
| 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
| Xorlev wrote:
| Exporting via Takeout will retain the geolocation tags. The API
| isn't the best place to export.
| [deleted]
| Roritharr wrote:
| I've stumbled upon this problem lately. Is there any software
| to organize the takeout dump sensibly?
| johnghanks wrote:
| why would anyone want this? you lose literally every benefit of
| Google Photos.
| mholt wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| liminal wrote:
| 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.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| How do you store photos there? Do they make an Android client
| that syncs your phone's photos to the cloud?
| arkitaip wrote:
| 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.
| liminal wrote:
| 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.
| pnutjam wrote:
| 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.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Have you tried using that full 1TB? Many small time hosts
| oversubscribe and will look for a reason to boot you if you
| go beyond a reasonable usage %.
| singhkays wrote:
| Sure but do you get to use office apps as well? I assume
| majority of the cost in the Office deal is the cost of the
| full Office suite
| anuila wrote:
| 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)
| andyjpb wrote:
| I guess the free lunch is finally over.
|
| 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.
| andromeduck wrote:
| I think it's more that cost per TB for HDD and NAND scaling
| started stalling a few years ago.
| pkaye wrote:
| 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.
| donalhunt wrote:
| 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).
| TLightful wrote:
| Photo storage is worth paying for. But just not at Google.
|
| www.smugmug.com
|
| Feel free to suggest others.
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| 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.
| arkitaip wrote:
| 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.
| mvgoogler wrote:
| 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.
|
| <disclaimer - I work on Google Photos>
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| I'll look into it. Thanks for the tip.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I did the same but I'm really not worried. How long is it going
| to take for her to fill 15GB really?
| ffpip wrote:
| Guess the face detection AI has become good enough. It was
| already way too creepy.
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| > 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.
| Fogest wrote:
| 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.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I don't want to have to backup the data myself. I pay Google
| so they can backup my photos.
| ISL wrote:
| The way to guarantee the latter is to make your own periodic
| backups.
| speedgoose wrote:
| But then these is almost no point to use Google Photos.
| seized wrote:
| 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.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes but then I need to host the backup in a reliable way. I
| think Google is very competent to keep my personal data.
| ianhowson wrote:
| Keep in mind that the photos you download from Takeout have the
| GPS data stripped out, so (sibling commentors) already have an
| incomplete backup.
|
| PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) lets you do
| a good-old-fashioned dump to a NAS.
| Octopuz wrote:
| Does PhotoSync keep the GPS/location data when downloading
| from Google Photos? Their website is not very specific and
| slightly outdated (Picasa login anyone?)
| londons_explore wrote:
| > low quality but unlimited storage is expensive
|
| 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.
| tomasreimers wrote:
| 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?
| nikolay wrote:
| They got enough free training data, so...
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| rektide wrote:
| 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.
| rektide wrote:
| 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?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Surely, if someone has died, you'd need to export their
| photos from any online services anyways. I don't really see
| the issue here.
| rektide wrote:
| 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.
| tyrust wrote:
| From the blog post [0]:
|
| > Any photos or videos you've uploaded in High quality before
| June 1, 2021 will not count toward your 15GB of free storage.
|
| If this is a concern you personally have, take a look at this
| help page: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter
| /6357590?h...
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on any of this stuff.
|
| [0] - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
| rektide wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| 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.
| chrisjc wrote:
| If you're an Amazon Prime user you can use their photo app that
| still has unlimited, full-res uploads.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011
|
| >Amazon Photos offers unlimited, full-resolution photo storage,
| plus 5 GB video storage for Prime members.
|
| Printing from amazon isn't too bad either.
| anuila wrote:
| Videos aren't free though and I feel that those 5 GB will
| start filling up pretty soon, which means you'll have to
| start paying anyway.
| chrisjc wrote:
| I'm not sure videos were unlimited on google either though.
| So I'm not sure you're losing a feature there.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| TLDR: unlimited high quality photos going away. Will start
| counting against your storage quota.
| thekyle wrote:
| 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.
| kingnothing wrote:
| They're still an ad company at the end of the day. Now they're
| going to charge you and advertise to you. Win win for them.
| mvgoogler wrote:
| Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for
| ad targeting.
|
| <I've worked on Google Photos since before it was launched>
| Normille wrote:
| >Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used
| for ad targeting.
|
| I think you forgot a "yet" in that sentence.
| kingnothing wrote:
| 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.
| singhkays wrote:
| > few bucks a month over having my data used for ad targeting
|
| not seeing this promise anywhere with this announcement though
| mvgoogler wrote:
| It's in the press release:
| https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
|
| "And, as always, we uphold our commitment to not use
| information in Google Photos for advertising purposes"
|
| https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-
| priva...
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| rch wrote:
| 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.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| 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.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Sad as I am to see "unlimited" go away, this is probably the best
| way to do it:
|
| * Grandfathering existing photos means I don't have to worry
| about going back and deleting objects or getting an sudden bump
| in cost.
|
| * 15 GB is pretty generous... iCloud includes 5GB for free.
|
| * $2/month isn't a huge jump to the next level of storage.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| The worst part about iCloud is how slow it is and how much
| Photos on macOs crash. It's barely usable for anything but
| previewing photos.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| To be clear the 'high quality' is still unlimited. Only the
| 'original quality' will be quotaed.
| llimos wrote:
| Not so, that's exactly what's changing.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| yes i see, its hard to read these things which are trying
| to be as positive as possible
| sgrinich wrote:
| Heads up on the term 'grandfathering' and the racial overtones
| of what this means:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586...
| acheron wrote:
| Excellent example of the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
| QUFB wrote:
| It is a sad reflection on HN that comments like this are so
| aggressively downvoted.
| gabagool wrote:
| What term should be used instead?
| ttam wrote:
| sunset?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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
| advisedwang wrote:
| 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.
| gundmc wrote:
| Legacy can work in most cases
| advisedwang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| [deleted]
| m0zg wrote:
| 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.
| ig0r0 wrote:
| Looking at the talk about various ways to downlod Google Photos,I
| use this for regular backups
| https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync
| th0ma5 wrote:
| 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.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing.
|
| Good thing they discontinued Picasa in favor of pushing
| everything into the cloud for Google Photos.
| mvgoogler wrote:
| 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.
| actuator wrote:
| Does something like this help?
| https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9776477
|
| 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.
| tmaly wrote:
| I hit that limit a few years ago. With kids you take a lot more
| photos. It cost me something like $2.99 a month for 100GB on
| Google
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| 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.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I use NextCloud to share albums, too. You can share a whole
| folder publicly
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| 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?
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Big Sur is coming out tomorrow, might be a decent chance to
| build a native app that's way better
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Originally for Picasa, but still relevant:
| https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FA...
|
| Tl;dr - Either filter and curate online, or deduplicate. Also,
| fix your backup settings.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| 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.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| 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.
| nikolay wrote:
| 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.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Anyone know why the strange tiers on Google One? There is a 2TB
| ($100/yr) and 10TB ($600/yr).
|
| - Usually prices scale log, but here, there is a storage premium
| going from 2TB to 10TB.
|
| - Does anyone else think 2TB is a bit low for a moderately savvy
| family plan? Why isnt there a middle tier like 5TB?
| baskire wrote:
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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).
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