This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).
Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons—
[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.
[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.
I 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?
Based on a cursory search, these bans are not so uncommon, and it is just scary
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365
[4] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en
(edit for formatting)
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.
Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best product.
I like this change a lot.
I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.
Google still collects data.
When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data.
Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free.
Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago? Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.
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.
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.
It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA:
As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
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.
Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.
I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested!
(One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)
I don't really understand this. I've been in computing for 45 years now. Programs come and go. I store files I want to keep in the most generic format practical. Storing a file in some program's special format is not a good plan for reading it 40 years from now.
For photos, I store them as jpgs in folders named after the year. Within those folders, there might be sub-folders named with a topic, like "disneyland" or "christmas". I'll "tag" photos by selecting a name for the jpg, like "bob and sue.jpg".
If more is needed, I'll just add a "notes.txt" file in the folder, with whatever text seems appropriate.
I have no worries about ascii text becoming unreadable, and few worries about jpgs becoming unreadable.
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.
https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=10412.msg55391#ms...
The project seems like it could be very interesting, but there's too much effort required to perform an initial evaluation.
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.
Probably for 90% of people on HN, it costs more (Opportunity cost) to type a comment complaining about ads on Youtube compared to a month subscription. But for some reason people like to complain.
I also want to press one shortcut key to put a photo into a certain album and at the same time archive it. As it is, it takes several buttons and a mouse selection and a mouse click (with some delay in between), which is super painful when you have to repeat it thousands of times.
Edit: Hmm, I saw there's Google Photos API. If it's easy(ish) to use, could I possibly write some small python or JS scripts to get this functionality? Or is there a reason this isn't as simple as it sounds?
Also, in general, do not rely on Google or Apple as backup of your photos. Use something like PhotoSync to back up to a second cloud location, and also keep a local backup.
How big is your photo library? I have about 100GB and that’s all worked perfectly well on iOS/macOS for many years - even on the old 2010 MacBook Air I used until it stopped getting security updates.
You can see a difference in quality but it’s a judgement call: Google Photos definitely indexes more things in pictures but it also has a much higher false positive rate - for example, it took until 2018-19 before searching for “cat” didn’t have two pages of results for my dog before any actual cats.
> identify faces
That's a negative point for many people. I want to store picture, not train the image recognition AI they might sell to the NSA in 10 years...
I used to use this feature heavily, and have to give up. Don't get me wrong, I still think Google Photos is the best in class. The point is, even the "best" is not enough due to the lack of options to fine tune it. And once it breaks, it jumps from "holyshit" to "unusable" straightly.
I wrote a very long article to detail it somewhere else before, here is the gist of it:
-------
* There is no way to tell Google to "split" a person/face. All you can do is remove wrong results (person B) from person A (you can also say it's "wrong person" on web, but not in app). You can't manually re-tag them as B in batch.
* These removed results don't seem to get re-recognized as other people; it's either not get re-analyzed at all, or often times, they will be re-recognized back to the wrong person again!
* You can't multi-select more than a few hundreds pictures and remove. It says "can't remove results" on both app and web if you select, say, 1000 photos. This is extremely annoying since I have people that have 10k images and I have to do so in small batch.
* You can manually assign a face, but can only do so one by one. And that's assuming Google actually detects the face, no matter how obvious it is.
* The people you added manually (by selecting a face from a photo, and manually add a name) are somehow treated as second-class citizens. When you visit https://photos.google.com/people, their names appeared at the very end of the list of named people (no matter how many photos you have for him/her), and they are almost never considered as face-recognition candidates when you upload new photos. I guess Google simply doesn't use the manually assigned people/face in their AI.
* And the final nail on the coffin is, even if you went to the trouble and fixed all these problems manually, which I did, nothing stops Google to recognize the newly uploaded photos wrong. That means you need to repeat the process again and again.
Also from an AI/machine learning point of view (I'm guessing, I'm not in this field), the more tricky cases that the user allowed/confirmed, the model for that person became more overfitted. So eventually it started to think other people are the same guy/gal.
This is typical, but the problem is, you, as the supervisor, can't tell the AI that he was wrong, and re-tag the training set as easily.
I think all this can be easily fixed if Google can add a way to "split" a person, and then force the AI to re-train the models based on the photos from now two different people. But I won't hold my breath for a free service.
* 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.
All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.
I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.
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.
- 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
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/
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.
What is the difference between a hard to guess password and a hard-to-guess URL?
They also offer file sharing with passwords and backup solutions.
I believe all services provide that, because both have their upsides and downsides
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.
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.
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.
Tl;dr - Either filter and curate online, or deduplicate. Also, fix your backup settings.
Truth is that upfront payment for storage and convenience is a much more sustainable model than subsidizing this through spyware and other services. Also given the amount of storage needed his seems pretty inevitable.
The search is unparalleled. The Google Location History integration is beautiful.
Just today I used it to find a dish I ate in a place years ago by finding the place in Location History and clicking through to the photo of the dish that was integrated into the view. Jesus Christ. This was the promise of AI assistants. It is here.
15 gigs of photos is nothing.
> Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I'm relying on cloud storage.
I'm a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mutual fund, saying they hadn't heard from me in a few years and were going to hand my account over to the government if they didn't hear from me soon.
Two years is nothing when you're my age. I have piles on the floor in my office that need attending to that have been there 5-10 years.
I can’t 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?
I'd say Google Photos isn't for you. It's for a different kind of user, like me.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics, they want users to be customers, not “products”.
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.)
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.
not seeing this promise anywhere with this announcement though
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.
I had purchased a bit of music through Google Music and it was nice. I kept it downloaded on my device, played it whenever I wanted, and it integrated nicely with Google Assistant, as promised. This year, Google decided to migrate all that into YouTube Music. I thought that wouldn't be a problem; just a new name and change of UI, surely? Well, YouTube Music is incessant about nagging you to subscribe. Unless you subscribe it doesn't work well with assistant and won't play without the app open. I only wanted to listen to the music I had already purchased on the same terms on which I had purchased it, though. Luckily, it was just a handful or so of music and they've agreed to refund it. But now I'm still in the situation where I will be looking for something to replace the gap. This is just one example.
At some point, I'm not going to be bothering with Google products anymore. I already feel a moderate bias against using their stuff. I'm switching from Google Cloud to Vercel, for example. I just hope Vercel doesn't get acquired by Google.
I haven't yet done anything about Gmail, Drive, or Photos, but I feel a bit insecure about such important stuff currently being in Google's hands.
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.
<disclaimer - I work on Google Photos>
The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.
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?
We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law).
Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams.
From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis.
[I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]
Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner.
Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.
Instead of making me pay for additional storage [1], I wish I could pay for the ability to use all of Google’s products with increased privacy (no tracking, no reading my emails, ability to turn off YouTube recommendations etc.). I would pay for that because the products themselves are great.
It's very hard for me (and many other people) to estimate how many GBs of photos I would produce total because (1) I don't know what camera technology would be like in a few years and (2) I don't know how many years I will be alive and producing photos for.
I know that they can't just our old uploads free forever, but I'd like the product framing to adapt to my mental model rather than the other way around. They can still price it such that it's profitable for them.
Another issue I have is vendor lock-in. Sure, I can take my data out of Google Photos, but I can't take my data out for 5 years, and at some later point decide to use it again, and have it be in exactly the same state as it was before. A lot of metadata (edits, social interactions like comments/shared album data) would be lost. To me, these "non-exportable features" almost feel like ads, since they entice people to modify their content in ways that can only be shown to them in the future if they continuously pay for the service.
I think the Facebook/Google Data Transfer project would help this second issue to some extent. https://engineering.fb.com/2019/12/02/security/data-transfer...
I've got a few issues with this but my biggest one is the combination of Drive/Docs/Gmail storage with my Photos quota.
I have 18GB of that stuff ... so I'm done before I take a single photo. If I had a 15GB runway starting on June 2021 that's plenty of time to consider my options. Now I have no runway, gotta start researching how to move a decade of photos.
For those, worrying about Google banning your account and losing your photos, here is how I do mine. Still not the best but hope to inspire others.
1. Our family shoots mostly with iPhone, and DSLRs and the first point of consumption are Apple Photos.
2. I have Google Drive Backup to back up the "original" resolution photos to Google Photos. This helps to share with friends, families, and others who are pretty much not on the Apple Ecosystem. This also serves as my second backup and I like the cute things that the Google Photos team does to the photos. A lot of fun moments for the family.
3. Besides the digital house-keeping that I quickly do every Month, I do a checklist of Backups, trimming, minimizing, etc, every year (usually in JAN). Here the Photos from Apple Photos are exported to the yearly folder but I'm not happy that the exported photos pretty much have scrambled metadata. I'm fine for now, as this is my last resort if the above two sources kinda die.
This is not yet something that I'm happy about and will continue to look for something in the lines of every tool (such as Apple Photos, Google Photos, and others) being just clients to a primary source available on my local NAS and somewhere online (with backup replicas -- cloud such as AWS, Wasabi + elsewhere).
On a personal note, I do skip lunches once a while each month to cover up for the 2TB Google One and Apple One Family plans, which I'm fast running out too. That lunch-skipping is good for health and pays for the monthly plans.
Could also mean that the big G has reached it's max market valuation in abstract terms..!
Still, to this day in 2020, I receive quarterly emails of them threatening to close my account (next month they say)...and not provide access, which is fine because... I went over their limit with half .mic 4K movie blob of Avatar (or blue ray or whatever), since my ps3 ran out of space.
I 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.
The people working at Google might not be able/allowed to comment on this, although I would appreciate their view on this issue.
The reality is a lot of folks don’t think this way and don’t want to have usb hard drives laying around or NAS in the living room next to the router.
People are storing their digital lives with Google. And they’re having them destroyed too, without any recourse.
Now, am i the only one who wished that, rather than just catalogue and organized bazillion photos, photo storage services would actually help us curate our own photos?
At some point I wish there was a service that would help me narrow my 30K+ photos down to maybe 1000 o so.
I read a paper about stochastic search, tried it out with my own photos, and found a novel UI that many of my beta testers think is one of my best features: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#fast-and-...
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.
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
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.
I am sure there will pop up companies happy to harvest your data for free.
Personally I just do multiple physical backups, it ain't so convenient, but I have control over my data.
Btw. there is Yandex Disk for people who don't wanna pay for OneDrive or Amazon Photos. For cold storage is maybe cheapest Backblaze.
I already take care of the uploading (I have a big nextcloud server with multiple copies), however there is no affordance provided for collecting albums and sharing them.
And just to clarify, an album to me it's just a list of paths to photos and the ability to generate password protected links that I can share with family members. Oh, right, the photos shared through this way should hide all exif tags to prevent leakage.
I find paid for Google services much better. Google WorkGroups/GSuite provides CloudSearch. Buying books and movies is easy and avoids having everything in one Amazon account. It is easy enough to control how much information they collect.
I would like it if Twitter and other services I use offered paid accounts with some privacy guarantees and no advertising.
I 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.
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.
Cameras keep getting better outputting bigger and bigger video and photo files.
Big percentage of the population has Google Photos as their single point of backup.
I don't like Googles threat of login each 2 years or we nuke everything.
People could be in coma, prison, religious sects etc for longer than 2 years without internet connection.
Lot's of people living in exotic areas don't have regular internet connection as well.
If a company puts their users first, I can understand why they'd charge them; that's their business model.
But for a company with interests so orthogonal to their users, it just amazes me that they decide to charge -- and also, that their users would be willing to pay.
Of course I can keep the old photos in Google Photo and upload new photos to other cloud service, but I would lose the ability to search "all" photo in a single place.
Now, I just want to have a function to download all photos from Google Photo and consider switching to others.
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?"
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.
It will show things like your largest photos and low quality (blurry, dark, etc) photos that you can review and decide what to delete.
I prefer not to manage the content actually. It is way better for Photos to group on dates, location, content. That way finding content becomes way easier on different dimensions.
Good thing they discontinued Picasa in favor of pushing everything into the cloud for Google Photos.
There should be an option to filter those imported images for easier deletion. I haven't seen one.
I always knew they'd do this so I've been backing up all my photos locally.
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.
Deleting data from "dead" accounts is fine and good. But they need to stay dead, not come back to life.
I'd imagine modern cellphones and their 40gpixel res crush that multiple times over
Best choice I made. Looks like I'll now need to turn off photo backup from Google.
The only other company I can think of is Amazon which provides unlimited storage if you pay for Amazon Prime.
This is why people need to host their own data.
Looks like I have some bad news for them...
I'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.
"In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future"
This is just gross.
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.
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.
An instance of NextCloud can do wonders and there is even an app that does face recognition.
- 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?
[1]: https://ente.io
at the end of the day, you will realize that only yourself can be trusted.
At least I should get free shit.
This is a welcome step towards realistic marketing.
Now you must pay.
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.
www.smugmug.com
Feel free to suggest others.
I'm happy to pay someone for storage, but not Google. So now I'll get on that.
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.
