The only other company I can think of is Amazon which provides unlimited storage if you pay for Amazon Prime.
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.
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.
It may take them an hour or two to build the archive depending on how many photos you have, but there it is.
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?
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).
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.
[1]: https://ente.io
Not only that, but I have quite a few files that were corrupted on Amazon Drive, so I wouldn't trust them for long-term photo storage either, unless the photos were also backed up to other services.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511935
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/d0jg8w/your_in...
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.
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.
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.
PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) lets you do a good-old-fashioned dump to a NAS.
I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my NAS to backup the true original files.
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.
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.)
My whole photo-taking process tends to be:
* take a bunch of pictures
* find the best ones
* further refine the best ones until it’s a reasonable number
* photoshop those to how I want them
* share the narrow list
And most of my photos come from events, so they’re in folders based on events.
If your goal is virtual galleries and avoiding duplication, this is sufficiently different I don’t think I can give suggestions there, I’m sorry
My use case is essentially ONLY virtual galleries. I want to bookmark the photos I like the most, then organize based on "whatever comes to mind" (e.g. horizontal-sleeping-daughter, playing-with-toys) and share those galleries.
But that's a rant for another day.
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?"
The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.
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
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.
Best choice I made. Looks like I'll now need to turn off photo backup from Google.
For real backups, I manually sync the phone's images/movies/dngs to my home photo archive.
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.
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.
There's currently no means to recycle them that I know of. I deleted one of my own and can't reclaim the URL. It just no longer exists. Period.
I think that's a problem.
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?
Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:
> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes
> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)
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/
That reminds me I should back up my youtube channel, I probably have videos on there that I don't have locally.
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.
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.
They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not count.
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_.
You don't like it, you have the option to take your photos somewhere else.
> In two or three they will start charging for search.
Great! They should.
I would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.
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.
This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.
Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
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'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.
* 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.
Now you have their credit card in Apple Pay and you can get them paying for more stuff.
All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
<I've worked on Google Photos since before it was launched>
not seeing this promise anywhere with this announcement though
"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...
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>
She wants her photos/videos with her at all times, but then she would need at least 256gb phone which she cannot afford the contract for. Google photos was a perfect balance for this, as the app works very very well as a photo browser where everything is in the cloud - meaning she could offload all the photos and videos (at an acceptable quality for her [impaired] vision) from the phone.
The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.
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.
Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Contributions welcomed to lower the barrier to entry. Use it, contribute to it, or leave it, I guess!
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
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.
I can easily fill up that much data in a single month with videos of my kids.
The next tier is 2TB for $10/mo. Then 10TB for $50/mo.
All of a sudden, you're paying $600 a year and it isn't as insignificant as you suggested.
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.
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!)
> 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.
I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.
Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good luck putting it back together. I did a poor job on mine, part of the bottom bezel didn't stick and there are weird green glitches on the screen when you press on that part. This thing really wasn't designed to ever come apart.
So, anyway, I have a Pixel 4a on its way to me, and I'm paying 50€/month for a server with much more disk space than I know what to do with. Are there any decent self-hosted replacements for Google Photos?
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/
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.
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 size of issue? Just the reduced upload speed, or something more? For most use cases you can probably ignore the throttling up to 10 or 15 TB.
What is the difference between a hard to guess password and a hard-to-guess URL?
Of course, that "someone" could also just take a screenshot or copy the image.
They also offer file sharing with passwords and backup solutions.
I believe all services provide that, because both have their upsides and downsides
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?
> 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.
Photos. People traditionally want to keep photos so that they can occasionally go back to them and reminisce about old times.
The photo albums that my grandparents lovingly kept weren't out every day, and not even every year.
I'd say Google Photos isn't for you. It's for a different kind of user, like me.
However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.
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.
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?
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
No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics, 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.
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.)
Congratulations, you've got malware on your machine. Chrome doesn't do that.
Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is.
Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & switch. Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation, while competitors to it went out of business, and now, they are forced to pay for continued service. That is a bait & switch.
The moment we have to start saying, "well, they should have known better" or "how did you expect this to be free forever" puts us into victim blaming territory. Just because someone could have been aware of a bait & switch/scam, doesn't make that practice not a bait & switch/scam.
'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope.
> while competitors to it went out of business
This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.
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.
I had a symlinked directory getting backup up twice...
I never heard a word from them, but I eventually noticed and fixed it. I generally run around 600GB.
Now the choice is to pay or walk away.
(source: i did it)
If there's one thing people will always do regardless of age, it's that.
Taking images and mounting them sounds reasonable. :)
The uncompressed raw files (or TIFF) are much bigger.
I think this serves as a warning and reminder to users.
Should I try it again?
I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source?
I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.
I mean, it's a small amount, but on the scale of google it might be worth it.
Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
>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.
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.
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.
Is there an alternative you’d recommend? I also use Dropbox for its cost-per-TB and Linux client.
"A home for all your photos and videos"
and they have a blog post titled:
"Easy Wi-Fi backup from your Canon camera to Google Photos"
in which they say
"you can choose to automatically transfer original quality photos to Google Photos"
Things like “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically” just sound condescending.
Like, 15-25 was an eternity compared to 25-35.
Perhaps, but it IS exactly the sort of thing a lot of older people say.
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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...
Even if the house catches fire I can still get my stuff out of amazon.
YouTube also has the benefit of having monopoly power over its market - to their credit, no one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions. But since they have all of the creators already, and starting a competitor is extremely capital-intensive, there aren't any competitors at anything near their scale. For the most part the usual way to find other YouTube creators is YouTube, via their recommendation algorithm. There is a significant lock-in effect.
Since they have monopoly power, they should be able to find ways to monetize their platform, even if potentially contentious. They recently turned on mid-roll ads on all videos longer than 8 minutes (unless the creator opts out) [2] so it's not like they're out of ideas.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
[2] https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/youtube-mid-roll-ads-short...
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.
Edit: there you go: https://mobile.twitter.com/mittermayr/status/131381816260595...
(Don’t be confused by the background image, I put that there).
Do you really think they are committing fraudulent inducement when they explicitly say that they aren't when selling the service?
> There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata
Marginally, probably not much when they already know that from your cellphone location data, your browser location data, the credit card data that they buy, etc.
> or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence.
Again, something they probably get a lot clearer a picture of from buying credit card transaction data than photos.
Their TOS is 8 miles long like every other SaaS company. I'm sure somewhere in their is a counter clause that says they can do whatever they want with any of your data across all products.
I work on Google Photos and prior to that I worked on datacenter level infrastructure.
>Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for ad targeting.
I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
But yeah, not enough for me to pay them for it. If I'm going to pay someone, I'll pay someone else.
Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos.
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.
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.
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.
So, just do your deletion on the Google Photos web client on desktop. The culled photos will be culled from Apple Photos as well.
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>?"
I take photos every day and I look at loads of them. The biggest mistake I made in my early twenties was not taking photos. Every year since I started taking photos, it's been great.
But to each their own.
It is political in the same way as everything is political.
Not surprising considering you just came to HN last year, probably from reddit, bringing the same toxic discussion style.
>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
>>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
>Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
No, it isn't. It's a descriptive statement. If you describe politics as "what we do together", which is the only definition that makes a discussion on Google's business practices (which is totally in the spirit of the website), then essentially everything is politics because of the effect discussing the world has on what should be done.
A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.
B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.
The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.
So while I agree this can be an issue in general, I'm not seeing the argument for it here. I think it would actually be relatively easy for a competitor to get started in this space.
Sure, it's not too bad but I need to migrate off a new platform literally 5 years of photos (+ face tagging), explain it to all my relatives, make them install another app.
Or I can just start paying 2$ per month. I'm not too bothered but it's a clear bait and switch.
To be fair I wasn't sure if this was coming or not given Google is not exactly a small business and could afford to spend some storage money to lock people in better in their ecosystem.
What I said was it's a fallacy re: your statement, "SV's dirty secret is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: .... to gain a dominant position in the market... then jack up the prices and fleece the customers."
Consider there is also a capital cost to rapidly accelerating change in consumer behaviour, e.g. app-based ride-hailing, which can also open up new markets.
*edit: typo
They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.
No, you don't.
> They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.
No, they don't.
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...
“As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.”
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.
And as for killed services with a billion users, well, free unlimited Google Photos is now a killed service.
As for killed paid services, Google Play Music, Nest Secure, Google Photos Print, Google Audio Ads, and a ton of others.
Not really, it's mostly frequency illusion hanging out on HN, but considering Google has multi-billion users, those dozen or so incidents are nothing in comparison.
> free unlimited Google Photos
That's a feature, not a service. And name me one other company that provides unlimited free storage.
> Google Play Music
Technically migrated, all your data and purchases are still there
> Nest Secure
Hardware is a completely different ball game. The existing users can still keep using their hardware just fine. Every single device eventually stops being sold.
> Google Photos Print
Again, a feature. You didn't lose any data. You can still print photos using other services.
> Google Audio Ads
Not familiar, but I see it's still around? Do you have a link to the announcement of it being killed?
Google has not mined emails in GMail for ad targeting for years now: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
I am constantly amazed and how people trust and defend corporations like Google, given what the incentives are. Why do you think Google provides services like GMail or Google Photos? Look at their revenue streams: it's an ad-tech company.
I'm not sure how you got that out of my comment. I was stating a fact.
This sounds nefarious, but for all we know you're talking about the people in the To line.
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.
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.
Being grandfathered into a service means you get to keep using it the way you did, full stop.
This service is about uploading and downloading files. All they're preserving is the ability to download them, not upload.
Velvet gloves dumping.
What kind of entitlement is this?!
That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.
What kind of entitlement is this?
Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
They’re pitching it as having “unlimited storage”....
Yep! We were right. Google Photos will launch today, for free.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/confirmed-google-will-laun...
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9618965
Highlight comment:
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
-- XJOKOLAT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619340
You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB. Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.
Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation.
So while this may not be a big problem at the moment, we'll see. I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying, which isn't awful, but it's a question of when not if, and image / video sizes still keep creeping up.
That's with my photo-taking being at a far lower rate than it used to be when my son was younger. I'm not a very social person and don't travel much at the moment - a lot of people will hit those limits far faster.
When gmail launched, I had to clean my old email every other week on all my addresses. A few years of normal usage before you have to remove old stuff is very reasonable.
My free Google Drive is even larger than my O360 one that my workplace pays for.
This is why google needs anti-trust.
Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.
As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.
>Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
Given the scale of Google and how many people have access to the Internet today, I'd generally be willing to bet that there are many, many others with the same fate but who simply can't get enough traction behind them for anyone (let alone Google) to care enough.
It's not at all uncommon.
I've done business with Google multiple times in my career, and I could name a dozen such incidents. They're just not public.
For the most part, there wasn't anything the user did; just Google algorithm bugs. In one case, a startup lost all of its data because one Google system expected another Google system to implement a fraud detection measure, and the other Google system didn't. Completely internal to Google, but poof, all of a sudden, account gone, all data gone, and no way to fix it.
In another case, GCE lost a contract worth millions of dollars to AWS because Youtube had algorithm bugs. Poof. Youtube system broke. This was early GCE days, and they were looking for successes, and we were sufficiently high-profile that we had a dedicated engineering team. They pushed on Youtube. Youtube said we weren't important enough to help.
Most of this stuff is either under NDA, or otherwise just private, but it is why my current employer, as a policy, doesn't do business with Google. That's a big contract too; I'm not at a startup right now, but at a big company.
> And name me one other company that provides unlimited free storage
I think you're unintentionally arguing I shouldn't rely on Google-unique features, since I might lose them. I already knew that. I've learned that lesson painfully over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
That hurts Google in B2B. If all customers take that philosophy, Google fundamentally can't have unique, differentiating advantages beyond price. It doesn't matter what unique AI algorithm Googlers come up with for the Google Cloud. I won't use it if I can't count on it still being around when I ship my product. And I can't. The only time I will use Google is if it provides unique customer access (e.g. Android apps or Youtube eyeballs), which hopefully the antitrust thing will help with.
Turn it the other way around... would you find it reasonable to be obliged to continue to share your data for as long as they provide you with free beer? Or can you withdraw from the agreement?
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.
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.
Now what happens if it was a slightly less popular word processor, like PC-Write? (PC-Write rose to fame by being the first shareware program.)
What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4? What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really share. It's really a big question for me how reliably store things for long periods of time.
My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.
Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.
My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.
I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.
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".
Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.
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.
Don't worry; I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen unless you click through a pop-up.
Or something else?
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
I agree with your last two points, as my family's digital photos are also stored in a fairly similar clustered index style where you have to know the date at least pretty closely to start your search unless you want to scan "all Thanksgivings" [which itself is just a series of clustered index lookups]
2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.
3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc.
4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential player in either sector.
https://traderiskguaranty.com/trgpeak/history-anti-dumping-c...
Or more properly, predatory pricing:
Most pictures taken today are probably taken with an Android camera. Google is, indeed, the most influential player in that sector.