Overall I'm excited to see this, as much as I don't need one more subscription (and have a very legacy, free, personal GSuite for a custom domain so I can't use One anyway).
Maybe this is a strategic transition to a more consistent, less advertising dependent Google.
Regardless, Google charging for these services bodes well for other consumer software shops because it is otherwise an uphill battle to compete with "free".
> If they can both charge and advertise, they will, just like cable tv.
While not always an exact distinction, the cost of cable is to carry the service to your house, and the advertising on cable is to pay for the content being served over the former.
Given that carrying one channel to my house should cost the cable company the same as carrying 500 channels to my house, the fact that I have to pay more for more channels seems to discredit your explanation.
> I’m less optimistic. All they will do is consolidate lock-in and leave people with less money and willingness to spend on other software.
I don't think that's the case at all. Look at the explosion of TV streaming services. Nevermind the fact that we're winding up with a situation worse than cable, people are paying for those.
What people don't pay for is apps that are more expensive than $1. They complain if apps cost more than a cup of coffee because everything else is free.
We have to push out the loss leaders and advertising subsidized garbage, because it puts expectations on the price of our software.
Compare our situation with Steam. People are happy to pay tons of money for games. Often times, they spend money for games they don't even play!
It's good for us if things start costing money and stop being free. Free is something only the giants can afford to offer.
The economics of offering free storage at that kind of scale eventually doesn't work out. Multiply the number of Android users by the average amount of cloud photo storage they use...
The concern, "we had to buy a million hard drives to store users' photos," ends up being fairly weighty. At the very least YouTube itself is an advertising platform... people buy ads on YouTube and those ads pay for the massive computing and storage running it. People don't buy ads to put in your personal photos and having a bigger training set than the next guy isn't enough of an advantage to pay for all your disks. Cloud photos may be smaller than YouTube but it's not small enough to "fall in the cracks" and get funded with spare capacity from running other "real" services, it's undoubtedly got real, proper funding which is justified because of how it positions Android in relation to iPhone, and how it positions the Google ecosystem within Android.
In other words, Google wants Android phones to use the Play Store, and free storage on Google Photos is part of the carrot.
Exactly. If I am paying I am expecting top notch customer service. From what I have read here multiple times it's not Google's strong suit. I expect them to handle my customer service call by actual human rather than a bot if I am paying.
This 1000%. I like Google services (Photos, YouTube, Gmail), but the free ones creep me out. The services that aren't spying aggressively on me are clearly just loss-leaders and, given Google's track record, are inevitably doomed for the scrapheap.
I will pay for it because it's a really good product and I want to have it. I agree that the fee doesn't guarantee Google will always keep the product around, but it certainly seems to signal some investment in Google Photos.
As a paying customer of Google Photos, I'm starting to explore alternatives after the recent round of horror stories. Baby photos are the one thing I don't have backups for due to their sheer size, and they are also utterly irreplaceable.
There are several solutions that are set-and-forget. I have beta users that report success with SyncThing and PhotoSync. I personally use Resilio Sync.
They all support automated backups to storage either that you have at home (say, on a NAS), or someone else's cloud.
> I don't have backups for due to their sheer size
If you've been living in the Apple ecosystem for a while, where 1 TB on your laptop is precious, realize that both SSD and spinning rust drives have plummeted in cost over the last decade. You can get a 12TB drive on sale for $175. That's $15 per TB. If you want something mobile and convenient, 2.5" external drives are ~$100 for 4TB. If you need speedy disk, a fast, 1TB m2 NVMe SSD can be had for just $100.
Really, for just $200 you can get two external drives (always have a backup) and have the peace of mind that all your photos are 1) safe, and 2) in your possession.
I agree it's a hassle, and a bummer that they de-integrated Google Drive and Google Photos. I've got a reasonably functional alternative using SyncTrayzor/Syncthing.
For very large Google Photo libraries, you may need to break your library into a series of albums. I had to do this for my wife before Takeout finally decided it could generate an archive instead of "oops! we couldn't make your archive! lol!".
Your metadata will also be scrambled or stripped as well. GPS almost certainly will be missing. I had a number of images where they _changed the captured-at times in the metadata_ (thanks?) to obviously-incorrect times (and not just a timezone-offset error): like, a sunset shot that they changed to 3am, and retained the timezone offset.
My reflex is to respond with: NextCloud...but as much as I'm a fan of nextcloud, i acknowledge that it either requires your time to manage a nextcloud server, or your money for you to pay a nextcloud host provider to do it for you. Which made me pause and step back and ask (rhetorically), what your requirements for an alternative might be. Having (rhetorically asked that), i'm going to just give you a list of links that provide suggestions for alternatives to goolg e services - presumably including alts to google photos. Here goes (in no particular order)...
Haven't tried myself, but a friend of mine was talking up Amazon's offering. Apparently one of the big benefits is that they store your photos 100% raw as you took them so no reduction in quality to save space. Apparently with your prime membership you get unlimited storage of full resolution included ie free. Guess Caveat for this option is having a prime membership with Amazon.
You're welcome to try out the beta for free, in exchange for your feedback.
PhotoStructure is designed to be simple to install and run. Libraries are uniquely cross-platform, cross-computer, and tested to scale comfortably to 500k+ assets. You can run the windows desktop edition, put your library on an external drive, move the drive to your Mac, automatically import whatever's on that computer, and sweep all your photos (JPEG and RAW) and videos (with auto-transcoding) into one tidy, de-duplicated folder hierarchy.
The UI is web-based and mobile-friendly. The docker image runs happily on NASes and anywhere else docker runs.
What is interesting to see is that first there were paid apps photo/gallery/editors.
Then Google broke the market with free apps to do that.
Then it was an incentive to force you using a phone of a manufacturer that paid the Google Play framework racket fees. (The user is thinking that they are free apps compared to competitors but in fact it is the manufacturer that pay for them)
And now that the competitors are rares, paid features and paywall are coming...
Just imagine if at the beginning it was the competitors apps vs paywalled Google apps as they are becoming!
In the same way as when people joined massively Gmail, it was because google was marketing it as 'unlimited storage' ('you will never have to delete an email anymore). And now that they are ubiquitous, the storage is clearly fixed and limited and there are incentives to push you to pay for more storage.
In a same way that drive or photos services were kind of: it's unlimited, no cost, use them for everything!
But every photo that you did put in your drive for example, reduce the storage you have available for receiving emails. So at some points you will have to pay for the extra storage...
It's not that they were killed. It is just that they could survive but not thrive facing a powerfully marketed free and preinstalled google photo gallery.
Think of it in the same way that AMD survived with difficulty for a dozen years when Intel used anti competitive mesures against them. Ensuring distributors would not let too much AMD powered computer be sold
Seems to me like they should be offering up every possible photo feature they can for free since their camera hardware is so far behind the iPhone. I didn't realize until recently that iPhone has some great computational photography features that the Google Camera doesn't (long exposure and crowd removal).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadMaybe this is a strategic transition to a more consistent, less advertising dependent Google.
As to advertising - why would they give up revenue? If they can both charge and advertise, they will, just like cable tv.
While not always an exact distinction, the cost of cable is to carry the service to your house, and the advertising on cable is to pay for the content being served over the former.
If you want more channels, you pay more, which is the reverse of how it would be if it worked the way you say it did.
I don't think that's the case at all. Look at the explosion of TV streaming services. Nevermind the fact that we're winding up with a situation worse than cable, people are paying for those.
What people don't pay for is apps that are more expensive than $1. They complain if apps cost more than a cup of coffee because everything else is free.
We have to push out the loss leaders and advertising subsidized garbage, because it puts expectations on the price of our software.
Compare our situation with Steam. People are happy to pay tons of money for games. Often times, they spend money for games they don't even play!
It's good for us if things start costing money and stop being free. Free is something only the giants can afford to offer.
I wholeheartedly agree with your desire here, however nothing that Google is doing is a move in this direction.
The base service is an advertising supported loss leader.
Upcharging on top of that is about capturing more money from those who have already been locked in.
In other words, Google wants Android phones to use the Play Store, and free storage on Google Photos is part of the carrot.
It just means that you're paying Google for a service you could easily have gotten for free.
Given Google's history of killing products, especially on the consumer side, why would you ever pay Google for a consumer-focused product?
Any insights? Which photo services are the best?
You would pay way more than that to get them back, if they were lost.
I'd actually pay more for a fixed feature set if it means less instability.
Dropbox also makes it easy to back up to a hard drive I have in my possession. When combined with Google Photos, it's N+2 redundancy for ~$12/mo.
They all support automated backups to storage either that you have at home (say, on a NAS), or someone else's cloud.
If you've been living in the Apple ecosystem for a while, where 1 TB on your laptop is precious, realize that both SSD and spinning rust drives have plummeted in cost over the last decade. You can get a 12TB drive on sale for $175. That's $15 per TB. If you want something mobile and convenient, 2.5" external drives are ~$100 for 4TB. If you need speedy disk, a fast, 1TB m2 NVMe SSD can be had for just $100.
Really, for just $200 you can get two external drives (always have a backup) and have the peace of mind that all your photos are 1) safe, and 2) in your possession.
> Photos are the only things I don't have backups for due to their sheer size
The bottleneck here isn't storage space. It's bandwidth and transfer time, given Android's crappy file system interface. (iOS, of course, has none.)
I kept up with Google Photos backups for almost a year. But ain't nobody got time for that.
[0] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Few months ago, I did an export, but also managed to find a harddrive with many of the originals, and the sizes were wildly different.
Any good way for a family to share/combine most of their photos?
https://www.privacytools.io/
https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/
https://goodreports.com/ (This one is actually relatively new)
https://ethical.net/resources/
https://switching.software/
And, then of course, a classic: https://prism-break.org/en/
Good luck to you!
You're welcome to try out the beta for free, in exchange for your feedback.
PhotoStructure is designed to be simple to install and run. Libraries are uniquely cross-platform, cross-computer, and tested to scale comfortably to 500k+ assets. You can run the windows desktop edition, put your library on an external drive, move the drive to your Mac, automatically import whatever's on that computer, and sweep all your photos (JPEG and RAW) and videos (with auto-transcoding) into one tidy, de-duplicated folder hierarchy.
The UI is web-based and mobile-friendly. The docker image runs happily on NASes and anywhere else docker runs.
Then Google broke the market with free apps to do that.
Then it was an incentive to force you using a phone of a manufacturer that paid the Google Play framework racket fees. (The user is thinking that they are free apps compared to competitors but in fact it is the manufacturer that pay for them)
And now that the competitors are rares, paid features and paywall are coming...
Just imagine if at the beginning it was the competitors apps vs paywalled Google apps as they are becoming!
In a same way that drive or photos services were kind of: it's unlimited, no cost, use them for everything!
But every photo that you did put in your drive for example, reduce the storage you have available for receiving emails. So at some points you will have to pay for the extra storage...
Think of it in the same way that AMD survived with difficulty for a dozen years when Intel used anti competitive mesures against them. Ensuring distributors would not let too much AMD powered computer be sold