For anyone with a technical inclination, we knew this day would come eventually, thus Google did as well. But for the layman or casual user, one would assume the unlimited space would remain free forever. Companies really need to be upfront about the sustainability of their free options and the forecasting of when those things will change. Google had to have known that they couldn't sustain an unlimited free plan forever and should have stated such from the beginning.
I'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.
I guess Google thinks they have enough training data, and can this stop offering free storage. Or maybe they think it is sticky enough to start charging and not lose clients. Either way, I wish them luck.
Tldr: low quality but unlimited storage is expensive, so it will go away in June. However everything uploaded before will not use space for some time. High quality storage has never been unlimited so no changes.
A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
> A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
This doesn't exist. But you can schedule a year of e.g. 2 monthly incremental takeouts at takeout.google.com and stop-limit your dataloss scenario to a window.
btw: I think it should exist. I think google should clarify its 'we terminated you' process to include the takeout function for export of the data they currently hold hostage.
This is exactly what I do. Every 2 months I get an email about a new backup being ready. If I know I have done a lot of stuff on my google account in the last 2 months I'll download a fresh archive of it and dump it to my NAS. It's kinda a tedious process since I have to go through and download all the zip files they have.
Google Takeout. Or RClone can be used to download with some limitations (bursts dont download, GPS EXIf data is stripped, videos are true original nitrate).
I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my NAS to backup the true original files.
Does PhotoSync keep the GPS/location data when downloading from Google Photos? Their website is not very specific and slightly outdated (Picasa login anyone?)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. PhotoSync copies the photos from your device to some destination (NAS, SMB, S3, whatever.) It doesn't interact with Google Photos. When it copies stuff it copies the original HEIC/JPEG/RAW/whatever, so the GPS EXIF is preserved.
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.
Well, luckily Google One is quite cheap. You can get 100 GB for 20 euro per year to get started and even the 2 TB plan is cheaper than for example Dropbox and iCloud when paid annually.
Free, however, meant that photos could stay online potentially past the end of someone's life. Now the dead will have their memories & photos that they've shared vanish. This is a dark day.
This helps me personally a little bit, but it's sad to see that going forward the world will need to find a new way to organize & make available their visual media, especially after death.
Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
Yes. Everyone is focussing on the curtailing of free uploads for high resolution images. But I don't think anyone yet has mentioned what is far more concerning for me; the fact that Google'a announcement also says that if your account is inactive for two years, they MAY [my emphasis] delete your data:
>What happens when you're inactive
When you have been inactive in a product for 2 years, we may delete all content for that product. But before we do that, we will:
Give you notice using email and notifications within the Google products. We will contact you at least three months before content is eligible for deletion.
Give you the opportunity to avoid deletion (by becoming active in the product)
Give you the opportunity to download your content from our services.
Important: As an example, if you're inactive for 2 years in Photos, but still active in Drive and Gmail, we will only delete Google Photos content. Content in Gmail and Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) will not be deleted if you are active in those products.
That is pretty concerning for anyone who believed that, in the event of their death, their Google Photos archive would still be around for their surviving friends and family to enjoy.
Any downvoters care to register dissent? At -2 now. I see almost no one discussing this. This is how more than one person I know had planned to preserve some of their mementos for the future. This option is now cut off. Why the downvotes, chums?
I was rather expecting that our presence online didn't disappear as soon as we went inactive. I don't want my message board messages to all get erased when I croak. Same goes for the pictures I share with others online too.
Not sure how this is not-an-issue for so many people. Thanks for the reply though. I really don't understand how I'm so far downvoted for what seems like the beginning of a new era where information starts to delete itself, whereas before it survived.
Whatever... I just wish they actually let you manage your own content. I guess I could just download it all, but I certainly can't sort by size or really do just about anything useful in staying under the limits, so I feel really strong-armed into paying.
A new tool will launch on June 1 that will make it easier to manage quota usage. The goal is to make it easier to understand what is using quota and reduce the amount of quota that is used.
It will show things like your largest photos and low quality (blurry, dark, etc) photos that you can review and decide what to delete.
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.
Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad "Backup and Sync" program for MacOS, which over the years has added thousands of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I'm happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.
That is more of the G Drive itself than the software. I had several issues with G Drive like not showing the current version that was revised 10 min prior, sometime it will take from an hour to a whole day to show the changes to other users in the shared folder. My job use GSuite unfortunately, so I am stuck with it.
The same issues happen with third party applications. I use rclone.
Duplication, missing items, quotas, stalled sync ... Some days, it just doesn’t want to work server side.
If Apple can put iOS’s ‘files’ app API to use in Finder these companies might just be able to drop macOS native (macOS only) apps in exchange for only distributing catalyst apps.
Probs they expect a 2TiB plan user to never use a significant amount of the 2TiB. Whereas the 10TiB plan user is more likely to use a higher percentage of allotted storage.
I agree. The price/GiB between looks like someone was throwing darts.
I wish there is a straightforward pay-as-you go option. However there is the mental downside that everything you store is costing money, whereas the package deals you feel free (until you hit the limit).
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.
> Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers.
Photos data isn't used for ads according to the post.
Are you concerned about photo analysis for tagging? You can upload to Google Drive in that case and manage the photos yourself like any other provider.
Possibly McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm [0]. Read that article to see some companies its consultants ruined by recommending the wrong business strategy.
Also, from that link:
McKinsey's alumni have been appointed as CEOs or high-level executives at Google, American Express, Facebook, Boeing, IBM, Westinghouse Electric, Sears, AT&T, PepsiCo, and Enron.
McKinsey is a management consulting company https://www.mckinsey.com/ which is famous (or infamous) for promoting highly 'streamlined' business practices. They're known for turning around failing businesses into profitable ones but also for the enron and 2008 scandals with the housing bubble. Though I'm not too familiar with exactly what 'McKinsey' would imply, it seems to just be a shorthand for whenever a business starts charging for something that was previously free. Aka luggage fees.
McKinsey is a management consultancy that, among other things, often advocates costcutting through skimping on services, outsourcing abroad and currently, automating a number of auxiliary functions such as customer support and other cost centers.
Well, Apple gives you 5GB of photo storage and only for Apple devices. Google was giving unlimited storage for any devices, including Apple’s.
It is only fair that in future they will give that perk only to Google device users:
> As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
Among big players I believe Amazon still offers unlimited high-quality photo storage.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You don't have to like $bigco or $ceo, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Note these guidelines:
Pixels have always had that special selling point but newer ones have an end date of free storage for original quality. I think only the Pixel 1 has lifetime storage.
On one hand I wonder if it makes sense to get an old Pixel 1 from eBay so that I can continue to upload free photos forever (or at least until the Google Photos APK is not updated anymore for the old Android version running on the Pixel 1).
On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if Google just closes the accounts of people who upload large amounts of pictures and videos (taken on another phone) with the Pixel 1.
> If you have a Pixel 1-5, photos uploaded from that device won’t be impacted. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality from that device will continue to be exempt from this change, even after June 1, 2021.
All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.
I bought a Pixel 1 and never got the free storage of raw photos. Eventually had to export everything to dropbox and convert everything to lower quality within photos. There is no way to fix this.
Somehow I suspect that is less about fulfilling their promise to the consumer and more about “let’s not piss off regulators in any more ways than they already are”...
It may just be cleaner to write it this way because the guarantee was different between generations, but the choice of "High quality" looks intentional. Pixel 1-3 (I don't remember 4, but definitely not 4a) were guaranteed unlimited storage at "full resolution", and for subsequent models the guarantee was changed to "high quality".
I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.
Pixel 1 is unique in that they forgot to put a deadline into the deal. They didn't make the same mistake for the next ones. And, yes, unlimited original quality still works for me as of today, but I'm not taking any chances with deleting my local copies.
Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good luck putting it back together. I did a poor job on mine, part of the bottom bezel didn't stick and there are weird green glitches on the screen when you press on that part. This thing really wasn't designed to ever come apart.
So, anyway, I have a Pixel 4a on its way to me, and I'm paying 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?
If you click through the blog post to the support page listing for Pixels they do suggest that Pixel 1s will continue to get unlimited uploads, and Pixel 3s will get them until the original expiration of Jan 31, 2022. The expiration for Pixel 2 will have already expired.
It appears that it's locked to the device you're using, so I would guess you're limited to "high quality". That's a real problem for, say, people taking photospheres, which generally clock in at around 40MP, and will be reduced to 2MP at "high quality".
Oh no, that's terrible. I really need to migrate, I guess. I was getting tired for paying for Google drive anyway. Onto someone elses family plan, I go.
Worth noting that promise has an expiration date though: my Pixel 3XL says "Unlimited storage for full resolution photos & videos uploaded from your Pixel before 2/1/2022". You can find this in the Backup & Sync settings page in the Photos app.
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) has an unlimited storage plan for $20/month. You might have to contact them to sign up for it. The plan is called Enterprise Standard.
Of course it's not especially wise to switch from a gutted google product to another gutted google product, but there aren't many good options for high capacity cloud storage at a reasonable price.
I wonder if they will ever fix the problem when you actually do upgrade to google one, there is no way to make your old photos go from "high quality" to "full res" without bringing them on to a desktop device, uploading them a second time, and often getting duplicates.
I'm a paying customer and I can't even back up my old photos in full res that are on my device without a TON of work.
That is supported on at least Android (I think it is on iOS as well, but I'm not 100% sure). When you switch the backup options from High-Quality to Original quality you should get a prompt asking if you want to re-upload the photos on your device in Original Quality.
So if I upgrade my photos don't upgrade to full res automatically, but if I download them they are actually full res?
I don't have the original photos anymore, that's why I'm asking if Google keeps the full res and I'm able to retrieve them with a paid plan.
I think Google is missing a clear opportunity to compete with Instagram and the like. Google Photos is nearly default on just about every new and recent android phone in the world and its "partner" sharing feature (limited to just 1 partner) resembles a private IG-like share experience.
Imagine having that breadth of user base already active in your app but not simply adding a public network around it (with adequate privacy controls). Add a few ads here and there and it could pay for itself...
Please, no. Photos has way more personal photos of mine. I would prefer to pay and have my content be there without ads.
Also, maybe I am the odd one out here but I don't like concept of public sharing. The only reason I have wanted to upload pictures on Instagram instead of individually sharing photos with my friends is to make my dating profile look better.
I think they’ve been bruised by Google+. I will never trust Google to not add a version of this that keeps your email handle different from your supposed username. Even if they do, I expect them to pull the rug out from under the users in the future to tie the image account and google account together.
Please no. Photos is where I put _all_ my photos. I don't want any social complexity layered on at all, ever. I'll gladly pay for the dumb storage solution they've got now (and, in fact, I do).
Social media like Instagram has actually shown that people appreciate having to explicitly upload select images to their online persona.
It's simpler and it also removes overhead like "wait, which photos can people see again?" Facebook had to build a complicated "view your profile as X" system early on just to address this trepidation.
The search function in Google photos is really the main factor why I'd want to continue using it. I wish there were a photo search index I could run on my own hdd.
Curious what indexing features you find most useful. For me the killer feature was how ocr rendered a lot of photos searchable by the text contained in the photo. But also cool how you can search “mountains” and see all your photos related to that.
I like being able to search by location and peoples names. Similar features are present in my phone's gallery (Samsung) but it obviously works only on the photos in device. Google photos searches all the photos taken by my wife and I over the last half a decade.
Apple's Photos app has a decent search-by-contents feature. Even better, the analysis is all on-device -- it isn't server-side, and doesn't rely on you uploading your photos to iCloud.
Samsung gallery also has same features but it works only on the photos stored on the phone. A big plus with Google photos is that it operates on my entire collection even when I clean pics up from my phone.
Hosting yourself is better than Google reading and disabling your account because you used a couple words that might violate it's TOS. I can't imagine a researcher trying to write a book in Google Docs about 1960's civil rights without tripping Google's abuse engines. It is creepy
You need redundancy with google too. I personally use google, but I have a home server that pulls my photos and emails via the google api. Then I backup that to a 2nd internal drive and the cloud. I use a time4vps storage server, if anyone is interested (https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)
I have a synology setup with a syncme app on mobile that I run every month or so to dump pics on home nas. I have a amazon glacier backup plugin on NAS that backup's periodically. thats it.
Even if the house catches fire I can still get my stuff out of amazon.
But is moving stuff or $5 a month cheaper? This is how iCloud got me. I pay $1 a month for space as I didn’t want to deal with figuring out what stuff on my phone I was willing to move or delete.
Or stop pack-ratting everything. How often do you go back and browse the photos you take. For me, it was "never" and I stopped taking photos. I probably take less than a few dozen photos a year with my phone, and I don't back them up because I will probably never look at them again.
I must have around 5000 photos in my archives and backed up to Google Photos / Amazon S3, etc. This includes old pre-digital ones from various family albums, which I've scanned. I have a strange compulsion to archive 'stuff' like this for posterity. Even though, logically, I know it's of no interest to anyone else apart from me and, after I'm gone and the 'rental' is not being paid on it any more, it'll all disappear forever.
Still, even though I very rarely look at any of it, I'm nonetheless comforted by the fact that it's in safe storage. At least for as long as I'm around.
Ironically, one of the few things that actually gets me looking at old photos again is Google Photos "This week X years ago" feature, that pops up in the mobile app. It's fun to bore the missus with such nuggets of info as "Did you know, this week 7 years ago, we were in <some place> visiting <some person>?"
At the prices involved, it will take years before not pack-ratting becomes a break-even operation.
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.
I remember the frantic meetings at Yahoo when Gmail killed the market for storage upgrades. They caused an immense amount of work (more so than affecting revenue and costs; the premium quotas at least in Europe didn't generate much revenue and the quotas were there more out of fear of excessive use).
A lot of adoption of Google services was driven by not having to worry about quotas. Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage in a way people have been unable to compete with them for years.
> Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage
Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.
As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.
>Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
You've just given me a horrible thought. What's the betting Google retains the free tier [albeit at a reduced level] and starts sticking adverts in amongst your photos?
No, but neither photos or e-mail sizes today are anything like what they used to be either. And remember the quota is the general Google Account quota, not separate to photos. I already have 8GB of other data in Drive.
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.
> I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying
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.
I don't think it's to do with that. I think it's just a reflection that google is a large company with lots of different products, half of which are providing de facto free cloud storage, despite the fact that Google has a cloud storage offering. Also, by pushing the storage limit to onto a single Google account (rather than individual accounts for each product) they can push you into their suite of products (if you're already using the app with a rainbow coloured box icon they can push you to look at those other icons: like rainbox coloured box, or other rainbox coloured box, and the rainbow coloured box with a squiggle)
"Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"
I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.
> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.
To be fair I would consider this a feature. This is how I expect trash to work. Someone takes it away on occasion.
> Google Docs to be counted as storage space
Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a user you don't really have any insight on how much space a doc actually uses. I guess they are going to create some metric?
> "Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"
All these limits were placed within the last few months. It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users
> I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.
It's paid.
> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.
It used to be unlimited. Now it isn't. Which is what people expected.
> Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a..
Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files? They previously excluded docs and it lead to hacks like these - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
> It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users
I agree that it's a company wide policy, but I'm not so sure it's to reduce load. It might just be that they want more subscription revenue and to reduce their reliance on advertising, which has current antitrust issues circling around it.
> Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files?
My point is that there is no "file" for Google Docs. They are some rows in a database somewhere. Probably some update rows and the occasional snapshot proto.
I guess it is no less arbitrary than a MS Office file, but since you can see the file on your disk you know the intrinsic size.
I'm definitely not saying they should give away the storage for free. But it is an interesting problem for how to count this in a user-understandable way.
Don't they make more by treating their customers as products (though i wouldn't call them customers because they receive no support, whether they pay or not)
How do they make money from giving their users free photo storage? I think the only path for that to be profitable was to grow the username for future subscription revenue.
“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.”
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.
Google is running out of ways to keep up with revenue expectations, it's becoming quite obvious. Even Chrome has small ads at the bottom from time to time now, the desperation is quite clear.
Nope, it has/had a line of linked text that promoted the new Pixel phone. Not graphical and definitely not malware. Was on the tiled start page a few weeks ago. An ad by Google, I took a screenshot, I’ll try to find it.
Big players do this to lock out competition. Give away a product or keep the price absurdly low until all the competition is wiped out. Then slowly start turning up the cranks to maximize profits.
It's a great reality check to replace "cloud" with "someone else's computer". Computers tend to run out of space. Then you either delete whatever you don't need, or buy additional storage, which costs money.
YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space.
In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable from a business perspective.
(I am not referring to the meme sites like Imgur who host images at a far lower resolution with a far higher compression ratio, which is of course useless for photos.)
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.
YouTube generates $15b in revenue on ads, plus YouTube Premium memberships [1] and so the cost of storing and serving all of the data would also have to total in the billions, after paying ad revenue to creators as well as other costs. That could be the case, although if they were taking a substantial loss it's unlikely they would hold on for as long as they have.
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.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but we simply don’t know because Google doesn’t report YouTube financials separately. They could still be taking a loss and subsidising it with general search revenue.
While I instinctively knew Google is not to trust with the word "free", especially since "you're the product" isn't applicable as easily here as with other products, I still decided to thoroughly test Photos for a long while to see if they'd introduce some limits. They are a corporate entity out to make money (and externally pressured to make more quarter by quarter), so I fully get it. But for Photos, it almost seemed like it could be a long play for them. A fantastic place to upsell users into all the other Google products. One that could just possibly stay free, forever. So, the fool I am, I started recommending it to just about anyone. Helped onboard relatives, many friends and so forth.
And now, this. We're at the next step of a funnel they could've (and should've) been more transparent on from the start: they're starting to apply force to add "a form of payment". After which, naturally, they'll be able to keep on raising those prices freely with such an impressively solid lock-in at hand. The more data stored inside Google Photos, the harder it'll be to migrate it away.
I am, once again, contemplating to give up entirely on the "cloud" and figure out something else. The issue isn't paying for services, but I do have a problem with intransparent funnels. It's not about paying a buck or two a month, it's about them now being able to raise prices without mercy, regardless of actual storage pricing going down!
To migrate away will be quite the effort once we're storing past 100 GB+. Frustrating. Fully to be expected, but still. Google is acting so desperate, their struggle with milking the good ole' advertising cow is becoming more obvious by the minute. I wonder how long Chrome (not Chromium) is going to survive until it'll end up in a monetisation funnel.
I don't get this honestly. None of us will like if our photos are used for ads as they are deeply personal. How do you think this should be monetized then?
Definitely not with ads, sorry if it came across like that. I meant that Google Photos (as a product) already got me to stay logged in to my Google account. So it can be a driver for Google account usage. The sharing features may be useful to get other people to sign up for Google (and Google storage for other things).
I used to run a free site that had a lot of users, and I mostly kept it up and running because I placed ads for my other (paid) SaaS services on it, and it converted like crazy. So my ideal scenario for Google would be to have a few of those launching pad products, where they show we can trust them on their word (and with our data), and that makes me want to invest more in the wider brand (buy a Pixel phone, get Google Home devices, Chromecast, etc.)
Time to dust off my side project, Timeliner [1] which downloads your Google Photos (and other content from various services) and indexes them in a local SQLite DB.
Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.
I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested!
(One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)
The Google Photos interface itself isn't that big of a product (I think), if you can lose some of the sharing features, I guess it'd be quite an easy app to make that can be run off a v-server or Amazon at considerably less long-term trouble. The big big issue is the seamless auto-upload from phone to Google Photos, that's the fantastic feature that locked me in.
MegaUpload and Plex offer both of those things. Using Plex allows you to control the full storage and interface, then you can sync those to a cloud service or keep on a HDD yourself.
There's also Yandex Disc [0] which is still offering unlimited photo uploads from mobile devices. Although it wouldn't surprise me if they followed Google's lead on this and curtailed their offering as well. As they seem to pretty much mirror everything else Google does.
Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos.
True but their AI adds a lot of value. Searching for people is invaluable (though to be fair if you have the files locally, Windows Photos does that too.) Searching by item in the photo is less useful but I can imagine people use it now and again. And the automatically created videos are a nice bonus.
But yeah, not enough for me to pay them for it. If I'm going to pay someone, I'll pay someone else.
the long term cost of buying something like a 12TB USB3.0 external hard drive and periodically letting it synchronize from your master copies, then unplugging it and storing it at a trusted family member's house is a great deal less than paying for 12TB+ of "cloud" storage indefinitely forever.
Google Backup & Sync makes it very cumbersome to retain a local copy of your photos. They used to sync them to Google Drive, so you could at least use Backup & Sync to have local copies. However, they got rid of that feature some time in the last year.
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.
For the 'I take pictures on my phone, poof its on my computer' needs, I replaced Onedrive Camera Upload with a Syncthing folder and haven't had to look back.
Onedrive is of course a different product than Google Photos, and the last time I used Google Photos, Google Now was still a left-swipe sidebar, so YMMV.
Maybe if you commit 100% to the Google system or work solely on your iPhone/iPad it is.
I wanted to look at pictures on the big screen of my desktop Mac. Leaving Google Photos in automatic upload on my phone meant that photos would all get uploaded but the ones that I culled would be deleted from Apple Photos but not Google Photos.
Using Google Photos on my phone would let me delete both copies (Apple and Google) but it was much harder to make out differences. 27" screen vs 6" screen.
I was using Google Photos in the unlimited free quality mode so their copy shouldn't match my original pictures.
So Google Photos ended up as a place where I dumped photos as a backup. I bought more storage on iCloud.
If you delete from Google Photos on the web from your desktop, the iPhone client will prompt you to allow deletion of those same photos from your iPhone’s Photos app (and hence iCloud, I think).
So, just do your deletion on the Google Photos web client on desktop. The culled photos will be culled from Apple Photos as well.
After downloading, can you upload to a different cloud photo service? I'd love to have a way to sync them automatically, and having a non-cloud backup would be nice too.
Sure, but doing it automatically (and handling things like making sure they're not duplicated) would be more convenient over cobbling together a solution.
> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
Hmm, good point, I guess nobody has ever lost access to their Google Account or (in the future) run out of storage space. After all, they're just photos, not important memories or anything.
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.
Yep, I've also seen Perkeep and several other similar projects. They're all a bit different and I'm happy with something simple and bare-bones, it just has to be good at getting the data off.
This is awesome. What would it take to hook up the storage to say block storage (say EBS or GCS) so that we can have more durabality interms of storage instead of having to manage a NAS at home? For me there have been a whole bunch of needs (photos, videos, docs) where storage has been the major stumbling block.
It's so annoying that Google strips the geolocation data. What would be the reason for this? It has been frustrating following along with the ticket that goes nowhere for years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228
Ironic indeed. I can’t help but wonder if Google stores the geolocation data privately where only they can access it for their own data mining uses before removing it from the photos.
I would start with the assumption that Google is collecting and storing every single possible data point about every single thing you share with them, including this. I have zero doubt that they store this info privately for their own use.
You can see the location on Photos website/app, it's not hidden from the user. You also still get it when you Takeout the photos. It's explicitly stripped when sent through the API, because said API is generally used by other websites for getting your photos, and it's not clear to the user they are actually leaking their location when uploading a Photo to "ShareYourRecipe.com".
As andybak says, almost certainly privacy. It's very easy for an unsophisticated user to share photos that, for example, effectively show where they live (or where someone else lives). I believe Facebook strips geo data as well. (A service like Flickr does not although I assume there is a switch somewhere that tells it to.)
One scenario is you're at a party at someone's house. If you post a captioned photo from the party that's geotagged, you're identifying where they live.
Well it's being done through the API, which is presumably OAuth'd under your name, but again, this API is generally used by other sites to interact with your photos library, and it's very easy for someone to just approve the OAuth permissions for sharing photos, not realizing they are also implicitly sharing their location.
I have one primary collection but I also have probably 30TB of old drives lying around with photos scattered all about. Is there something I can do to mount those drives, grab all image files and then dedupe/catalog them (at least by date)? Ideally this would work with videos as well.
I bought a Synology NAS mainly for images/videos/personal files and run hard drives in RAID setup. You could explore other NAS solutions like QNAP or open source.
Synology's photo station is slightly jarring... the whole indexing operation isn't optimized at all so if you have like 500k photos it's going to be spinning for a while.
There's an ancient-but-maintained image cataloger / asset manager called NeoFinder, available on Windows and Mac. Would love to find an OSS equivalent.
Same problem. The other issue is having a 2 cameras and 2 phones in the family and grouping together events. Its easier just to save them all and not try.
I've been pleased with PhotoSweeper on my Mac. I started with the free Lite version, then went ahead and bought the full version.
I set it at the highest match setting. If you adjust it to a lower setting, it will match things where somebody is looking at the camera versus looking away.
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.
Considering you're using Linux, I'd do something of sorts:
1. get all image files with "find", considering they are with a known extension
2. run jdupes on the dump and deduplicate them.
3. run exiftool on them to automatically divide them to folders based on any metadata field you like.
4. Index all of the images with digikam and further organize them there.
Another path would be to add all drives as "removable collections" to digikam and manage all of them there. digikam also has fuzzy search so it can find not only identical but similar images so you can deduplicate them.
Both ways are applicable to videos as well.
I'm currently using the second path since Digikam is already my primary photo cataloging and managing tool for years and, it works wonders.
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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.
This looks like a great approach, thanks for putting it together. I'm hoping to dump these disks to an image b/c the filesystems on them are all over the place...some of them are IDE lol, then just loopback mount them for this process.
From the comfort of a terminal[1], a few options comes to mind,
git-annex[2] will allow you to index all, or just some, of those files where they are - and keep track if you shuffle them around. The really useful feature in your case, is that git-annex will keep tabs on even your disconnected harddrives, flashdrives or cloud storage. It will let you know if you have redundant copies and how many, or if you're about to trash the last known instance of IMG001.jpg. It will point you to specific storage media if query some file not currently local.
Note that it's not entirely as trivial as I make it out to be - git vcs experience helps. Some love it.
In your situation, I'd might try borg[3] - No experience, but I heard appreciative voices about it and docs seem OK.
Personally, I always end up using rmlint/fdupe and unix tools, but that's a secret.
Why not just pay $30/yr to get access to all the features which Google Photos (and other Google services) offer? I know $30 is not the same everywhere but if you are in US (and assuming you are in tech given you are on HN), you'd spend that much in a dinner without thinking much. There is something about paying about online services which brings a lot of resistance in us (me included but I think I am getting over it)
Realistically... if you wanted to pay $30/year for a set and forget photo album, is Google the best place to do that?
Given how they often they deprecate things and how hard I've heard it is to restore a disabled account, I feel like some kind of smaller company dedicated to photo storage would be much better anyway
I'm not sure if you're just stating a personal preference there, or hinting that Flickr are somehow morally superior to Google. But Flickr had their own 'google Photos moment' a few years back, when they were bought out by SmugMug and immediately got rid of their 'free for life' 1TB storage.
Photos is a billion user product, how many of those have they deprecated? The disabled account thing may be a real concern, but statistically it's more rare than getting into a plane crash, yet we still fly planes. Also, if anything, monetizing the product and allowing it to be self-sustaining financially makes it far less likely to be killed. I'd much rather pay for a product that brings me value, since now I'm a real customer get treated differently from a free user. Also AFAIK Google has never killed a paid service either.
I would be curious to know what the competition looks like, but I don't know of any other service that lets me do "Show me photos of me and my brother at the beach" and actually return relevant results. The face/object clustering is near flawless, and even works with pets.
Umm.... no. The disabled account thing is pretty common. Perhaps it's safer than flying a GA Cessna 172 in a storm, or being an air force test pilot. But probably not even that.
And as for killed services with a billion users, well, free unlimited Google Photos is now a killed service.
As for killed paid services, Google Play Music, Nest Secure, Google Photos Print, Google Audio Ads, and a ton of others.
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?
Just for something to think about regarding the disabled/locked accounts, remember that we only hear about those who have the means/social-media following to make a Big Deal about it or those with the right friends inside of Google who might be able to nudge the proper team to take a second look, and the only stories that happen to pop up are "success stories" if I can call them that. As far as I can see, the average person is screwed should The Algorithm (blessed be thy name) decide against them.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am pretty much all-in with Google and do what I can to protect my Google account, but one risk you can't get rid of is if Google cancelled your account for whatever mysterious reason, which is unlikely but would be catastrophic.
I still like Google Photos, but ideally I'd automatically sync all my photos to a backup service and have things set up so I could make it the primary replica if needed.
IMO, no one should be treating any online photo site as their primary photo storage. At the risk of seeming paranoid, I have everything local and both backed up locally and to Backblaze; the online photo site I use is strictly for sharing and, I suppose, yet another backup of last resort.
If you're easily generating 200GB per month in photos and videos then a NAS would probably make more sense. But keep in mind the vast majority of people don't take that many photos.
Takeout sounds like an interesting workaround. I just do a takeout download once a month and figure that if google photos vaporizes or I lose my account I can write a python script to bake back in the JSON metadata that comes with it.
but the result is a mess - why can't Google just give me all my photos in a logical folder structure, but instead I get duplicate folders with .json files and pictures which are in a completely different folder.
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.
Metadata is more useful with older photos. Right now it’s obvious who’s in them, but in 40 years being able to just put names to faces can be difficult.
I just note their names in the file name. If there are too many, I make a copy of the photo, bring it up in an image editor, and type the names of the people next to their heads. It works like a champ.
SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years. There are very few pieces of software that I am able to praise like that with a clean conscience; SQLite is definitely one of them though. You might find it worthwhile to read e.g. about its memory allocation strategy, or its testing strategy.
Also, I don't think that the image files themselves are stored in the SQLite DB file; likely just their indices and metadata.
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".
Tags are more flexible than folders. An actual index let's you search by tag. Folders don't let you search for all photos of your mother, or in 1987, or in Alabama, or some combination thereof.
Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.
I know, but folders work perfectly fine even up to a few thousand files. It doesn't take me long to find a vacation picture from 1966, for example. I look in the 1966 folder, which doesn't have a lot in it. The preview thumbnails from file explorer quickly let me hone in.
It'd take me far more time to set up a proper tag database than I'd save looking things up.
It's still infinitely better than a random shoebox with random snapshots in it.
Looking up something by its clustered index is indeed pretty easy. That's not the only access pattern into most data sets, which is where tags can be handy.
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]
> SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years.
My timeline is much longer than 20 years. I have family photos going back to the Civil War.
Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be ubiquitous. Good luck with those today.
I switched my mail from Outlook to Thunderbird because the former stores the email in some undocumented unreadable binary format. TB stores the mail as text, so I can recover the mail without needing TB. I have mail going back 25 years now. Some of my earlier mail is now lost because, surprise surprise, the mail program no longer works and the data is stored in a proprietary format.
I unzipped all my old file archives a few years back out of concern that some of the old DOS archive software would disappear.
For how much longer? And how much resources do you imagine will be spend to fix bugs/issues opening these files? I don't think this example is strong enough to deserve a mocking wink
I hope you at least have at least 1 on site and one off site and 1 physical media backup of all those if you want to keep them for the next few generations...
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.
I copy them forward to new media every year or so. It's how I avoid bit rot and media obsolescence.
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.
Please don't misunderstand, with your 45 years of computing experience. :) (which I highly respect) I never said the files are stored in sqlite. They are just indexed in sqlite. The files are stored on disk like normal.
It would be easy enough to use the SQLite DB for normal read/write and search, and also save a human readable .txt dump periodically such as when making backups, or asynchronously on every save.
Bits rot. If you want your data to last the next 40 years, plan for spending a few hours every 5 years migrating your storage. It's a far better plan than trying to predict what the world will be like 40 years from now.
Yes. Binary file formats are common (like Microsoft Outlook, pdf files, etc.), and are very fast to read/write. Text files have to be parsed. I've written lots and lots of dumpers for binary file formats generated by other programs.
Oof, I feel the trauma on this one. I've been bitten by too many binary file formats that I don't care to store aggregate amounts of content in them (unless it's just metadata).
Creating a cadence that also stores the data in EXIF isn't really that hard if that's your concern. You could even get SQLite triggers to do external calls to update the tags if things change. This is all pretty trivial.
I extracted myself from Google Photos in 2019. Geolocation was a nightmare. I ended up using exiftool to merge the metadata from JSON available in Takeout.
I've found Microsoft Office to be the best deal for online storage. $70/year gets you a bunch of useful apps and 1TB of storage, or $100 year provides 1TB for up to 6 accounts. Nothing else seems to come close.
Yup, on Android photo upload works the same as Dropbox/Google. It doesn't have the AI smarts of Google Photos though. Just tried searching for 'cat' and the results were useless. But the storage works.
The android app exists but it's wonky as in sometimes the thumbnails of your photos simply won't load They are there, you just have to click on a blank thumbnail to watch the photo.
I can get a 1TB storage server from Time4vps for about $60 (they charge in euros). That gives me the ability to store stuff with sftp, rsync, or more full featured backup solutions like borgbackup.
Sounds like a bad deal, comparatively. Microsoft skips the low-level interfaces but gives you redundancy and usable UIs and services (on top of an API)
Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Nice of them to announce so far in advance and let existing content stay free for now, and that should help them avoid an abrupt exodus.
This seems like a big win for Apple though, especially with their new focus on services. As with other apps like maps, they’ve by now basically caught up with Google who had started off with a huge lead. When Google photos first launched with facial and object recognition and ability to search photos without ever tagging them, it was pretty incredible but now that’s basically table stakes.
For any iPhone and Mac users who haven’t been paying specifically for cloud photo storage and will now need to, I don’t really see much reason to stick with google photos over the native solution using iCloud or Apple One. I’m sure that’s what I’ll do eventually.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.
A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
This doesn't exist. But you can schedule a year of e.g. 2 monthly incremental takeouts at takeout.google.com and stop-limit your dataloss scenario to a window.
btw: I think it should exist. I think google should clarify its 'we terminated you' process to include the takeout function for export of the data they currently hold hostage.
For real backups, I manually sync the phone's images/movies/dngs to my home photo archive.
I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my NAS to backup the true original files.
PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) lets you do a good-old-fashioned dump to a NAS.
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.
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.
[0] - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
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.
Good thing they discontinued Picasa in favor of pushing everything into the cloud for Google Photos.
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.
Tl;dr - Either filter and curate online, or deduplicate. Also, fix your backup settings.
- 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 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.
Also, from that link: McKinsey's alumni have been appointed as CEOs or high-level executives at Google, American Express, Facebook, Boeing, IBM, Westinghouse Electric, Sears, AT&T, PepsiCo, and Enron.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company
It is only fair that in future they will give that perk only to Google device users:
> As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
Among big players I believe Amazon still offers unlimited high-quality photo storage.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011
"Don't be snarky." "Please don't fulminate."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
They can add up the space shown beside the file name on Google Drive. Which is what users would expect
No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics, they want users to be customers, not “products”.
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.”
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.
Congratulations, you've got malware on your machine. Chrome doesn't do that.
Edit: there you go: https://mobile.twitter.com/mittermayr/status/131381816260595...
(Don’t be confused by the background image, I put that there).
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.)
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.
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...
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 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.)
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.
Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.
I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested!
(One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)
[1]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos.
[0]https://yandex.com/promo/disk/unlim
But yeah, not enough for me to pay them for it. If I'm going to pay someone, I'll pay someone else.
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.
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!
https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations
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.
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.
I mean, it's a small amount, but on the scale of google it might be worth it.
https://cdfinder.de/
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.
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.
Taking images and mounting them sounds reasonable. :)
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.)
https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html
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.
If there's one thing people will always do regardless of age, it's that.
https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=10412.msg55391#ms...
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.
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.