I would contend that the people who do pay for Google Photos are now potential customers of lots of the other apps, and hence can be advertised to as such.
And that is enabled by VC funded culture, where you have million of dollars invested in companies, which can then offer services at a loss investing in something else (market share, training data, etc.).
Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.
In this case though, a smaller company might not be around forever. When you’re looking at storing important photos, the service you think will last longest may be best.
(I use Flickr, Gphotos and an S3 bucket but I’m paranoid)
I use Flickr as well but I also back up in other ways, including locally. As I wrote on another thread, I'd never depend on a photo sharing site as my primary storage.
Flickr changed hands a couple times, almost went under and is still struggling to stay afloat. So you're right to be paranoid. I have been a paying Flickr Pro user since the beginning of time, but I don't feel that my photos are any 'safer' there than they would be on Google Photos.
Also, Flickr has done an arguably nastier bait and switch when they announced the end of their unlimited free storage. At least Google seems to be willing to keep the photos already uploaded around. For now.
> Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.
Smaller companies also commonly get acquired, shuttered, or become big companies in their own right. There's no panacea here. I think by the third or fourth time I was migrating from "the honesty priced option" the reality settled in that "honestly priced" is usually just an uninventive advertising moniker used for overpriced underdeveloped products.
By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.
My urine like everyone else's contains potassium and can be used to create gunpowder - does this mean I am enabling terrorists to blow people up every time I take a leak?
If you and millions of other people captured, packaged, and transmitted that urine to a central urine clearinghouse (similar to how Google Photos works), then yes. Innocuous activities can easily be made dangerous when those activities are centralized and scaled up to a level involving/affecting hundreds of millions of people.
that kind of statement is harsh. what gives you a guarantee that any other paid service is not going to do this "machine learning" on your data. has Google ever made public your data?
I think the point is if you charge upfront for storing peoples data under a certain price plan, you're less likely to change anything regarding the deal because you're in the business of storing peoples data. If you do bad, people will stop using the service, and you lose your business. You're more aligned with your users.
Compare it to Google, where they can operate under a loss for a particular service (like Google Photos) in order to increase profits in a different market (like AI recognition tools). Once they are done with whatever they wanted to do, they can close down the service without much consequence, the business lives on.
Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.
It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.
>Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.
And yet I can't find a cheap host for 2-4TB that's not like $10/month or so... even with Glacier it's $16/4TB/month...
Yep, it's possible with a dedicated or vps with 4TB or more, but this doesn't suit my use case (backup).
I want the storage replicated geo-redunduntly backed-up and safer, Glacier/Backblaze/etc-style, not just lost whenever someone breaks into the server or there's a hardware issue at the hosting company, etc. Basically "upload and forget"...
Same way, I can't find any good Squarespace/Ghost/Wordpress.com style service where I can run 3-4 sites that's not like $10/month per site or so...
I'd appreciate a service that charges you based on actual traffic load, not mere website count/custom domain, and that is "post content and forget".
Where does this meme of "storage is essentially free" come from? A 4TB drive is already like ~$100 and that's without any fault tolerance. Now purchase some for yourself, geo-replicate it across the world, make it be online 24/7 and accessible with high speed worldwide, and tell me how it came out to be "essentially free"?
The network was hardly the culprit in my explanation. How much is the cost of 4TB of georeplicated storage do you think? Surely you have to at least pay for the storage itself? So like $300-$400 at least if it's replicated 3-4x? And I haven't even hinted at offline backups and all kinds of other things.
Marginal cost is meaningless when you are dealing with exponential values. There are four trillion photos on Google Photos currently. That number is increasing faster than the cost of drives is going down.
Maybe close to free on a per bit basis but I guess electricity, bandwidth, redundancy etc aren't. Photos is one of the products I'm actually happy to pay for extra storage. €100 buys my 2TB of storage that I can share with my wife and my kids when they are old enough. Knowing that any pic I snap is backed up is worth the cost, photographs are one of the few things that are truly irreplaceable. Saying that based on advice from other threads I'll be doing a regular download from takeout.google.xom
'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does.
Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users.
If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Which isn't free.
If you still don't quite get it - try this thought experiment. If storage is free then could you afford to set up a storage data centre? If not, why not? It's free after all, in your mind.
> Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation.
I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation.
Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing.
At the end of the day 'storing a billion photos is free' - your argument - is simply a provably false statement, as everyone in these threads keeps trying to explain to you.
Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward.
That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month?
>Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it
Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.
According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.
I like the comic and it's definitely hilarious, and but it's not necessarily an apt comparison. Imagine the same situation with a bank holding your money. Are you paying them? (I assume you're not... I guess if you are, you probably shouldn't be.) Does that mean they're not in the business of storing your money and should be able to just give it away if you don't claim it in a month?
Interesting idea... are you sure? Do you want to pay extra fees to transfer it internationally, have to deal with sanctions/etc. depending on where you're sending it, pay taxes on it when you acquire it, have a copy sent to the government if it's over 10KB of data, etc.?
Yes.. that sounds honestly perfect. Make them respect the data.
Send a copy though.. do you have to give the government 10 grand when you send 10 grand? Course not. But you would tell the government it exists if it goes anywhere
Interest rates are b/c a bank can invest your money. They differ from, say, a gold storage company that keeps your gold secure but has no right to invest or otherwise trade it.
But these comics often misrepresent the issue (for humorous effect). It sounds like chad was never asked if it was ok to store stuff in his garage, chad never promoted as such.
> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”
Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).
And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.
This does not sound true at all. Everyone has a camera and most everyone takes a lot of photos. A large number of people take videos too. I would be shocked if the median smartphone user didn’t take at least 5 GB of photo/video every year.
15 GB/30,000 days ≈ ½ MB/day. You can’t type that, but that would be a single photo every week or so, or about 4,000 over a lifetime. Doable, but it would require quite a few habitual changes for most.
If that was true they would not have made the change as the marketing value of "unlimited" would have more than paid for the few users that did exceed.
However they know, as with all data things, that people will continually expand their consumption, with more and more mobile devices making not only extremely hi res photos but now 4K video, the need for storage will only increase
This type of comment is on the same vein of "640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "we will never need more than 4,294,967,296 addresses"
While technically true this also applies to literally any product marketed as unlimited, lifetime, or infinite. There are always restrictions because the world is finite and the resources of a single company even more limited. I would agree with you if you suggested that such marketing should be banned, but this is hardly a google-specific problem.
I also think syncing to one of those is the best solution for most consumers, even though its not a true backup and it runs the risk of account closure for uploading forbidden content.
> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable
That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.
Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.
Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).
I would be very surprised if Google is not data mining everything they can, it's always been their main business model.
With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.
Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.
I'm pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.
Very well paid teams of lawyers have spent considerable time and effort writing these terms of services. In the case of Google there is so much of this stuff, for all the different services, that Google doesn't even have a single conclusive ToS document, but instead a whole website [0]
Good luck finding anything explicitly stated in there.
> What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?
Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family/friends wear, who wears or doesn't wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone's dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.
Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.
Google Photos could track a persons travel and dining and things we are fond of. Google Pay could track which friends we pay money to and where we hang out. An tourism council could target drinking buddies of somebody who visited there.
Alphagoog is an advertising company. Everything they do is focused on efficient selling of advertising. They will perform any surveillance they can in order to improve the profile they have of you, regardless of your status as a registered user of their services.
From photos you can find every person you (in person) know, everywhere you've gone, everything you do, everything you own (and don't). So long as it shows up in a picture once. If storage for 200gb costs _them_ a couple bucks, and that's the price of a few ad (conversions), it would seem to work out. I'm an outsider of course, would be interesting to understand the actual economics from someone more familiar with the details. Of course, if the story were this rosy they obviously wouldn't be charging. So I'm sure its quite a bit more nuanced than this.
Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)?
I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.
It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.
Such a law would basically make startups impossible. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I think the startup culture is pretty toxic. Just an interesting result.
With one hand it would eliminate the opportunity to bait and switch, with the other it would extend a supply of users who weren't busy feasting on someone else's bait.
The real question is whether you could legislate and enforce such a law in a manner that couldn't be circumvented with simple accounting tricks.
It seems to me, markets have short term memory because markets are composed of people who also have short term memory. Bait and switch seems to be a quite effective market capture mechanism. Bait with something alluring at a loss, build momentum, then pull away once little could stop that momentum. Along the way, build in hurdles that make it difficult to transition away from the service through technical and other commitment hurdles.
Rinse repeat and as long as you have a decent product and enough capital to front-load the model and take initial loses, you seem to win everytime going forward. At this point, people even shun phrases like "vendor lock-in" like an external business dependency isn't a potential liability.
> But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that
Did the user agreement - or even the marketing - at the time this was offered stipulate that unlimited photo storage would continue forever? As a user I never interpreted it that way - there's no free lunch.
You can get your photos out onto your own hardware using Google Takeout easily enough.
30 GBP per year for measly 200GB, I can have 1TB for 40 GBP (and I am talking about more expensive external drive) and I am not scaling it like Google
so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!
if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data
Apples to Oranges. Google replicate and have roughly ~ 3 copies of your data, your 1TB hard drive does no such thing, has zero redundancy, isn't available from your phone, can't automatically backup photos from it, etc.
except only reason many if not most of the people keep using google photos is free unlimited photo backup, let's see how many people keep using it when they run out of those 15GB
you can have redundancy with two drives for price which will pay itself within less than two years and you will have significatntly bigger backup capacity for connecting external harddrive directly to your phone through USB OTG and pressing one button, I find that extremely convenient, after all automatic google backup was pretty fucked up and freezing and unstable for years
what is the most important is you have your data backed up and it does not matter whether you have to connect drive and press one button or it us supposedly done automatically
Is this not a commonality between most "tech companies". The combination of tech, moving fast, disruption, etc, means that there's a lot of promises that drop once reality hits.
You could argue that all hyper growth “build it and they will come” types of companies do this bait and switch. It’s inherent to the startup culture that emphasizes capturing users above earning profit in the early stages of a company.
Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech generally, not just Google.
That isn't just a tech thing either. Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.
Google has the ultimate smartass retort to justify it to critics especially if they are on Capital Hill. "I thought it was considered unfair competition now to provide something others can't now because we are apparently 'too big' now."
> Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.
MBAs have "optimized" the flavor out of everything with their little spreadsheets and graphs and quarterly earnings reports. I can't go to a chain restaurant anymore.
The obvious solution is grandfathering. Google Photos decided to grandfather old photos: only photos uploaded after June 2021 count towards your storage limit. That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.
This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.
Considering the market penetration of Google Photos and the lack of any compelling reason to switch, I doubt that grandfathering would have accomplished what they're trying to do here. Phone companies also eventually kick people off of grandfathered plans, or change them so substantially that they are no longer recognizable. For example, I remember the AT&T unlimited plan that came in the early days of the iPhone. It started out reasonably cheap but eventually became extremely expensive.
> That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.
The fact that Google didn't do it is another reason why one could call it a bait-n-switch model.
Google 'subsidizes' some of their services by leveraging them to gain valuable information. Google voice was used to train their voice analysis algorithms. Recaptcha has been used to transcribe text for google books, road signs etc for street view, and now objects for waymo.
If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).
I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.
> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”
That sure did change and within the classic 5-year business plan model as well.
>Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I say that with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
Yes, though how many where planned and how many organicly just ended up that way from a business perspective.
We are all used to the marketing budget phase of companies, initially offering great services and deals, just to get a foothold and then after that period, change bit by bit with the niceties eroded away.
Sad to say that many company does this, just marketing wise it feels less obvious as they are initially in effect using the customer base as the marketing with word of mouth and as people love free, that works out. So down the line many will feel put out by such changes, some will stay with it be that economical evaluation or hassles in moving (not everybody a tech head), so a complacency lock-in happens with so many.
Personally the straw with google came from the endless robotic termination stories having all the services pulled for one misinterpreted action upon on another service they just happen to run. But more so the way they handled Google Music, forcing those who paid for content to be shafted towards a platform just forcing you to pay again as some subscription model to access features you had before and would expect. With that, faith in many things Google does will be tainted, however good intention they seem, the worst case down the line thoughts will stick out way more from all the past instances now.
That all said, I do get it, companies operate to make profit, otherwise they are not a company but a charity. Still, false advertising needs to catchup with the digital age and T&C needs some form of regulation as currently it's still a bit of a mess. After all, people brought Google Phones, sold by Google and some would of done so on the back of what was said in 2015 - so there is that whole avenue of debate that may play out legally. So could be something that gets more depth in the comming months.
I'm an avid photographer and had a few friends who were hooked on google photos, I've always been skeptical because I know how pricey storage can get and figured this would always happen. I'm glad I didn't move all my photos onto Google Photos like my friends, I don't envy their situation now.
My friends have at least 1TB. My one buddy who was the biggest google advocate has 10TB+. He moved all his photos there and deleted them off harddrives etc.
They are not changing down the service, merely changing the price for it. A price increase after 5 years of service can hardly be considered "bait and switch".
Another way of looking at this, perhaps, is that business concerns are deterministic. Deterministic is too strong a word, of course... but that's the idea.
15 years ago, the milkiness of potential cash cows was unknown. Search had an ad model that worked really well, as long as you had majority market share. Meanwhile, google had some great wed development chops. They could make a move on email, rss, a web based office suite and sweep the whole market in a short span. It was cheap enough, and each one might turn out to be a major business. Being free made sense. Higher product success rates and who cares about $10m here and there. The goal was that some of these would become multi billion dollar businesses.
I'm sure people remember the "google wipeouts" of startup territories when they released the latest something for free.
Fast forward... the bar for financial success is 25X bigger. Google's main problem is putting capital to work. We're way less naive about financial potential. Most of Google's important competitive dynamics are within oligopolies. There aren't hundreds of startups that threaten android or even youtube at any given time. A lot of the rollovers from Google pre 2010 just don't make a ton of sense.
You end up with these business/product units arbitrarily attached to stuff in the business. It's not obvious what they're for commercially, which makes them hard to manage. A commercially self sustaining unit can just operate like a business. It's easier.
It's the organisational version of technical debt.
I suspect they placed some big bets initially on the value they could derive from it for use with AI/ML. Perhaps they've since realised that they bought too much into the surrounding hype (much of it generated by their own marketing) and are starting to view that strategy as a liability should governments start tackling privacy.
A lifetime of memories offers the greatest opportunity for bait and switch "marketing".
Do you think the statement you quote means that Google 5 years ago meant to make a gift to users, but then someone changed course?
I'm giving Amazon Photos a try, since they offer unlimited high quality storage with Prime. I will appreciate if someone shares their opinion about this service.
“Unlimited”, until it is limited. Amazon already bait-and-switched on unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive storage. Microsoft, too, on OneDrive, before Amazon. Now Google. What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?
They had an incentive to keep me as an Amazon Cloud Drive customer, too, until they decided they didn’t if I stored more than 1TB. So I canceled.
In the case of Prime I doubt a non-negligible percentage of Prime customers would cancel over losing unlimited storage, so the incentive to keep it unlimited is even smaller.
Have used it but this sounds a lot like kicking the can down the road. Don’t be surprised if/when Amazon does the same thing and/or just lets photos Languish.
I encourage a self-hosted solution with backups. There are many, some super easy for non-tech folk to use (synology for example)
I am indeed self-hosting, but just a Raspberry Pi+HD. The Google/Amazon Photos is the backup/convenience. Since I want off-site backups in case something happens in my apartment, when/if Amazon goes this road I'll probably rent some general purpose storage in the cloud.
I've been using it for a few weeks already. tldr: It's slightly worse than Google photos in most respects and quite a bit worse for albums.
* The AI is fine, although not as good as Google's.
* Albums are far less featureful. The shared link doesn't even show the album title. You can't add text or locations like you can on Gphotos. This makes trip albums less good IMO.
* Scrolling and UI seem faster, although I have far fewer photos.
* Desktop upload is nice for people who have non-smartphone cameras
* Albums list can be sorted by Date Created or Name. GPhotos default sort is by the date of the most recent photo.
* Adding and removing from albums seems slower, but is also async, so /shrug
* Selecting multiple photos is much harder- Google allows a Press, hold, swipe gesture to select multiple photos. Amzn doesn't have that on the app. On web, they do have shift+Click, though.
* Different photo layouts is nice
* The shared photo screen is very aggressively in your face about advertising amazon photos. GPhotos has no ads.
* AFAICT, Amzn does not share the accounts/names of signed-in people who access shared content. Gphotos leaks this info to anyone who views the shared content. It's one of my main problems with GPhotos.
I have not really tested the "Groups" feature (which seems to be the equivalent of shared albums).
That's what Google is organizationally unable to understand. They consider you giving them all your data to be a perfectly private thing to do. In fact, in a way, they consider themselves to be sort of guardians of your privacy, since they only look at it themselves and don't let anybody else take advantage of it. To anyone outside Google this not what "privacy" means, of course, but that's the internal mantra.
I don't think they thought this through actually. If I have to pay, I'll pay for Apple iCloud instead, since it has better integration with my devices.
> If I have to pay, I'll pay for Apple iCloud instead, since it has better integration with my devices.
If you ever, for whatever reason, stop using Apple devices, can you continue using your iCloud storage from other devices? If not, that'd be a deal breaker for me.
I suppose. The usability of Google Photos is pretty awesome, though, I'd find it very difficult to switch. Both the Android app and the web app are maintained and work extremely well (imho, ymmv). Does video, too. Tight integration with Android devices and other Google products, fairly convenient sharing functionality, and almost everybody has a Google account. (This is what Microsoft devotees must have felt like in the early 00s...) And at this point I'm easily served by the lowest tier, 20 EUR for 100 GB.
time to do some cleanup. surely the auto-sync / auto-backup in Google Photos app has uploaded a shiploaded of photos not needed. also check gmail & drive for large attachments/files and see if they can be deleted .
From what I understand, the photos uploaded up to that time will not count toward the used space even after that. So only newly uploaded photos will start counting toward the usage.
For anyone looking for other options: I've been very pleased with Microsoft's Onedrive offering; I pay $70/year for access to all the Office apps plus 1TB of storage and their family plan is $100/year and supports up to 6 people, with 1TB of storage per account.
Theoretically you can. You just need 6 different email addresses and add them to your onedrive account. You won't be able to use it as a single 6TB volume though.
I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free.
use your imagination. Sheesh this is such a boring line of questioning that borders on disingenuous and obtuse for a social news site that caters to people in AdTech.
You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot, by using HN for political and ideological battle, flaming other users, and so on. We've had to warn you about this many times:
Would you please fix this? The intended use of the site is curious, thoughtful conversation. I'm not going to ban you right now because (not counting the last week) you've posted good, on-topic comments too. But if you continue along the same lines we're going to have to.
That's interesting that you seem to think it's my problem. I also find it disingenuous that you are linking to my previous comments publically. Are you trying to shame me? Maybe you need to disallow political discussions period? Have you considered that the people I am replying to are also fighting a political battle that you are biased for?
All in all, yes I believe certain things passionately. Like racism and sexist exist in America, specifically in software and corporate America. I also believe that this bias shows on this community because of the demographic or people who browse and comment here.
I'm not trying to shame you; sorry if it had that effect. I post links like that when I imagine it might be helpful to users who are trying to decide (as users always try to decide) if the moderator is being excessive or not.
Banning political discussions is not possible for a bunch of reasons, but the most important one is that it would be bad for curiosity, which is the thing we try to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). There are too many intellectually interesting topics with political overlap—and ultimately, some political overlap on virtually every topic.
At the same time, not moderating political discussions is also not an option because that would also be bad for curiosity. So we're in a bit of a tradeoff with constraints on either side and no easy solution. I've written about this a lot in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that I haven't answered yet, I'd like to know what it is.
As for bias, everyone always feels that the mods are biased against their position when we moderate this way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'd never claim we're unbiased—who could?—but the bar for reaching that conclusion needs to be a little higher. I can show you a long, long list of HN commenters complaining bitterly that HN is biased in favor of your positions (i.e. the politics/ideology you happen to favor). Every passionate user feels that the bias runs against their side.
I'd be cautious about assuming things about the "demographic or people who browse and comment here". We don't have that data—no one does—and HN is basically a gigantic projection screen or Rohrschach diagram out of which people draw their own pre-existing positions. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) I know this because everyone does this, and the universal property their statements have in common is not their conclusions about HN (those are wildly contradictory) but the fact that they always see HN—both mods and community—as opposed to their own view. (One explanation for this is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)
Network effects, unintended side effects, operator incompetence, risk of information leak... GDPR should have me covered, but I won’t be able to remove myself from deep learning models they already have.
That is not true. Google retrains its models periodically. Removed data is not used for training models. Also I'm not sure that private user photos can even be used for training cross user models because I don't see how these photos could possibly be disclosed to raters, so there would be no ground truth.
Not OP but technically the FBI as a matter of public fact and obligation (child pornography in that case). Probably more "run a known hash list against it and peak manually before reporting to verify that it isn't a freak collision with a perectly innocent photograph of a cupcake" style unless reported.
In the US there is "no reasonable expectation of privacy" for data voluntarily given to third-parties [0]
US government agencies can simply ask for such data, and companies can just pass it along, all without even evoking any of the countless surveillance laws [1]
The internet is full of entitled people. I've never seen such entitled people in real life. Unfortunately lately HN is no different. I am also an avid user of Google Photos. From my perspective, they did keep their promise. They will store your photos for free before a certain timeline. Just because someone did a favor to you for some time, that doesn't mean you are entitled to their help forever.
i mean, paying for google photos storage is not even that expensive. it's $10 for 2TB, which i happily pay every month because it means i don't have to worry about photos backups.
I've never comes across so many developers who feel like they are entitled to unlimited API access for free so they can build businesses on top of your platform.
Yeah man, when someone says "i'll give you $5 ever day for life" and then in 5 years they say "i'm not going to do that anymore starting tomorrow" and being upset about that is such entitled behavior.
The correct analogy would be "you can ask me for $5 as often as you want, I will give it to you for free, and you can keep it for life" and then 5 years down the road they say "starting 7 months from now, I'll stop giving you $5 when you ask me for it, but obviously you can still keep all the money I gave you".
I feel like people misconstrue "you can upload your photos and (store them for free for life)" to "you can (upload your photos and (store them for free for life) for life)".
As I understood it, it is only free for previous Pixel owners until they buy a new Pixel. So it is free for the lifetime of the device, not the users lifetime.
Isn't that how most people would have understood the offer anyways? Why should Google store the photos from e.g. your new OnePlus for free just because you owned a Pixel in the past?
Has anyone cracked the "DRM" on this? Can I just install a hacked app and have it think I'm a pixel owner? Does it just use the EXIF headers to identify the device?
I feel like the email they sent is a master class in misleading. The feeling and subtext make you feel like nothing is happening or you'll be better off:
> To build for the future and welcome even more memories, Google Photos is changing its unlimited high-quality storage policy. Starting Ju ne 1 , 2 02 1, new photos and videos backed up in high-quality will begin to count toward users' 15 GB of Google Account storage, which is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.
> Your Pixel device will not be impacted by this change. High - quality uploads from your Pixel device will continue to be free and unlimited. This exemption only applies to uploads made from your Pixel device, not uploads from other devices or via photos.google.com.
I'm with you. I'm a big fan of Google Photos, in fact I'd go so far as to say I'd take very few pictures if not for it. Not because of the storage, but because of the ease with which it allows me to reminisce and organize my photos. I'd happily pay the couple bucks a month for it if it's what keeps it viable, I'd much rather that than the kill the service.
And they're giving 8 months notice and everything up to that point will continue to be supported for free. It's kind of crazy to me that people have a problem with it.
In fact I didn't knew until the news yesterday. Now I'm going to get hooked - upload all my pictures (landscape-only, people pictures stay offline) before the end of the free offer. AFAIK what you have already uploaded stays there and doesn't count when the offer changes.
Can we talk about alternatives? I am not a Google Photos user but I struggle to find a good privacy-aware or self-hosting solution.
Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS.
So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonably priced commercial solution (you have to go to the "individual" tab).
I've bought a Synology NAS which comes with a builtin Synology Moments application. It's pretty much a self-hosted Google Photos (including web gallery, sharing and mobile app which autobackups directly to your NAS).
I still use Google Photos for convenience sake, but having a safe copy owned by myself on harddrives I own by myself is still worthwhile.
And setup was very easy - couple of clicks on web UI to enable the package and installing the mobile app.
I used a lowend ds213j for along time but now I've upgraded to 218+ (I think there's now 220 as well?) because I wanted btrfs, hardware transcoding for Plex and ability to run some of my stuff in docker.
Also FWIW, you can run the Synology OS itself (DSM) on general x86 hardware or VMs via the Xpenology [1] bootloader which is pretty awesome. The DSM is a fairly single-admin friendly network applicance OS anyway with a decent GUI and support. Of course, their NAS hardware offerings make the whole thing more appliance-like and with official support, but if the matrix doesn't fit your needs or desires (I wanted my data on ZFS for example) DSM on your own hardware may still be worth giving a look.
I actually like Synology's software in some ways more than their hardware for many use cases, kind of wish I could just officially buy a license for that (though I guess it works for them in that familiarity means I have recommended them to some small businesses).
First of attracting customers with the low or zero price is kind of standard way of attracting customers. I've never heard people complaining that some shampoo free sample is no longer free or that some discounted item is no longer discounted.
Second, another mistake people make is personification of companies. Company is not a human being, it cannot be honest, nice, make promises, etc. Company is a business entity, it just have contract with the users (officially signed or some TOS, like Google has that people agree with). Companies typically reserves the right to change terms of such contracts and it just happened.
Some companies might have good PR and make PR driven promises - if someone believes that, it is only that person problem.
If someone really thinks that companies support gay community because they "like" gay people, they are wrong. They support gay people only in countries where gay people are accepted and such PR move will bring them popularity (putting six colors rainbow as a company logo background costs companies $0, and they get good, cheap PR in return).
If companies really wanted to support gay people they would do all those "gay pride" stuff in countries where gays are sent to jail, but, as one can easily check, they carefully omit those places.
I don't have much of a problem with Google wanting to charge for photo storage, as services aren't free to run. However, with Google's track record of spontaneously killing services (even paid ones), I'm looking to find alternatives that are less at risk of being rebranded or shut down on a manager's whim. Does anyone have experience with a competing product?
I would even go as far as to suggest setting up your email with your own domain. This way switching providers is as easy as just changing a few DNS settings.
I've been running that setup for a few years now and it has been flawless. Spam is almost entirely gone, with a catch-all address I can simply sign up to websites with <website name>@mydomain, makes it easy to track down if one of them ends up doing shady things with your mail!
I personally have a "vanity" domain that spells out my last name (the TLD forms the last two letters). So I just have <firstname>@<domain> for personal stuff, and then for example git@<my domain> for github, spotify@<my domain> for spotify etc.
The mail@firstnamelastname.com approach seems like a clean way to do it as well.
Given that Gmail does not have, and never has had, infinite free storage it seems quite hard for it to follow the same path... It's already there.
Specifically, Gmail had 1GB quota at launch. These days you have 15GB combined across Drive, Gmail and Photos for free, and paid plans if you need more space.
I think gmail has lower chance of this happening because google needs to feel the "pulse" on whats happening in the world by reading your email. Photos are quite repetitive and they done enough of AI training.
First and foremost, Google is an advertising company. And this is reflected in everything they do.
The idea that Google is a technology company --- is really just another marketing facade. Their technology is only as good as it has to be to further their advertising objectives. Any product they offer is subject to the whims of their advertising needs.
All of which leads to the current state of affairs. You wouldn't expect "free" technology or data storage from a restaurant. And you shouldn't expect it from an ad company either.
Any disappointment here is really a reflection of unrealistic expectations and naive acceptance of Google's marketing hype.
Isn't this the classic pattern followed by almost all startups? Create a product that loses money and attracts users. Sustain it with VC money until you have a large number of users who are highly dependent on the product. Then switch to profitability, knowing you can do so because you've already hit critical mass and users aren't easily able to switch away.
You don't have to like it, but it is legal and it is how many of the most celebrated startups got to where they are today.
Google isn't a startup any more and hasn't been for a decade or more at this point. Google Photos was only launched in 2015 far out of the scrappy startup stage and into the area of using their success in other areas to crush competition in a new area by willingly losing money while starving the competition.
There will probably be a handful of users who go bananas with rage and start blindly uploading everything they can before the cutoff. I have a feeling there will be some very interesting stuff accidentally being uploaded in the coming months, and we will probably hear about some it.
It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business that can offer a better anything.
Your comment hits the nail on the head. It's anticompetitive behaviour, and in the end consumers don't have a choice because competitors have gone out of business. If it's a valuable product or service (e.g. lifetime memories), consumers are then held to ransom. It has been going on for years, and it will continue to get worse until we rearch some kind of tipping point where people start to really care.
It didn't work though, there's like 1 billion ways to store photos. At the end of the day DropBox started as just a wrapper around Amazon S3 buckets, it's not exactly a high barrier to entry.
The storage is a small piece of the Google Photos offering. Good luck searching for a persons name or "sunsets", getting time hops, stylized suggestions and collages, or easy group sharing on a trip in solutions like DropBox or S3, especially for the average user.
That's the weirdest thing to me about this conversation. People act like storage is the main thing Google Photos does, but that's not by a long shot the most compelling piece of the offering.
This seems specious. Others absolutely have competing options, Apple's photos the most notable (since it's by the other Phone OS maker). None as good as Google photos imo (at least not that I've tried), but on release there was nothing as good as Google Photos either.
And now that they are charging, presumably there's space for competition to arise again no? Just as if they started charging at the outset?
I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos.
To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year.
Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.
That's the main thing for me, and probably for the majority of people who don't want to or can't set up a home storage system with backups and redundancy etc.
I got married recently. We really enjoyed the shared photo album feature of Google Photos. Apple has this too, but Google Photos is platform-agnostic. It works on Android, iOS, and the plain old web. We were able to set up a shared photo album, text a link to friends, and they could add all their photos to the album pretty easily.
Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.
I think it's terrible that the next step up from that plan is $999/year up to 20TB. Consumers shouldn't have to pay in orders of magnitude for storage they "could" but are not yet consuming. I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit the 2TB limit.
I'm legit planning to just download it all, store on multiple drives/computers, send a copy to my brother in another state to stash in his vault, and then clear the 2TB and start over.
> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less?
Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.
I don't think that's inefficient as such, that's just the price you pay for data durability. Sure you can buy a high capacity HDD on Amazon for very little, but most people would be pretty sad if/when the hard drive dies and takes the family photo collection with it.
The full-size photos are still compressed, unfortunately. And Google Photos turns Live Photos into 2-3 sec video files, which destroyed a huge chunk of my photo library when I made the switch to iCloud Photo Library.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadAnd that is enabled by VC funded culture, where you have million of dollars invested in companies, which can then offer services at a loss investing in something else (market share, training data, etc.).
Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.
(I use Flickr, Gphotos and an S3 bucket but I’m paranoid)
Also, Flickr has done an arguably nastier bait and switch when they announced the end of their unlimited free storage. At least Google seems to be willing to keep the photos already uploaded around. For now.
Smaller companies also commonly get acquired, shuttered, or become big companies in their own right. There's no panacea here. I think by the third or fourth time I was migrating from "the honesty priced option" the reality settled in that "honestly priced" is usually just an uninventive advertising moniker used for overpriced underdeveloped products.
Can google guarantee this data is not used to fuel their ad or other businesses in anyway ?
Can they guarantee US Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) will not have access without due process and informing you ?
Can they guarantee LEAs from other countries will not given access to this data ?
If you send it to Google it is unequivocally not private.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal...
By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.
Compare it to Google, where they can operate under a loss for a particular service (like Google Photos) in order to increase profits in a different market (like AI recognition tools). Once they are done with whatever they wanted to do, they can close down the service without much consequence, the business lives on.
It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.
And yet I can't find a cheap host for 2-4TB that's not like $10/month or so... even with Glacier it's $16/4TB/month...
https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/order/kimsufi.xml?reference=18...
No RAID, but it's in your desired price range.
I want the storage replicated geo-redunduntly backed-up and safer, Glacier/Backblaze/etc-style, not just lost whenever someone breaks into the server or there's a hardware issue at the hosting company, etc. Basically "upload and forget"...
Same way, I can't find any good Squarespace/Ghost/Wordpress.com style service where I can run 3-4 sites that's not like $10/month per site or so...
I'd appreciate a service that charges you based on actual traffic load, not mere website count/custom domain, and that is "post content and forget".
Supposedly $5.99/TB/Month
> It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.
Or like charging for time or distance travelled, when the 'real cost' is fuel?
Well Google is going to charge you $240 annually for a TB of storage now.
I wouldn't personally say "essentially free" though.
To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.
You're storing 1 photo (like 3MB)?? Or like thousands/millions?
Give me an estimate for how much you think 4TB of replicated storage costs if you think I overestimated?
Storage is growing faster. That's my point.
We're being marketed storage by features, not by the cost of the thing. And in an efficient market in a sane world, that should drop to nearly free.
Folks, try to understand marginal cost. Its a tiny number per person now, and plummeting.
'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does.
Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users.
If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Which isn't free.
If you still don't quite get it - try this thought experiment. If storage is free then could you afford to set up a storage data centre? If not, why not? It's free after all, in your mind.
Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.
I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation.
Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing.
At the end of the day 'storing a billion photos is free' - your argument - is simply a provably false statement, as everyone in these threads keeps trying to explain to you.
That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month?
Get it now?
In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?
Anyway I've said all I have to say. Read my comments again if you want to understand. I'm out.
You repeatedly said 'Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its [sic] essentially free.'
Now you're saying you agree actually it requires hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and so people should be charged for it.
> Read my comments again if you want to understand.
But see how your comments contradict yourself? It should be free but people should pay for it. Which is it?
Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.
According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.
[0]https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
Send a copy though.. do you have to give the government 10 grand when you send 10 grand? Course not. But you would tell the government it exists if it goes anywhere
Gmail was promoted as a free service.
Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.
Source: Anecdata
However they know, as with all data things, that people will continually expand their consumption, with more and more mobile devices making not only extremely hi res photos but now 4K video, the need for storage will only increase
This type of comment is on the same vein of "640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "we will never need more than 4,294,967,296 addresses"
I also think syncing to one of those is the best solution for most consumers, even though its not a true backup and it runs the risk of account closure for uploading forbidden content.
That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.
Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.
Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).
What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?
Google conspiracy theories are just HN's preferred sport.
With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.
Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.
I'm pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.
Good luck finding anything explicitly stated in there.
[0] https://policies.google.com/terms
Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family/friends wear, who wears or doesn't wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone's dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.
Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.
I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.
It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.
The real question is whether you could legislate and enforce such a law in a manner that couldn't be circumvented with simple accounting tricks.
Rinse repeat and as long as you have a decent product and enough capital to front-load the model and take initial loses, you seem to win everytime going forward. At this point, people even shun phrases like "vendor lock-in" like an external business dependency isn't a potential liability.
Did the user agreement - or even the marketing - at the time this was offered stipulate that unlimited photo storage would continue forever? As a user I never interpreted it that way - there's no free lunch.
You can get your photos out onto your own hardware using Google Takeout easily enough.
so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!
if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data
you can have redundancy with two drives for price which will pay itself within less than two years and you will have significatntly bigger backup capacity for connecting external harddrive directly to your phone through USB OTG and pressing one button, I find that extremely convenient, after all automatic google backup was pretty fucked up and freezing and unstable for years
what is the most important is you have your data backed up and it does not matter whether you have to connect drive and press one button or it us supposedly done automatically
So anywhere from 15 minutes to two years.
Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech generally, not just Google.
Google has the ultimate smartass retort to justify it to critics especially if they are on Capital Hill. "I thought it was considered unfair competition now to provide something others can't now because we are apparently 'too big' now."
MBAs have "optimized" the flavor out of everything with their little spreadsheets and graphs and quarterly earnings reports. I can't go to a chain restaurant anymore.
This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.
The fact that Google didn't do it is another reason why one could call it a bait-n-switch model.
If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).
I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.
That sure did change and within the classic 5-year business plan model as well.
>Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I say that with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
Yes, though how many where planned and how many organicly just ended up that way from a business perspective.
We are all used to the marketing budget phase of companies, initially offering great services and deals, just to get a foothold and then after that period, change bit by bit with the niceties eroded away.
Sad to say that many company does this, just marketing wise it feels less obvious as they are initially in effect using the customer base as the marketing with word of mouth and as people love free, that works out. So down the line many will feel put out by such changes, some will stay with it be that economical evaluation or hassles in moving (not everybody a tech head), so a complacency lock-in happens with so many.
Personally the straw with google came from the endless robotic termination stories having all the services pulled for one misinterpreted action upon on another service they just happen to run. But more so the way they handled Google Music, forcing those who paid for content to be shafted towards a platform just forcing you to pay again as some subscription model to access features you had before and would expect. With that, faith in many things Google does will be tainted, however good intention they seem, the worst case down the line thoughts will stick out way more from all the past instances now.
That all said, I do get it, companies operate to make profit, otherwise they are not a company but a charity. Still, false advertising needs to catchup with the digital age and T&C needs some form of regulation as currently it's still a bit of a mess. After all, people brought Google Phones, sold by Google and some would of done so on the back of what was said in 2015 - so there is that whole avenue of debate that may play out legally. So could be something that gets more depth in the comming months.
In fact I believe photos uploaded until some time next year still won't count towards your storage.
We need to remember that $0 is still a price.
15 years ago, the milkiness of potential cash cows was unknown. Search had an ad model that worked really well, as long as you had majority market share. Meanwhile, google had some great wed development chops. They could make a move on email, rss, a web based office suite and sweep the whole market in a short span. It was cheap enough, and each one might turn out to be a major business. Being free made sense. Higher product success rates and who cares about $10m here and there. The goal was that some of these would become multi billion dollar businesses.
I'm sure people remember the "google wipeouts" of startup territories when they released the latest something for free.
Fast forward... the bar for financial success is 25X bigger. Google's main problem is putting capital to work. We're way less naive about financial potential. Most of Google's important competitive dynamics are within oligopolies. There aren't hundreds of startups that threaten android or even youtube at any given time. A lot of the rollovers from Google pre 2010 just don't make a ton of sense.
You end up with these business/product units arbitrarily attached to stuff in the business. It's not obvious what they're for commercially, which makes them hard to manage. A commercially self sustaining unit can just operate like a business. It's easier.
It's the organisational version of technical debt.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17589246/data-transfer-pr...
*I work at Google but not on this
There does seem to be some activity, although it also seems to be slowing a bit... https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/graphs/code-...
Because Amazon has an incentive to keep me as a Prime customer (I'll buy more crap on Amazon). Most people don't pay Google a single cent.
So it's not that I trust Amazon, it's that the economic model for Amazon including unlimited storage in my Prime membership makes sense.
(Note: I wouldn't bet on Amazon staying unlimited for the next 50 years, just providing the counter-argument.)
In the case of Prime I doubt a non-negligible percentage of Prime customers would cancel over losing unlimited storage, so the incentive to keep it unlimited is even smaller.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17761760/twitch-prime-tur...
I encourage a self-hosted solution with backups. There are many, some super easy for non-tech folk to use (synology for example)
Is it a PITA to switch from Google Photos, or is it just a case of installing an Amazon Photos app and enabling sync?
* The AI is fine, although not as good as Google's.
* Albums are far less featureful. The shared link doesn't even show the album title. You can't add text or locations like you can on Gphotos. This makes trip albums less good IMO.
* Scrolling and UI seem faster, although I have far fewer photos.
* Desktop upload is nice for people who have non-smartphone cameras
* Albums list can be sorted by Date Created or Name. GPhotos default sort is by the date of the most recent photo. * Adding and removing from albums seems slower, but is also async, so /shrug
* Selecting multiple photos is much harder- Google allows a Press, hold, swipe gesture to select multiple photos. Amzn doesn't have that on the app. On web, they do have shift+Click, though.
* Different photo layouts is nice
* The shared photo screen is very aggressively in your face about advertising amazon photos. GPhotos has no ads.
* AFAICT, Amzn does not share the accounts/names of signed-in people who access shared content. Gphotos leaks this info to anyone who views the shared content. It's one of my main problems with GPhotos.
I have not really tested the "Groups" feature (which seems to be the equivalent of shared albums).
I don't think they thought this through actually. If I have to pay, I'll pay for Apple iCloud instead, since it has better integration with my devices.
If you ever, for whatever reason, stop using Apple devices, can you continue using your iCloud storage from other devices? If not, that'd be a deal breaker for me.
time-consuming, yes .
Get a @your-domain-name email which comes with the same corporate outlook with calendar integration and everything else that comes with it.
Also, 1 TB.
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Another good option is Apple - they charge reasonably 0.99$ for 50 GB
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Finally, dropbox is really good too and I have been using them since the beginning.
However their free storage plan is still very generous when compared to apple and Dropbox also they storage plans are very reasonably priced as well
https://www.tecowly.com/2020/11/12/google-photos-to-stop-giv...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452134
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480233
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480058
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20717150
Would you please fix this? The intended use of the site is curious, thoughtful conversation. I'm not going to ban you right now because (not counting the last week) you've posted good, on-topic comments too. But if you continue along the same lines we're going to have to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All in all, yes I believe certain things passionately. Like racism and sexist exist in America, specifically in software and corporate America. I also believe that this bias shows on this community because of the demographic or people who browse and comment here.
Banning political discussions is not possible for a bunch of reasons, but the most important one is that it would be bad for curiosity, which is the thing we try to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). There are too many intellectually interesting topics with political overlap—and ultimately, some political overlap on virtually every topic.
At the same time, not moderating political discussions is also not an option because that would also be bad for curiosity. So we're in a bit of a tradeoff with constraints on either side and no easy solution. I've written about this a lot in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that I haven't answered yet, I'd like to know what it is.
As for bias, everyone always feels that the mods are biased against their position when we moderate this way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'd never claim we're unbiased—who could?—but the bar for reaching that conclusion needs to be a little higher. I can show you a long, long list of HN commenters complaining bitterly that HN is biased in favor of your positions (i.e. the politics/ideology you happen to favor). Every passionate user feels that the bias runs against their side.
I'd be cautious about assuming things about the "demographic or people who browse and comment here". We don't have that data—no one does—and HN is basically a gigantic projection screen or Rohrschach diagram out of which people draw their own pre-existing positions. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) I know this because everyone does this, and the universal property their statements have in common is not their conclusions about HN (those are wildly contradictory) but the fact that they always see HN—both mods and community—as opposed to their own view. (One explanation for this is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)
US government agencies can simply ask for such data, and companies can just pass it along, all without even evoking any of the countless surveillance laws [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[1] https://cantheyseemydick.com/
I've never comes across so many developers who feel like they are entitled to unlimited API access for free so they can build businesses on top of your platform.
I feel like people misconstrue "you can upload your photos and (store them for free for life)" to "you can (upload your photos and (store them for free for life) for life)".
True, but for how long?
> To build for the future and welcome even more memories, Google Photos is changing its unlimited high-quality storage policy. Starting Ju ne 1 , 2 02 1, new photos and videos backed up in high-quality will begin to count toward users' 15 GB of Google Account storage, which is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.
> Your Pixel device will not be impacted by this change. High - quality uploads from your Pixel device will continue to be free and unlimited. This exemption only applies to uploads made from your Pixel device, not uploads from other devices or via photos.google.com.
And they're giving 8 months notice and everything up to that point will continue to be supported for free. It's kind of crazy to me that people have a problem with it.
Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS.
So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonably priced commercial solution (you have to go to the "individual" tab).
What else is there?
[1] piwigo.org [2] https://piwigo.com/pricing
I still use Google Photos for convenience sake, but having a safe copy owned by myself on harddrives I own by myself is still worthwhile.
And setup was very easy - couple of clicks on web UI to enable the package and installing the mobile app.
I actually like Synology's software in some ways more than their hardware for many use cases, kind of wish I could just officially buy a license for that (though I guess it works for them in that familiarity means I have recommended them to some small businesses).
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1: https://xpenology.org/
First of attracting customers with the low or zero price is kind of standard way of attracting customers. I've never heard people complaining that some shampoo free sample is no longer free or that some discounted item is no longer discounted.
Second, another mistake people make is personification of companies. Company is not a human being, it cannot be honest, nice, make promises, etc. Company is a business entity, it just have contract with the users (officially signed or some TOS, like Google has that people agree with). Companies typically reserves the right to change terms of such contracts and it just happened.
Some companies might have good PR and make PR driven promises - if someone believes that, it is only that person problem.
If someone really thinks that companies support gay community because they "like" gay people, they are wrong. They support gay people only in countries where gay people are accepted and such PR move will bring them popularity (putting six colors rainbow as a company logo background costs companies $0, and they get good, cheap PR in return).
If companies really wanted to support gay people they would do all those "gay pride" stuff in countries where gays are sent to jail, but, as one can easily check, they carefully omit those places.
I've been running that setup for a few years now and it has been flawless. Spam is almost entirely gone, with a catch-all address I can simply sign up to websites with <website name>@mydomain, makes it easy to track down if one of them ends up doing shady things with your mail!
Should I go for firstname.lastname@hardtochooseamongwhatsleftdomain.com or mail@firstnamelastname.com ?
The mail@firstnamelastname.com approach seems like a clean way to do it as well.
Specifically, Gmail had 1GB quota at launch. These days you have 15GB combined across Drive, Gmail and Photos for free, and paid plans if you need more space.
https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/Undo-Gmail-2.png
The idea that Google is a technology company --- is really just another marketing facade. Their technology is only as good as it has to be to further their advertising objectives. Any product they offer is subject to the whims of their advertising needs.
All of which leads to the current state of affairs. You wouldn't expect "free" technology or data storage from a restaurant. And you shouldn't expect it from an ad company either.
Any disappointment here is really a reflection of unrealistic expectations and naive acceptance of Google's marketing hype.
You don't have to like it, but it is legal and it is how many of the most celebrated startups got to where they are today.
Well, guys, does anyone use amazon prime photos? Is it as good at google photos? My main usage was automatically backing up all my phone pics.
That's the weirdest thing to me about this conversation. People act like storage is the main thing Google Photos does, but that's not by a long shot the most compelling piece of the offering.
And now that they are charging, presumably there's space for competition to arise again no? Just as if they started charging at the outset?
To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year.
Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.
Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.
Unless they boost the storage.
Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.