Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

SmugMug and Flickr (same company these days) both do if you pay, and I'd trust them far more with photos than any of the bigger companies.

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.

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.)

[1]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

Guess the face detection AI has become good enough. It was already way too creepy.

More like “tapping that lucrative subscription revenue” because they finally have enough people locked in