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Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

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Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#101
post #46

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…

why would anyone want this? you lose literally every benefit of Google Photos.

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.

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#102

Yes Pichai, please keep McKinseying the shit out of Google so that we can have an Apple-Huawei duopoly soon.

What do you mean by McKinseying? Sorry English is not my first language. Nothing showed up on Google either.

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.

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#103

> Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it's a scale I've never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us never will. I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to contend with.

>28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded.

If I've done my math right that's something like 3-4,000 hard drives per week assuming 10mb per file and 10tb per hard drive.

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my cue to start self-hosting again!

Is it cheaper and better though? 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.

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)

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#106

Yes Pichai, please keep McKinseying the shit out of Google so that we can have an Apple-Huawei duopoly soon.

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:

"Don't be snarky." "Please don't fulminate."

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#107
Pretty upset about this. I added the app to my mothers phone as it auto backs up everything at high enough quality for her at no cost. Trying to explain to a 65 year old woman with no computing skill how to set up a recurring subscription for online photo storage is going to be a tough ask.

Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

#109
post #47

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.

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.
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