Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?
Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
111–120 of 649 posts
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#112Personally I like this new direction Google is going. I am someone who much prefers to pay a few bucks a month over having my data used for ad targeting. Ideally I'd like to see them make all Google platforms ad-free for Google One subscribers.
They're still an ad company at the end of the day. Now they're going to charge you and advertise to you. Win win for them.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#113This is a good thing. I've been having trouble weaning myself off this service, one of few Google services I still use, but now I have just over six months notice to find something different.
I'm happy to pay someone for storage, but not Google. So now I'll get on that.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#114Pretty 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.
My mother is at the same age and I set up the subscription for her and she never has to think about it. Or, you could share your subscription with your mother.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like “tapping that lucrative subscription revenue” because they finally have enough people locked in
A major reason people use Google products is because it is free. Subscriptions will not work out well when the user base is 7 billion people large
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.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#116Shit ... now how do I get my photos out ???.
And please don't tell me to use rclone - never got it working properly.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#117I'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.
How do you store photos there? Do they make an Android client that syncs your phone's photos to the cloud?
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.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#118> 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.
(*3 because Google can't lose your data and stores multiple copies, /x because neural compression)
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#119Google is 100% running out of space. 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 sp…
More like “tapping that lucrative subscription revenue” because they finally have enough people locked in
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.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#120Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
A little bit of good news, IMO. Next, they need to do like Reddit and start making "dead" account names available for re-use. (Something Reddit does for sub-reddits and which Google seems to not do for, say, BlogSpot.)
Edit: I say this as someone with old, dead google accounts I will never recover and I would rather the data be deleted than fall into the hands of nefarious third parties. Also, we bellyache about the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin as an environmental hazard, but we think Google should keep abandoned accounts intact indefinitely? Why?
All systems need some means to clean out the cruft and recycle stuff and not just permanently freeze it for people who may be dead, who may have forgotten they made that account while high that one night, etc.