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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

#141

Post by dmix »

vidarh wrote: post #119
chrismeller wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wil…

> Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage

Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?

Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.

As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.

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

#143

Post by marcosdumay »

vidarh wrote: post #119
chrismeller wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wil…

To be fair, current quotas are nothing like email quotas used to be.

You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB. Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.

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

#144

Post by scrollaway »

mholt wrote: 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…

Matt, did you see Promnesia? https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

There are a lot of converging ideas out there, for "self-hosted NSA of yourself" type software which gather your own data from services you use and index it / make it more accessible to users. Would love to see something serious come out of it.

I followed Timeliner early on and really like the idea, but yeah it's a bitch to get traction for this sort of thing. You need people willing to implement backends for basically everything, then maintain them.

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

#145

Post by smileysteve »

dragonwriter wrote: post #72
ffpip wrote: post #40

Google 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…

> Google is 100% running out of space. No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics, they want users to be customers, not “products”.

I think it's less Google and more FTC; and at minimum, Google's desire to have a defensible position when the FTC comes knocking.

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

#146

Post by ajsnigrutin »

robotmay wrote: post #125
tsm wrote: post #111

Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?

If you're just looking to back up your photos off your phone, I use SyncThing to sync them to my server, which works quite well.

This! just set the folder on the phone as send only, and backup on the pc.

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

#150

Post by flashgordon »

mholt wrote: 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…

This is awesome. What would it take to hook up the storage to say block storage (say EBS or GCS) so that we can have more durabality interms of storage instead of having to manage a NAS at home? For me there have been a whole bunch of needs (photos, videos, docs) where storage has been the major stumbling block.
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