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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

#151

Post by duskwuff »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #120

Google 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…

Allowing email addresses to be reused is a huge security and privacy problem. It means that any email which was still being sent to the old address -- including account recovery emails -- becomes accessible to the new owner of the email address.

Deleting data from "dead" accounts is fine and good. But they need to stay dead, not come back to life.

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

#152

Post by majora2007 »

mittermayr wrote: post #78
akx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you're responsible for backing that local content somewhere else... maybe the cloud?

The Google Photos interface itself isn't that big of a product (I think), if you can lose some of the sharing features, I guess it'd be quite an easy app to make that can be run off a v-server or Amazon at considerably less long-term trouble. The big big issue is the seamless auto-upload from phone to Google Photos, that's the fantastic feature that locked me in.

MegaUpload and Plex offer both of those things. Using Plex allows you to control the full storage and interface, then you can sync those to a cloud service or keep on a HDD yourself.

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

#153

Post by anuila »

treis wrote: post #103
politelemon wrote: post #75

> 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.

10mb per file only if you average videos, multiple sizes/formats and assume some redundancy. The single photo file stored by Google averages 2 megabytes.

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

#154

Post by warrentr »

Has anyone found a good family friendly alternative? In particular I would really like to:

- Pay for the service (sustainable/trustworthy business model)

- Be able to very tightly control access to albums as I really don't want kid photos ending up on facebook or similar due to crazy aunt kathy (in google photos anyone with access can add anyone else and until recently there was no way to remove people)

- Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security)

- Confirmed and well-tested backup as a feature (sha1 of the backup matches my local, original copy, no stripping of the geo data!)

- Decent ios and android clients that can auto backup all photos on the device

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

#155

Post by anuila »

chrisjc wrote: post #38
Hamuko wrote: post #5

Well, luckily Google One is quite cheap. You can get 100 GB for 20 euro per year to get started and even the 2 TB plan is cheaper than for example Dropbox and iCloud when paid annually.

If you're an Amazon Prime user you can use their photo app that still has unlimited, full-res uploads. https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011 >Amazon Photos offers unlimited, full-resolution photo storage, plus 5 GB video storage for Prime members. Printing from amazon isn't too bad either.

Videos aren't free though and I feel that those 5 GB will start filling up pretty soon, which means you'll have to start paying anyway.

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

#157

Post by hombre_fatal »

ugh123 wrote: post #22

I think Google is missing a clear opportunity to compete with Instagram and the like. Google Photos is nearly default on just about every new and recent android phone in the world and its "partner" sharing feature (limited to just 1 partner) resembles a private IG-like share experience. Imagine having that breadth of user base already active in your app but not simply adding a public network around it (with adequate…

Social media like Instagram has actually shown that people appreciate having to explicitly upload select images to their online persona.

It's simpler and it also removes overhead like "wait, which photos can people see again?" Facebook had to build a complicated "view your profile as X" system early on just to address this trepidation.

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

#159

Post by shiftpgdn »

pnutjam wrote: post #109
liminal wrote: 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.

Have you tried using that full 1TB? Many small time hosts oversubscribe and will look for a reason to boot you if you go beyond a reasonable usage %.
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