Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 649 posts

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

#221

Post by jkingsman »

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…

Takeout sounds like an interesting workaround. I just do a takeout download once a month and figure that if google photos vaporizes or I lose my account I can write a python script to bake back in the JSON metadata that comes with it.

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

#222

Post by gabagool »

gowld wrote: post #197
warrentr wrote: post #154

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…

> - Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security) What is the difference between a hard to guess password and a hard-to-guess URL?

Someone with a hard-to-guess URL could share the link with anyone else or just put it online, thereby eliminating any sense of security.

Of course, that "someone" could also just take a screenshot or copy the image.

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

#223

Post by warrentr »

mceachen wrote: post #183
warrentr wrote: post #154

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…

I'm working on one that's cross-platform, and, critically, self-hosted. The beta is available for free in exchange for your feedback. It's an early product, but I'm pushing out new features monthly. Face detection and sharing are coming soon. https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ FWIW, I recommend to my beta users that they personally store at least one of their backup copies. https://photostructure.com/…

Thanks for this! This sounds very interesting and your stated values align exactly with mine. I will check it out.

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

#224

Post by jl6 »

Fej wrote: post #191
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…

YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space. In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable fr…

For all we know, YouTube may be haemorrhaging money and they just haven’t figured out a way of charging for storage - yet.

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

#225

Post by gabagool »

sgrinich wrote: post #192
advisedwang wrote: post #55

Sad as I am to see "unlimited" go away, this is probably the best way to do it: * Grandfathering existing photos means I don't have to worry about going back and deleting objects or getting an sudden bump in cost. * 15 GB is pretty generous... iCloud includes 5GB for free. * $2/month isn't a huge jump to the next level of storage.

Heads up on the term 'grandfathering' and the racial overtones of what this means: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586...

What term should be used instead?

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

#226

Post by wolco2 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #178

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free s…

I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch.

If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in.

In a year they will start charging for gmail.

In two or three they will start charging for search.

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

#227

Post by ENGNR »

fwiwm2c wrote: post #220
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…

Why not just pay $30/yr to get access to all the features which Google Photos (and other Google services) offer? I know $30 is not the same everywhere but if you are in US (and assuming you are in tech given you are on HN), you'd spend that much in a dinner without thinking much. There is something about paying about online services which brings a lot of resistance in us (me included but I think I am getting over it)

Realistically... if you wanted to pay $30/year for a set and forget photo album, is Google the best place to do that?

Given how they often they deprecate things and how hard I've heard it is to restore a disabled account, I feel like some kind of smaller company dedicated to photo storage would be much better anyway

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

#228

Post by andybak »

fletchowns wrote: post #171
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…

It's so annoying that Google strips the geolocation data. What would be the reason for this? It has been frustrating following along with the ticket that goes nowhere for years: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228

Ironic as it sounds - privacy?

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

#229

Post by jl6 »

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.

For context, if you assigned each photo a unique integer ID, the list of IDs (just the list of numbers, not the data itself, not even any other metadata) wouldn’t fit on the largest HDD available today.

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

#230

Post by andybak »

wolco2 wrote: post #226
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #178

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free s…

I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. In a year they will start charging for gmail. In two or three they will start charging for search.

I’m not sure you’ve thought through all these examples to the same degree.
Post reply on HN