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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

#241

Post by dirtyid »

I wonder how much typical account uses free storage. I was recently helping a family member troubleshoot their over quota Google Photo backup, originally setup for full quality, since I thought 15GB was enough for life time. Was surprised to find they shot close to 60GB worth random shit in the last few years after putting them on my One family circle. I guess explosion in camera sensors and high res recording is making a lot of croft.

I think Google should start throwing some deduplication photos in Google Feeds everyday, help them clear up some space and help users clear up their gallery which is often filled with so much useless shit that it's hard to use. There's something about physical film where each shot was precious and developing photo came with it's own sorting / curation process. Online photo are pretty tedious viewing experience compared to physical albums, I know a lot of people who practice inbox zero but virtually no one who keeps their online photos kempt.

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

#242

Post by llimos »

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.

True but their AI adds a lot of value. Searching for people is invaluable (though to be fair if you have the files locally, Windows Photos does that too.) Searching by item in the photo is less useful but I can imagine people use it now and again. And the automatically created videos are a nice bonus.

But yeah, not enough for me to pay them for it. If I'm going to pay someone, I'll pay someone else.

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

#243

Post by jcims »

x87678r wrote: post #219
jcims wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one primary collection but I also have probably 30TB of old drives lying around with photos scattered all about. Is there something I can do to mount those drives, grab all image files and then dedupe/catalog them (at least by date)? Ideally this would work with videos as well.

Same problem. The other issue is having a 2 cameras and 2 phones in the family and grouping together events. Its easier just to save them all and not try.

My problem is I'm paranoid of getting rid of anything now. I just want to take one good sweep through so I can do something with those drives.

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

#244

Post by Xorlev »

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…

Exporting via Takeout will retain the geolocation tags. The API isn't the best place to export.

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

#245

Post by glennpratt »

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.

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

They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not count.

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

#246

Post by skybrian »

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)

I am pretty much all-in with Google and do what I can to protect my Google account, but one risk you can't get rid of is if Google cancelled your account for whatever mysterious reason, which is unlikely but would be catastrophic.

I still like Google Photos, but ideally I'd automatically sync all my photos to a backup service and have things set up so I could make it the primary replica if needed.

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

#248

Post by skybrian »

mholt wrote: post #98
skybrian wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After downloading, can you upload to a different cloud photo service? I'd love to have a way to sync them automatically, and having a non-cloud backup would be nice too.

You can do whatever you'd like. They're just files like any other.

Sure, but doing it automatically (and handling things like making sure they're not duplicated) would be more convenient over cobbling together a solution.

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

#249

Post by gcatalfamo »

mrlala wrote: post #234
wolco2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>In two or three they will start charging for search I would say you win for the most moronic thing uttered on the internet today.. but then there are other things going on right now which actually do beat you. Don't worry, I'm sure you will win another day.

Woooosh

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

#250

Post by brailsafe »

jeffbee wrote: post #8

Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad "Backup and Sync" program for MacOS, which over the years has added thousands of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I'm happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.

Big Sur is coming out tomorrow, might be a decent chance to build a native app that's way better
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