Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

chrisbroadfoot wrote: post #272

ciarannolan wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would start with the assumption that Google is collecting and storing every single possible data point about every single thing you share with them, including this. I have zero doubt that they store this info privately for their own use.

Zero doubt? Wow, wish I had such confidence to make claims about things I know little about. Each photo's geolocation data is stored. Of course. It is shown in the UI, as well as indexed so you can search by location. For example, I can search for "photos of dogs in Portland" and it'll show all the pics of dogs I've taken in Portland.

Post by echelon » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

glennpratt wrote: post #245

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.

> 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.

Post by deanclatworthy » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

mvgoogler wrote: post #198

deanclatworthy wrote: post #107

Pretty 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.

Google One family subscriptions would be a good fit here. You can manage the subscription and just add your mother to the plan. It's what our family does.

Post by rektide » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

rektide wrote: post #94

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.

Free, however, meant that photos could stay online potentially past the end of someone's life. Now the dead will have their memories & photos that they've shared vanish. This is a dark day.

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #173

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…

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.

  1. get all image files with "find", considering they are with a known extension
  2. run jdupes on the dump and deduplicate them.
  3. run exiftool on them to automatically divide them to folders based on any metadata field you like.
  4. Index all of the images with digikam and further organize them there.