301–310 of 649 posts
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.
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 would be happy to pay up if I could be sure that my account is safe at Google. I am mentioning this because of multiple reports of people who saw their account being closed because of an unnamed TOS violation, and no way to get it back. The people working at Google might not be able/allowed to comment on this, although I would appreciate their view on this issue.
The reality is a lot of folks don’t think this way and don’t want to have usb hard drives laying around or NAS in the living room next to the router.
People are storing their digital lives with Google. And they’re having them destroyed too, without any recourse.
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.
I've used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos.
Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind.
Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on "enterprise cloud storage" and "workplace sharing".
Apple: I love the privacy features of Apple, but what I've come to realize is that, with a very big photo library, no iPhone or Macbook can analyze them all and share the results with all my devices. Only a server can analyze 10,000+ pictures, identify faces, organize by date. All in a slick and fast UI.
There's definitely space for Google Photos competitors. Build a product that automatically triage photos, using and sometimes guessing the exif data. With face identification, location identification, automatically creating albums from photos batches (like if you take 40 photos in 2 days).
Managing our online pictures will be extremely important in the future (it is now), because we take more and more of them.
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 would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.
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...