311–320 of 649 posts
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Wouldn't it be easy for Google to only strip the geolocation data if you are not the owner of the photo though?
One scenario is you're at a party at someone's house. If you post a captioned photo from the party that's geotagged, you're identifying where they live.
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.
> In two or three they will start charging for search.
Great! They should.
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 would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account actually be deleted? I can hardly see Google digging through their tape archives to delete cold-stored data from dead accounts. It would be so much hassle and be more costly than just leaving it as is.
It could very well be the same situation with actual 'live' data in data centre, belonging to dormant accounts.
Say you have a multi-TB hard drive in a data centre somewhere and, on that multi-TB drive, you have one or two users whose accounts are deemed to be now dormant. Would it really be worth Google's while to delete those one or two users' 'stuff'?
OK. the data savings would add up with thousands of inactive accounts, spread across data centres. But if all that freed up space is in relatively tiny amounts, dotted around thousands of hard drives, it would be a nightmare to manage and keep track of. Unless Google has some kind of system in place which is constantly shuffling data around to effectively 'de-frag' entire data centres?
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> 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.
For now
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 don't really understand this. I've been in computing for 45 years now. Programs come and go. I store files I want to keep in the most generic format practical. Storing a file in some program's special format is not a good plan for reading it 40 years from now.
For photos, I store them as jpgs in folders named after the year. Within those folders, there might be sub-folders named with a topic, like "disneyland" or "christmas". I'll "tag" photos by selecting a name for the jpg, like "bob and sue.jpg".
If more is needed, I'll just add a "notes.txt" file in the folder, with whatever text seems appropriate.
I have no worries about ascii text becoming unreadable, and few worries about jpgs becoming unreadable.
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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
Photos is a billion user product, how many of those have they deprecated? The disabled account thing may be a real concern, but statistically it's more rare than getting into a plane crash, yet we still fly planes. Also, if anything, monetizing the product and allowing it to be self-sustaining financially makes it far less likely to be killed. I'd much rather pay for a product that brings me value, since now I'm a re…
And as for killed services with a billion users, well, free unlimited Google Photos is now a killed service.
As for killed paid services, Google Play Music, Nest Secure, Google Photos Print, Google Audio Ads, and a ton of others.
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'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.
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 don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem.
You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts.
I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space.
Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?
Great time for FLOSS federated project pixelfeld: https://the-federation.info/pixelfed
Pixelfed's more like a crappier version of Instagram. It's hardly a substitute for Google Photos.