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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

#331

Post by WalterBright »

Retric wrote: post #323
WalterBright wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> indexes them in a local SQLite DB. 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…

Metadata is more useful with older photos. Right now it’s obvious who’s in them, but in 40 years being able to just put names to faces can be difficult.

I just note their names in the file name. If there are too many, I make a copy of the photo, bring it up in an image editor, and type the names of the people next to their heads. It works like a champ.

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

#332

Post by seraphsf »

jdeibele wrote: post #297
fouronnes3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, except no drive sync software is as convenient or user friendly as google photos.

Maybe if you commit 100% to the Google system or work solely on your iPhone/iPad it is. I wanted to look at pictures on the big screen of my desktop Mac. Leaving Google Photos in automatic upload on my phone meant that photos would all get uploaded but the ones that I culled would be deleted from Apple Photos but not Google Photos. Using Google Photos on my phone would let me delete both copies (Apple and Google) but…

If you delete from Google Photos on the web from your desktop, the iPhone client will prompt you to allow deletion of those same photos from your iPhone’s Photos app (and hence iCloud, I think).

So, just do your deletion on the Google Photos web client on desktop. The culled photos will be culled from Apple Photos as well.

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

#333

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

cogburnd02 wrote: post #233
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 they start charging for search then 1/3 of Earth will use Baidu, 1/3 DuckDuckGo, and 1/3 Bing.

aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"

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

#334

Post by bogdan »

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

Wouldn't it be 'bait and switch' if they did that after less time, say 1 year? 10 years is more than reasonable. And if you disagree, that's fine, but I'm curious to hear what number of years would you consider reasonable then? I'm not excited about the news either but I think it's _fair_.

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

#335

Post by duskwuff »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #161
duskwuff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing email addresses to be reused is a huge security and privacy problem. It means that any email which was still being sent to the old address -- including account recovery emails -- becomes accessible to the new owner of the email address. Deleting data from "dead" accounts is fine and good. But they need to stay dead, not come back to life.

I'm talking about recycling BlogSpot addresses. Currently, it's common to see a BlogSpot blog with a single post from ten years ago and it means all the best URLs are gone and will never be available.

That's vulnerable to a different sort of hijacking -- SEO spammers recreating blogs with URLs of deleted sites that previously had a lot of incoming links. It'd also risk destroying historically important content that was published in "one-off" Blogspot sites.

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

#336

Post by QUFB »

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...

It is a sad reflection on HN that comments like this are so aggressively downvoted.

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

#337

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

t-writescode wrote: post #330
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #327

Any open source software for displaying and organizing photos as albums? I already take care of the uploading (I have a big nextcloud server with multiple copies), however there is no affordance provided for collecting albums and sharing them. And just to clarify, an album to me it's just a list of paths to photos and the ability to generate password protected links that I can share with family members. Oh, right, th…

I use NextCloud to share albums, too. You can share a whole folder publicly

I have all the photos in a single folder, i would not like to change that, especially because some photos should appear in multiple albums. How do you manage that?

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

#338

Post by sib »

WalterBright wrote: post #329

> Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. 15 gigs of photos is nothing. > Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years. Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I'm relying on cloud storage. I'm a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mut…

These days, 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing. If I go on a trip for a week to take pictures, I can easily shoot 50-100GB of images. (Using my full-frame DSLR, shooting in raw, average image size is over 50MB, meaning < 20 images per GB).

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

#339

Post by ZainRiz »

echelon wrote: post #319
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'm actually glad to see this. Unlimited storage is unsustainable. 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…

Seems like hard drives aren't getting cheaper by that much of a margin nowadays [0]

Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

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

#340

Post by WalterBright »

phoe-krk wrote: post #325
WalterBright wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> indexes them in a local SQLite DB. 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…

SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years. There are very few pieces of software that I am able to praise like that with a clean conscience; SQLite is definitely one of them though. You might find it worthwhile to read e.g. about its memory allocation strategy, or its testing strategy. Also, I don't think that the image files th…

> likely just their indices and metadata

notes.txt will work just fine, then, even for several thousand photos. I don't see a need for a database until you've got far more than that. The tree file system works tolerably well as a "database".

As for searching, I know how to use "grep" and "locate".

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