341–350 of 649 posts
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...
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…
> 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…
Best choice I made. Looks like I'll now need to turn off photo backup from Google.
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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.
I see no reason why Google can't have similar policies that if the Gmail that controls the blog is completely inactive to the point where it gets deleted, any blogs it controlled can now be recycled.
I feel like the only real concern around Google is accidentally violating some obscure policy, and getting perma-locked out. Then why not stay on Google Photos in addition to duplicating it somewhere else, instead or moving away completely. Haven't really looked elsewhere in depth, but nothing else seems to offer even close to the polish and especially search functionality.
I guess the free lunch is finally over. For ~15 years (since the launch of GMail) Google has differentiated itself on storage. Both in terms of products offerings and in terms of company image. To me it signifies a change in the market. They don't feel like they currently need to compete with Apple or Microsoft on any of these fronts right now. The market is pretty stable and there are more battlefields ahead. So tim…
I think its more that as better privacy laws come into place, its hard to make money through ads and give free stuff away so they are dialing things back for the long run.
> Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it's a scale I've never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us never will. I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to contend with.
I appreciate that working for Google isn't everyone's cup of tea for a myriad of reasons, and would never pretend otherwise. And yes, the interview process can be onerous. But we are hiring! Certainly the 'technical scale' bit didn't disappoint me.
As with any other big company, if you're wondering how it is to work there, I would strongly recommend looking up acquaintances in the company and getting an inside view of the workplace dynamics to get a sense of what would await you and whether you'd enjoy it, even if experiences across this large an organization will vary greatly. If they're not close personal friends chances are if you just know them casually, they would still be happy enough to give you an unfiltered and honest summary of their experience.
> 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).
However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.
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How do they make money from giving their users free photo storage? I think the only path for that to be profitable was to grow the username for future subscription revenue.
You agree to have your photos analyzed and used in advertising. They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.
For those who are considering or already self-hosting, I'm genuinely curious whether it's worth the time/effort vs privacy comfort of mind? Google One prices seem reasonable (except the lack of middle tiers). Even the price aside, they also claim to not use data for ad targeting, and I personally haven't seen ads based on my media content (but obviously I'm just one anecdote). I feel like the only real concern around…
People who are time-poor can consider a turn-key self-hosted appliance like a Synology NAS. I've heard some good reviews about their Moments app: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments