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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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit doesn't let you adopt a subreddit if the mod is active anywhere on Reddit, even if you as a user can't see it. The subreddit has to be completely abandoned and the mod account has to be dead. 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.

Subreddits are built upon user activity, and need active moderation to keep that under control. A policy of allowing the subreddit to be passed on to a new moderator if the previous moderator is gone -- which doesn't even remove any existing content -- is eminently reasonable.

Blogspot blogs, on the other hand, are primarily about the author's content. Destroying that content simply because the author is no longer reachable (e.g. if they have died!) is not a reasonable policy.

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

#362
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…

> 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…

It would be easy enough to use the SQLite DB for normal read/write and search, and also save a human readable .txt dump periodically such as when making backups, or asynchronously on every save.

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

#363
They don't actually want peoples data for free any longer so they are failing at capitalising it which could mean a bump on the road for big data but maybe it's the real deal and they are saturated with what they can deal with and hence more data becomes a cost to them going forward.

Could also mean that the big G has reached it's max market valuation in abstract terms..!

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

#364

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…

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

#365

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…

-“ 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).”

The level of snark in your comment is really unnecessary. There are many valid points in the comments on why we are upset but you’d rather just straw man us instead of acknowledging thosey or even leave the snark out and make your case.

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

#366
post #201
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought a Synology NAS mainly for images/videos/personal files and run hard drives in RAID setup. You could explore other NAS solutions like QNAP or open source.

Synology's photo station is slightly jarring... the whole indexing operation isn't optimized at all so if you have like 500k photos it's going to be spinning for a while.

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

#367
post #307

I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos. 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…

I never understand people on HN complaining about Ads on YouTube, life long Storage on Google Photos costing $.

Probably for 90% of people on HN, it costs more (Opportunity cost) to type a comment complaining about ads on Youtube compared to a month subscription. But for some reason people like to complain.

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

#368
post #224
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space. In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable fr…

For all we know, YouTube may be haemorrhaging money and they just haven’t figured out a way of charging for storage - yet.

YouTube is very profitable.

Historically, YouTube was acquired circa 2006, it was bleeding money massively and in constant legal battle with the music labels, until things started turning around circa 2010.

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

#369

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…

It also means they will hopefully clamp down on worse monetization features like sending you notifications to go buy a photo book.

Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best product.

I like this change a lot.

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

#370

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…

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