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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

#411

Post by stev0lution »

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…

> Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?

Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:

> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes

> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)

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

#412

Post by GhostVII »

hackily wrote: post #18

> If you have a Pixel 1-5, photos uploaded from that device won’t be impacted. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality from that device will continue to be exempt from this change, even after June 1, 2021. All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.

Sounds like it's time to pick up an old pixel and start funnelling your photo library through it.

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

#413

Post by echelon »

stev0lution wrote: post #411
echelon wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed? Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago: > Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes > YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. ( https://news.ycombinat…

That's incredibly telling. Wow.

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

#414

Post by fudged71 »

Google Photos still feels like the safest way to keep an archive of thousands of images across my family, agnostic to devices. I’d rather have High Quality backups than losing the originals on some outdated hard drives.

The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.

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

#415

Post by vkou »

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.

But what about Yandex?

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

#417

Post by dreamcompiler »

I never understood why people used this service. I'm not a professional photographer but I care about image quality. Google's "high quality" option really means "16 Megapixels or less" which is lower quality than most modern cameras can capture, so by taking advantage of unlimited storage, you're sacrificing image quality.

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

#418

Post by Rebelgecko »

advisedwang wrote: post #355
Rebelgecko wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm having getting whooshed here, but sunset has a racist connotation just as bad as "grandfathering" (or arguably worse). Plus it means something different. When I hear that I product it being sunset, to me that means 100% dead, even for preexisting users

What is the racist undertone to "sunset?" Currently I assume sunset is just a play on sunset being the end of the day, which is a pretty universal experience.

During the Jim Crow area, many towns and cities put up signs that read

  N*****, Don’t Let the Sun Set On You in $CITY_NAME
African-American laborers could come into town for work during the day, but any who found themselves there after dark were liable to be lynched or otherwise hassled out of town. While African-Americans were the most common target, Asian-Americans[0] and Jews were sometimes the subject of these warnings/threats. The cities that put up these signs and highway billboards became known as Sunset Towns (although in the last 2 decades the term "Sundown town"[1] became more popular[2]).

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide that was written to help black people plan roadtrips. It acknowledged that "the White traveler has had no difficulty in getting accommodations, but with the Negro it has been different". The Green Book warned about Sunset towns and had pointers for finding friendly lodgings. Sunset towns weren't limited to the Deep South: New England and California also took part in the practice, and Route 66 was notoriously difficult for black travelers.

Afroman immortalized a Californian sundown town and its racial housing covenant in his song "Colt 45"[3]:

Well, it was just sundown in a small white town

They call it East Side Palmdale

When the Afroman walked through the white land

Houses went up for sale

Well, I was standing on the corner sellin' rap CDs

When I met a little girl named Jan, I let her ride in my Caddy

'Cause I didn't know her daddy was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan

[0]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BLlJwLdIRpk/RZ1Bfy6G8CI/AAAAAAAAAB...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

[2]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sunset+town%2C...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH2ukQdF-0U&t=1m21s

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

#419

Post by zeroxfe »

WalterBright wrote: post #316
mholt wrote: 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…

Bits rot. If you want your data to last the next 40 years, plan for spending a few hours every 5 years migrating your storage. It's a far better plan than trying to predict what the world will be like 40 years from now.

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

#420

Post by dontfiremepls »

pgt wrote: post #408
dontfiremepls wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one. The honest approach would b…

This seems like a fallacy. VC subsidies benefit consumers until they run out of money or raise prices. As long as the market remains free, there will be new entrants. The problem is regulation that keeps competitors out. In some cases Big Co. lobbies for this regulation, but often it is government that kills competition by attempting to tax said Big Co., or adds expensive compliance.

We want to build a new car. A fancy electric car. We raise money from investors, build plant, hire engineers, designers and workers, establish a supply chain and a distribution chain. How should we fairly price the product?

A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.

B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.

The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.

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