Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021 • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by esaym » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #417

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.

I did a "deep dive" trying to compare my raw photos with what I had on google and I could spot nearly no difference even after zooming way in. The one difference was a 5MB vs 700KB file size though. I was actually quite impressed. But I think these were all 12MP photos.

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

#422

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

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…

Escheatment is to protect you.

I'd say Google Photos isn't for you. It's for a different kind of user, like me.

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

#423

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

throwaway201103 wrote: post #214

MattGaiser wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is moving stuff or $5 a month cheaper? This is how iCloud got me. I pay $1 a month for space as I didn’t want to deal with figuring out what stuff on my phone I was willing to move or delete.

Or stop pack-ratting everything. How often do you go back and browse the photos you take. For me, it was "never" and I stopped taking photos. I probably take less than a few dozen photos a year with my phone, and I don't back them up because I will probably never look at them again.

At the prices involved, it will take years before not pack-ratting becomes a break-even operation.

I take photos every day and I look at loads of them. The biggest mistake I made in my early twenties was not taking photos. Every year since I started taking photos, it's been great.

But to each their own.

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

#424

Post by zeroxfe » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

choppaface wrote: post #391

"... more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded" So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m / month in storage and a mere $140k / month growth. (And Google's internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2.…

Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object detection, gene.) Running all that for 28 billion photos a month costs a lot of money. (And that excludes all the engineering cost of building front ends, android apps, integrations, etc.)

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

#425

Post by nybble41 » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

dontfiremepls wrote: post #407

nybble41 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)… This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and vi…

We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged. Velvet gloves dumping.

> The service was promised for free…

Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.

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

#426

Post by megablast » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

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…

45 years experience, and your first thought is that they are being stored as a binary blob in a database??

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

#427

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

I have Google One for $20/yr and iCloud for $12/yr and they provide sufficient value. Google Photos is the best photo app there is. It really takes advantage of Google's skill with hard CS problems and their platform advantage.

The search is unparalleled. The Google Location History integration is beautiful.

Just today I used it to find a dish I ate in a place years ago by finding the place in Location History and clicking through to the photo of the dish that was integrated into the view. Jesus Christ. This was the promise of AI assistants. It is here.

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

#428

Post by akerl_ » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #389

akerl_ wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell if this is just hyperbole, but if an account is inactive and unpaid for 2 years, I don’t see why they’d be expected to just sit on that data forever. I can’t imagine being 5-10 years behind on things that “need attending to”. What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?

My 20 year old self would have agreed with you. But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically. > What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay? Unopened mail, things I need to organize in case of a tax audit, broken things I was going to fix, things that simply need to be put away, things I can't decide whether to…

I feel like there’s interesting personal opinion in your comments in this thread, but it’s losing potency because you’re surrounding it in this aura of being older and wiser than anyone else in the thread.

Things like “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically” just sound condescending.

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

#429

Post by TillE » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:49 PM UTC

akerl_ wrote: post #428

WalterBright wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 20 year old self would have agreed with you. But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically. > What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay? Unopened mail, things I need to organize in case of a tax audit, broken things I was going to fix, things that simply need to be put away, things I can't decide whether to…

I feel like there’s interesting personal opinion in your comments in this thread, but it’s losing potency because you’re surrounding it in this aura of being older and wiser than anyone else in the thread. Things like “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically” just sound condescending.

There's nothing "older and wiser" about it, it's just (subjectively) true that the years seem to go by faster as you get older.

Like, 15-25 was an eternity compared to 25-35.

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

#430

Post by qwertox » Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

Funny how Google pushes the automatic syncing between partner accounts. These automatically imported images go against the storage cap, and most don't realize it.

There should be an option to filter those imported images for easier deletion. I haven't seen one.