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

#471

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #452

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t do anything special for photos appearing in multiple albums. My use-cases don’t align to that. My whole photo-taking process tends to be: * take a bunch of pictures * find the best ones * further refine the best ones until it’s a reasonable number * photoshop those to how I want them * share the narrow list And most of my photos come from events, so they’re in folders based on events. If your goal is virtual…

Oh ok, no problem, thanks for the input.

My use case is essentially ONLY virtual galleries. I want to bookmark the photos I like the most, then organize based on "whatever comes to mind" (e.g. horizontal-sleeping-daughter, playing-with-toys) and share those galleries.

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

#472

Post by rmah » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:06 AM UTC

andromeduck wrote: post #433

dontfiremepls wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if someone gives you a free beer for a the foreseeable future they also owe you free beer for life? What kind of entitlement is this?!

There is a certain segment of the population that believes exactly that. And they tend to get offended when you point out that it's unreasonable.

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

#473

Post by fomine3 » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

andyjpb wrote: post #194

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…

AFAIK Google deploys massive HDDs to get massive parallel I/O. Possibly they changed storage strategy to mainly use SSD (lower capacity, higher IOPS) , so they no longer able to provide wasting capacities?

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

#474

Post by usrusr » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

andromeduck wrote: post #433

dontfiremepls wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if someone gives you a free beer for a the foreseeable future they also owe you free beer for life? What kind of entitlement is this?!

What if he only stops giving you free beer after all other breweries have closed shop?

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

#475

Post by kristopolous » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:17 AM 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…

Creating a cadence that also stores the data in EXIF isn't really that hard if that's your concern. You could even get SQLite triggers to do external calls to update the tags if things change. This is all pretty trivial.

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

#476

Post by Paianni » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #439

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…

I really hate that low value, reddit-style political comments like this are becoming more common on HN nowadays.

Practise what you preach.

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

#477

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

Photos is the most annoying thing I didn't want to migrate over when trying to de-google myself. It's handy to share the kids' photos with relatives. I guess this will make it easier.

An instance of NextCloud can do wonders and there is even an app that does face recognition.

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

#478

Post by usrusr » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

Skunkleton wrote: post #308

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.

> In two or three they will start charging for search I would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.

That would țruly be an awesome offer. I'm not sure that I would take it (stingy should be my middle name) but offering it would be a very respectful gesture by Google. Follow up question: would we trust that paying changed anything?

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

#479

Post by therealx » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #441

bogdan wrote: post #334

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. 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_.

I'm not sure more time makes it better. The logic here is that they baited you for so long that it suddenly became fair? Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is. Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & swit…

It also means the market is opening back up. The code of projects gone by still exists, and it's not the worlds biggest effort to make a photo app.

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

#480

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #396

joshuamorton wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tags are more flexible than folders. An actual index let's you search by tag. Folders don't let you search for all photos of your mother, or in 1987, or in Alabama, or some combination thereof. Folders are a limiting api and we shouldn't limit ourselves to strictly hierarchical organizational structures for non hierarchal data.

I know, but folders work perfectly fine even up to a few thousand files. It doesn't take me long to find a vacation picture from 1966, for example. I look in the 1966 folder, which doesn't have a lot in it. The preview thumbnails from file explorer quickly let me hone in. It'd take me far more time to set up a proper tag database than I'd save looking things up. It's still infinitely better than a random shoebox with…

Looking up something by its clustered index is indeed pretty easy. That's not the only access pattern into most data sets, which is where tags can be handy.

I agree with your last two points, as my family's digital photos are also stored in a fairly similar clustered index style where you have to know the date at least pretty closely to start your search unless you want to scan "all Thanksgivings" [which itself is just a series of clustered index lookups]