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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

#481

Post by jokethrowaway »

eslaught wrote: post #431
dontfiremepls wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), especi…

I can see an argument for this for Tesla, because of the capital costs. I can see an argument for this for Uber, because of the network effects. But I cannot see an argument for this for Google Photos, because the network effects are not that strong, and the capital costs are directly proportional to how many users you have. (You don't need to scale our your datacenter/cloud until you actually have users to justify d…

I think you're underestimating the cost of leaving Google Photos.

Sure, it's not too bad but I need to migrate off a new platform literally 5 years of photos (+ face tagging), explain it to all my relatives, make them install another app.

Or I can just start paying 2$ per month. I'm not too bothered but it's a clear bait and switch.

To be fair I wasn't sure if this was coming or not given Google is not exactly a small business and could afford to spend some storage money to lock people in better in their ecosystem.

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

#482

Post by therealx »

murgindrag wrote: post #318
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'd be more than happy to pay for a privacy-respecting product like Google Photos. I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.

Nextcloud's isn't bad.

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

#483

Post by choppaface »

zeroxfe wrote: post #424
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.)

All the software infra and processing was built years ago for Google Plus, so the ongoing engineering costs are minimal. The compute might be more than Backblaze, but it's predictable (the majority happens on upload) and it's a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of daily search indexing, YouTube, etc.

The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.

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

#484

Post by usrusr »

rbecker wrote: post #359
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…

> Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. Anger could be due to: 1) Kill competition by offering product at a loss. 2) Once competition is dead and people are invested in the product and ecosystem, start charging.

And "competition" in this case isn't just other photo cloud service companies, it's also the entire habit and ability of offline bulk data handling. Having opted for a smartphone without microSD because storage was low priority, having favored the ISP when it was time to decide between spending money on more bandwidth and spending money on an NAS, these things. People have become addicted not only on the mental level.

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

#485

Post by therealx »

grishka wrote: post #170
plorg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may just be cleaner to write it this way because the guarantee was different between generations, but the choice of "High quality" looks intentional. Pixel 1-3 (I don't remember 4, but definitely not 4a) were guaranteed unlimited storage at "full resolution", and for subsequent models the guarantee was changed to "high quality". I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.

Pixel 1 is unique in that they forgot to put a deadline into the deal. They didn't make the same mistake for the next ones. And, yes, unlimited original quality still works for me as of today, but I'm not taking any chances with deleting my local copies. Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good lu…

NextCloud, or maybe the offering from Synology.

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

#486

Post by therealx »

plorg wrote: post #268
grishka wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel 1 is unique in that they forgot to put a deadline into the deal. They didn't make the same mistake for the next ones. And, yes, unlimited original quality still works for me as of today, but I'm not taking any chances with deleting my local copies. Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good lu…

If you click through the blog post to the support page listing for Pixels they do suggest that Pixel 1s will continue to get unlimited uploads, and Pixel 3s will get them until the original expiration of Jan 31, 2022. The expiration for Pixel 2 will have already expired.

If I had a Pixel 1 that was covered, but now have a Pixel 5, do I get original size or the reduced?

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

#487

Post by dragonwriter »

akmarinov wrote: post #176
shajznnckfke wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You agree to have your photos analyzed and used in advertising.

No, you don't.

> They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.

No, they don't.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

“As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.”

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

#488

Post by pgt »

dontfiremepls wrote: post #420
pgt wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), especi…

I didn't say that was the role of capital.

What I said was it's a fallacy re: your statement, "SV's dirty secret is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: .... to gain a dominant position in the market... then jack up the prices and fleece the customers."

Consider there is also a capital cost to rapidly accelerating change in consumer behaviour, e.g. app-based ride-hailing, which can also open up new markets.

*edit: typo

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

#489

Post by bassman9000 »

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…

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.

It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA:

As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.

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

#490

Post by 627467 »

Can't complain for the end of free service.

Now, am i the only one who wished that, rather than just catalogue and organized bazillion photos, photo storage services would actually help us curate our own photos?

At some point I wish there was a service that would help me narrow my 30K+ photos down to maybe 1000 o so.

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