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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

#541

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.)

Another datapoint: Flickr Pro is as low as $5/month for unlimited full-res photos. So Google Photos (beyond 15GB) at ~$1.6/month would get to undercut Flickr yet won't even offer unlimited space.

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

#543

Post by bayindirh »

jcims wrote: post #513
bayindirh wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering you're using Linux, I'd do something of sorts: 1. get all image files with "find", considering they are with a known extension 2. run jdupes on the dump and deduplicate them. 3. run exiftool on them to automatically divide them to folders based on any metadata field you like. 4. Index all of the images with digikam and further organize them there. Another path would be to add all drives as "removable coll…

This looks like a great approach, thanks for putting it together. I'm hoping to dump these disks to an image b/c the filesystems on them are all over the place...some of them are IDE lol, then just loopback mount them for this process.

I'm glad that it helped. Organizing old files always take much longer than anticipated. It's a live exercise on entropy :)

Taking images and mounting them sounds reasonable. :)

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

#544

Post by jogundas »

Normille wrote: post #263
majora2007 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MegaUpload and Plex offer both of those things. Using Plex allows you to control the full storage and interface, then you can sync those to a cloud service or keep on a HDD yourself.

There's also Yandex Disc [0] which is still offering unlimited photo uploads from mobile devices. Although it wouldn't surprise me if they followed Google's lead on this and curtailed their offering as well. As they seem to pretty much mirror everything else Google does. Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos. [0] https://yandex.com/promo/disk/unlim

You might want to be aware that Yandex is a Russian company before moving all your photos there.

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

#545

Post by dredmorbius »

andromeduck wrote: post #538
nomad543 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.

1. Loss leading is not dumping. 2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc. 3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc. 4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential…

Loss-leading to dissuade, discourage, weaken, or preempt market-based rivals is precisely dumping.

https://traderiskguaranty.com/trgpeak/history-anti-dumping-c...

Or more properly, predatory pricing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

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

#546

Post by dredmorbius »

nybble41 wrote: post #425
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.

> 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.

Launch announcement:

They’re pitching it as having “unlimited storage”....

Yep! We were right. Google Photos will launch today, for free.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/confirmed-google-will-laun...

HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9618965

Highlight comment:

Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.

-- XJOKOLAT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619340

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

#547

Post by bogdan »

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…

> Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation

'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope.

> while competitors to it went out of business

This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.

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

#548

Post by romwell »

andromeduck wrote: post #538
nomad543 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.

1. Loss leading is not dumping. 2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc. 3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc. 4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential…

Yeah, and which of those services you mentioned directly integrate with the camera and gallery app that ships with every other phone?

Most pictures taken today are probably taken with an Android camera. Google is, indeed, the most influential player in that sector.

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

#549

Post by dang »

mrlala wrote: post #234
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 say you win for the most moronic thing uttered on the internet today.. but then there are other things going on right now which actually do beat you. Don't worry, I'm sure you will win another day.

Hey, you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately, unfortunately. We've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past, too. This is the sort of thing we ban accounts for, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on? They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
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