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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

#581

Post by lm28469 »

vvoyer wrote: post #307

I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos. I've used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos. Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind. Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on "enterprise cloud storage" and "workplace sharing". Apple: I love the…

> Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind.

> identify faces

That's a negative point for many people. I want to store picture, not train the image recognition AI they might sell to the NSA in 10 years...

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

#582

Post by habosa »

Googler here but opinions are (obviously) my own.

I've got a few issues with this but my biggest one is the combination of Drive/Docs/Gmail storage with my Photos quota.

I have 18GB of that stuff ... so I'm done before I take a single photo. If I had a 15GB runway starting on June 2021 that's plenty of time to consider my options. Now I have no runway, gotta start researching how to move a decade of photos.

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

#583

Post by jwr »

three_seagrass wrote: post #257
jwr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, perhaps apart from the fact that you are giving your photos to the company that makes money on targeted advertising and invests bajillions into AI technologies that learn from data. Some of us are distinctly uncomfortable with that, especially given what has been done to Gmail — your mail is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you.

>especially given what has been done to Gmail — your mail is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you. Google has not mined emails in GMail for ad targeting for years now: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Ok, I stand corrected. Your mail WAS fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you.

I am constantly amazed and how people trust and defend corporations like Google, given what the incentives are. Why do you think Google provides services like GMail or Google Photos? Look at their revenue streams: it's an ad-tech company.

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

#584

Post by dzhiurgis »

theshrike79 wrote: post #557
dzhiurgis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about iCloud is how slow it is and how much Photos on macOs crash. It’s barely usable for anything but previewing photos.

YMMV, I've got 300GB of photos in iCloud and I can count the amount of Photos crashes in the last 5 years with one hand.

I think I've got just a slight more and I can't count how many times it crashed within a week. It's abandonware.

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

#585

Post by majani »

dontfiremepls wrote: post #376
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…

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…

No one ever hikes the prices up significantly after running at a big loss. What usually ends up happening is that loss making companies adopt a model where their shareholders are the actual customers that the business makes money from. The goal becomes to IPO and leave index funds and pension funds holding the bag and playing hot potato with it. In a perverse way it's kind of sustainable. Hate not the player, but the game.

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

#586

Post by hamilyon2 »

identity0 wrote: post #358
vvoyer wrote: post #307

I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos. I've used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos. Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind. Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on "enterprise cloud storage" and "workplace sharing". Apple: I love the…

Do you actually use that? Maybe it's just because I have few photos, but I always thought it was a massive gimmick. If I wanted to see photos from a specific vacation, I just remember when it happened, or look up the location in the geotagging thing. No ML needed. I've never once wished I could see all my photos of "dog on beach" in one place.

It is life-changing feature for those of us who don't remember when they took picture of what. Even with a few thousand photos, looking up something important in seconds (instead of an hour) is huge.

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

#587

Post by WalterBright »

knyazhefilms wrote: post #522
WalterBright wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SQLite is an ubiquitous and well-tested piece of software that is going to stand the test of time and survive the next twenty years. My timeline is much longer than 20 years. I have family photos going back to the Civil War. Besides, Wordstar and Wordperfect files used to be ubiquitous. Good luck with those today. I switched my mail from Outlook to Thunderbird because the former stores the email in some undocumente…

>My timeline is much longer than 20 years. What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4? What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really sh…

I copy them forward to new media every year or so. It's how I avoid bit rot and media obsolescence.

My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.

Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.

My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.

I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.

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

#588

Post by richrichardsson »

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 am already paying for Google Drive, and a huge part of what sold me on paying for it was that Google offered free photo storage if I was happy with a potential slight quality degradation.

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

#589

Post by WhyNotHugo »

What really pisses me about google is that they're a company where the user is the product AND they pretend to have users pay them.

If a company puts their users first, I can understand why they'd charge them; that's their business model.

But for a company with interests so orthogonal to their users, it just amazes me that they decide to charge -- and also, that their users would be willing to pay.

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

#590

Post by ishikawa »

I think it is OK. The problem is how they did not predict they would not be able to keep the product as is. So a lot of people created a dependency on it. The app itself will need to change. It is now the official photo backup app. Now it will have to come by default disabled or it will incur costs. Also, it should be tied to better Google One offerings.
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