Explanation of the change from an email I received from them:
"In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future"
This is just gross.
Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
611–620 of 649 posts
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.
Techcruch, arguably an entity with some experience and credibility in assessing product and service offerings, noted both "unlimited" and "free" in describing Google Photos.
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#614we're trapped!
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#615Time 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…
I extracted myself from Google Photos in 2019. Geolocation was a nightmare. I ended up using exiftool to merge the metadata from JSON available in Takeout.
https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=10412.msg55391#ms...
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, current quotas are nothing like email quotas used to be. You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB. Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.
No, but neither photos or e-mail sizes today are anything like what they used to be either. And remember the quota is the general Google Account quota, not separate to photos. I already have 8GB of other data in Drive. Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation. So while this may not be a big problem at the mo…
> I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying
When gmail launched, I had to clean my old email every other week on all my addresses. A few years of normal usage before you have to remove old stuff is very reasonable.
My free Google Drive is even larger than my O360 one that my workplace pays for.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#617Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts: I would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account…
https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-fi...
Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner.
Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what do you do for off-site back though? Do you have a strategy for the 'house burning down' scenario?
Yes I do, offline and offsite backup of important and valuable data stored on a HDD at my parents. Not the most seemless or user friendly options, but the privacy and security of my data is more important. I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
Yeah, that's a good strategy I suppose even if you do need to cart around a HDD to update every so often. You just need to make sure your parents backup is updated periodically.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Read your own links please and FYI Google Drive/Storage was far from the first to offer free storage, not by a long shot. Dropbox and Microsoft were offering of free storage years before Google even launched Drive. Free hosting in the photo sharing space predates Photos/Picasa by literally decades and even in their specific form they were never without major competitors from the likes of FB/MS/Flickr/Photobucket/IG etc.
Re: Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I tried Nextcloud a long time ago. It was buggy. I really, really wanted to pay for it at the time, but it didn't quite work.
Should I try it again?
I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source?
I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.