141–150 of 256 posts
If you have to start paying for photo storage, you may as well move them somewhere with better privacy.
I'm giving Amazon Photos a try, since they offer unlimited high quality storage with Prime. I will appreciate if someone shares their opinion about this service.
Is it a PITA to switch from Google Photos, or is it just a case of installing an Amazon Photos app and enabling sync?
> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.” Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
You could argue that all hyper growth “build it and they will come” types of companies do this bait and switch. It’s inherent to the startup culture that emphasizes capturing users above earning profit in the early stages of a company. Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech gen…
This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.
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Is google mining photos for profit? What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?
Very little. I think training data for image classification is one benefit. Google conspiracy theories are just HN's preferred sport.
To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year.
Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.
> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.” Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
Could a case be made that Google did this with their free unlimited storage move?
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To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too). And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.
Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)? I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will…
Can we talk about alternatives? I am not a Google Photos user but I struggle to find a good privacy-aware or self-hosting solution. Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS. So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonabl…
I've bought a Synology NAS which comes with a builtin Synology Moments application. It's pretty much a self-hosted Google Photos (including web gallery, sharing and mobile app which autobackups directly to your NAS). I still use Google Photos for convenience sake, but having a safe copy owned by myself on harddrives I own by myself is still worthwhile. And setup was very easy - couple of clicks on web UI to enable th…
I actually like Synology's software in some ways more than their hardware for many use cases, kind of wish I could just officially buy a license for that (though I guess it works for them in that familiarity means I have recommended them to some small businesses).
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> Folks, try to understand marginal cost. 'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does. Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users. If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Whic…
They're not charging a dollar. That's my point. They're raising their prices, while storage costs fall. Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.
I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation.
Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing.
At the end of the day 'storing a billion photos is free' - your argument - is simply a provably false statement, as everyone in these threads keeps trying to explain to you.