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Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

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Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#191

Post by emaildanwilson »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #144

I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos. 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.

I think it's terrible that the next step up from that plan is $999/year up to 20TB. Consumers shouldn't have to pay in orders of magnitude for storage they "could" but are not yet consuming. I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit the 2TB limit.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#192

Post by cjamesd »

Sebb767 wrote: post #36

I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free .

I feel like the email they sent is a master class in misleading. The feeling and subtext make you feel like nothing is happening or you'll be better off:

> To build for the future and welcome even more memories, Google Photos is changing its unlimited high-quality storage policy. Starting Ju ne 1 , 2 02 1, new photos and videos backed up in high-quality will begin to count toward users' 15 GB of Google Account storage, which is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.

> Your Pixel device will not be impacted by this change. High - quality uploads from your Pixel device will continue to be free and unlimited. This exemption only applies to uploads made from your Pixel device, not uploads from other devices or via photos.google.com.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#193

Post by londons_explore »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #144

I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos. 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.

> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less?

Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#194

Post by Markoff »

nicoburns wrote: post #23
part1of2 wrote: post #5

> 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

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.

30 GBP per year for measly 200GB, I can have 1TB for 40 GBP (and I am talking about more expensive external drive) and I am not scaling it like Google

so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!

if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#195

Post by f1refly »

tiborsaas wrote: post #43
cwhiz wrote: post #2

Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.

But users also benefit from it. You can search for the contents of the images in your private gallery.

You mean like that one time when it tagged blacks as apes? I'm sure the users feel like they made a great deal.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#196

Post by Nasrudith »

minikites wrote: post #117
tiborsaas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bit of a hyperbole. How is ML horror?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal... By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.

My urine like everyone else's contains potassium and can be used to create gunpowder - does this mean I am enabling terrorists to blow people up every time I take a leak?

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#197

Post by iliketosleep »

nomad543 wrote: post #132

It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business tha…

Your comment hits the nail on the head. It's anticompetitive behaviour, and in the end consumers don't have a choice because competitors have gone out of business. If it's a valuable product or service (e.g. lifetime memories), consumers are then held to ransom. It has been going on for years, and it will continue to get worse until we rearch some kind of tipping point where people start to really care.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#198

Post by zzbzq »

nomad543 wrote: post #132

It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business tha…

It didn't work though, there's like 1 billion ways to store photos. At the end of the day DropBox started as just a wrapper around Amazon S3 buckets, it's not exactly a high barrier to entry.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#199

Post by mmmmmbop »

bluntfang wrote: post #177
johncena33 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is full of entitled people. I've never seen such entitled people in real life. Unfortunately lately HN is no different. I am also an avid user of Google Photos. From my perspective, they did keep their promise. They will store your photos for free before a certain timeline. Just because someone did a favor to you for some time, that doesn't mean you are entitled to their help forever.

Yeah man, when someone says "i'll give you $5 ever day for life" and then in 5 years they say "i'm not going to do that anymore starting tomorrow" and being upset about that is such entitled behavior.

The correct analogy would be "you can ask me for $5 as often as you want, I will give it to you for free, and you can keep it for life" and then 5 years down the road they say "starting 7 months from now, I'll stop giving you $5 when you ask me for it, but obviously you can still keep all the money I gave you".

I feel like people misconstrue "you can upload your photos and (store them for free for life)" to "you can (upload your photos and (store them for free for life) for life)".

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#200

Post by npongratz »

j7ake wrote: post #101
elmo2you wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole. Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), consid…

Is google mining photos for profit? What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Alphagoog is an advertising company. Everything they do is focused on efficient selling of advertising. They will perform any surveillance they can in order to improve the profile they have of you, regardless of your status as a registered user of their services.
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