Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #208

chrisseaton wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. 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…

Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward. That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month? Get it now?

> So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once.

In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?

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

#212

Post by SamuelAdams » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #154

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.

Yeah, and Google Photos you can easily access no-nonsense from your phone, your friend’s house, multiple laptops, etc.

I got married recently. We really enjoyed the shared photo album feature of Google Photos. Apple has this too, but Google Photos is platform-agnostic. It works on Android, iOS, and the plain old web. We were able to set up a shared photo album, text a link to friends, and they could add all their photos to the album pretty easily.

Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.

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

#213

Post by chronofar » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

This seems specious. Others absolutely have competing options, Apple's photos the most notable (since it's by the other Phone OS maker). None as good as Google photos imo (at least not that I've tried), but on release there was nothing as good as Google Photos either.

And now that they are charging, presumably there's space for competition to arise again no? Just as if they started charging at the outset?

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

#214

Post by blisterpeanuts » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

emaildanwilson wrote: post #191

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.

I'm legit planning to just download it all, store on multiple drives/computers, send a copy to my brother in another state to stash in his vault, and then clear the 2TB and start over.

Unless they boost the storage.

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

#215

Post by chronofar » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

f1refly wrote: post #195

tiborsaas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, let's cherry pick this one example to invalidate all ML strides in image recognition under the guise of racism, surely that seems reasonable.

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

#216

Post by rtkwe » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #102

Isn't this the classic pattern followed by almost all startups? Create a product that loses money and attracts users. Sustain it with VC money until you have a large number of users who are highly dependent on the product. Then switch to profitability, knowing you can do so because you've already hit critical mass and users aren't easily able to switch away. You don't have to like it, but it is legal and it is how ma…

Google isn't a startup any more and hasn't been for a decade or more at this point. Google Photos was only launched in 2015 far out of the scrappy startup stage and into the area of using their success in other areas to crush competition in a new area by willingly losing money while starving the competition.

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

#217

Post by subpixel » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

I'm still bitter that they removed the Google Drive to Google Photos sync. That allowed me to organize my photos on disk, and control what lived in Google Photos.

Without that setup Google Photos is like a vast sea of images that you can only scroll by date. There is no filtering, etc. so if you want to edit your Google Photos, you're limited to in-browser selection and album creation which is of little use with tens of thousands of images.

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

#218

Post by chronofar » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

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'm with you. I'm a big fan of Google Photos, in fact I'd go so far as to say I'd take very few pictures if not for it. Not because of the storage, but because of the ease with which it allows me to reminisce and organize my photos. I'd happily pay the couple bucks a month for it if it's what keeps it viable, I'd much rather that than the kill the service.

And they're giving 8 months notice and everything up to that point will continue to be supported for free. It's kind of crazy to me that people have a problem with it.

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

#219

Post by baq » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

rockengineer84 wrote: post #129

baq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they're so big disclosing those photos to their algorithms is questionable privacy-wise.

what is the privacy loss outcome that you are suggesting has happened as a result of photos being disclosed to algorithms?

Network effects, unintended side effects, operator incompetence, risk of information leak... GDPR should have me covered, but I won’t be able to remove myself from deep learning models they already have.

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

#220

Post by sofixa » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

Markoff wrote: post #194

nicoburns wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apples to Oranges. Google replicate and have roughly ~ 3 copies of your data, your 1TB hard drive does no such thing, has zero redundancy, isn't available from your phone, can't automatically backup photos from it, etc.