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Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

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Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#31

Post by prima-facie »

I think none of us is surprised that the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum.

Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage services out there that offer good price per GB.

Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search brings up FolderSync which looks decent.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#32

Post by oarsinsync »

sahila wrote: post #26
oflannabhra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud shared albums has served our family well for over five years, all for free.

That's fine as long as you're all Apple people. Walk outside that garden though and how do you share an album with someone? To contrast, Google photos web app is actually good!

You can do a read-only web share from iCloud. Definitely not ideal, but in some circumstances, good enough.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#33

Post by federona »

jrockway wrote: post #13

I got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day, they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful. I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your pe…

If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#34

Post by kyrra »

bilal4hmed wrote: post #21
smueller1234 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is hiring just fine. (Source: I'm hiring. I work for Google. Also careers.google.com.)

Do yall have any remote positions?

(googler, opinions are my own).

See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22175150/google-return-o...

We are WFH till September for sure, and they will be testing flex hours after that. Though, they are still office focused, so you need to live near the office/team you work for.

Note that there are a few special cases where they let an individual be remote, but they tend to be very very outstanding developers. I've only worked with 1 of those in the last 5 years here.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#35

Post by dontblink »

prox wrote: post #17
jrockway wrote: post #13

I got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day, they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful. I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your pe…

That’s bad. Using any Google product will be the same experience, simply because you are not the client, advertisers are. I am sure there are fine people working on the ship called Google, but I don’t like where it is heading.

Advertisers have nothing to do with a paid product. GSuite (or whatever it is called now) can be paid for. Just an fyi as you seem to be misinformed.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#36

Post by hedora »

mceachen wrote: post #10
lambda_obrien wrote: post #6

Google photos is the best photos product out there for simple sharing with family (and partner share), so of course they're going to destroy it with mismanagement. Time to start looking for alternatives.

I'm building a self-hosted, cross-platform one that you're welcome to try! https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

It looks great, but lack of open source is a deal breaker. I wouldn’t mind paying for it, but what if I want to run it outside of docker (and not on Ubuntu?), let alone on an ARM or BSD machine?

Consider using the BSL license!

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#37

Post by [deleted] »

federona wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #13

I got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day, they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful. I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your pe…

If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.

[deleted]

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#38

Post by verytrivial »

For a few years it seemed to me that updates to Photos on Android would silently flip the quality setting down from Original to "High" as in "compressed", so I was never sure if the images I wanted to backup in original actually were backed up or not. I never set it to "High" but it kept flipping back to that.

I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.

I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One.

(seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!)

Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#39

Post by prox »

dontblink wrote: post #35
prox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s bad. Using any Google product will be the same experience, simply because you are not the client, advertisers are. I am sure there are fine people working on the ship called Google, but I don’t like where it is heading.

Advertisers have nothing to do with a paid product. GSuite (or whatever it is called now) can be paid for. Just an fyi as you seem to be misinformed.

That really doesn’t change the outcome of what kind of company Google is, on the whole, and where they get their value extraction from. Gsuite is only 5% of their revenue. Photos is also not part of Gsuite afaik.

Re: Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users

#40

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

coolspot wrote: post #2

Google seems to be in some “cut all expenses” mode recently: + cancelled stadia game studio + cancelled free unlimited google photos + closed Chromium APIs for derived browsers + closed Google Music (replaced with YT Music) + froze hiring + cancelled new office leases

Hiring froze??
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