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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

#121

Post by ignoramous »

laurent92 wrote: post #108
dimator wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize google reader was a popular app, especially among the hn crowd. But there's been how many years since reader? Why hasn't anyone duplicated exactly the reader experience? The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on th…

https://theoldreader.com Excellent. But what Google took away was the culture of blog-RSSing. It gave an enormous advantage to Facebook and Instagram. Which are competitors to Google. What a bad move from Google.

Google built Chrome and then AMP. I assume, Reader fell short where Chrome excelled, and hence the Google axe.

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

#122

Post by misterchrister »

noAnswer wrote: post #27
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…

> I use iCloud now. As long as you don't use it to store music... Basically same story, different file type: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250315803

Google Music shut down on the 24th, and almost took with it my hoard of 2001-2011 mp3s. The iCloud is walled, but back then I took my collection from machine to machine until they offered a service to upload it all to. Fortunately I caught the email on the 24th and pulled 15gb of tracks via Takeout, because I would have lost a lot of personal works that I just knew would be there. It’s been a nostalgic week.

The cloud is too... cloudy.

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

#123

Post by ahepp »

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.

I paid for GSuite, it sucked. Between GSuite and Fi, it was a constant battle of trying to get Google's own services to work with each other. I couldn't use voice assistant to set a reminder on my phone...

I wish I had just gone with Apple.

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

#124

Post by ahepp »

lathiat wrote: post #51
mrfusion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to do it on iCloud? Like a backup?

iCloud Photo Library is similar but no compression hijinx - it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space (hilariously, the opposite of Google). You pay for the storage (but you can't get more than 2TB for love nor money).

>it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space

This is the sort of thing that really makes me regret getting a pixel

I wish I realized how anti-ergonomic Google's services were before I experienced it first hand.

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

#125

Post by posguy »

subsonicswe wrote: post #102
verytrivial wrote: post #38

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 so…

This definitely sounds like a bug worth tracking down. If you're interested in using your account as example, it would be helpful to file in-app feedback including at least the following two things: 1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue" 2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting

Will this result in the problem getting addressed?

Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.

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

#126

Post by HJain13 »

lathiat wrote: post #51
mrfusion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to do it on iCloud? Like a backup?

iCloud Photo Library is similar but no compression hijinx - it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space (hilariously, the opposite of Google). You pay for the storage (but you can't get more than 2TB for love nor money).

> hilariously, the opposite of Google

Google offers both options, though? It used to offer free - unlimited "high quality" photos, which they have now stopped.

If you pay for storage, you can choose to store original quality images in the first place, and delete them from device

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

#127

Post by HJain13 »

ahepp wrote: post #124
lathiat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud Photo Library is similar but no compression hijinx - it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space (hilariously, the opposite of Google). You pay for the storage (but you can't get more than 2TB for love nor money).

>it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space This is the sort of thing that really makes me regret getting a pixel I wish I realized how anti-ergonomic Google's services were before I experienced it first hand.

Google offers both options, though? It used to offer free - unlimited "high quality" photos, which they have now stopped (Still available to Pixels (till P4) for 3 years since the respective phone was launched)

You can choose to pay for storage and keep original quality uploads?

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

#128

Post by subsonicswe »

posguy wrote: post #125
subsonicswe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely sounds like a bug worth tracking down. If you're interested in using your account as example, it would be helpful to file in-app feedback including at least the following two things: 1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue" 2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting

Will this result in the problem getting addressed? Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.

That's a lot of speculation. Why wouldn't Google care about losing user data? Especially for such an important setting.

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

#129

Post by gundmc »

IshKebab wrote: post #23

High Quality is not just limited to 16 megapixels, the photos are also re-encoded at a lower bitrate.

> High Quality is not just limited to 16 megapixels, the photos are also re-encoded at a lower bitrate.

How exactly do you encode a photo at a bitrate? Do you mean videos?

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

#130

Post by jhoechtl »

sp332 wrote: post #98
dimator wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize google reader was a popular app, especially among the hn crowd. But there's been how many years since reader? Why hasn't anyone duplicated exactly the reader experience? The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on th…

It kept archives of defunct blogs. When Reader went away, they just deleted it all. Also, it's less useful for a smaller site to have social sharing features when we used to have a Google-sized network of readers.

Defunct blogs create no ad revenue stream.
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