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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMP was designed to reduce publisher's ad revenue if they dared to use something else than AdSense. It was never about a reader.

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

#142
post #109

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 hope you had local copies! All cloud storage should be treated as ephemeral (some more than others, particularly google). It will change terms or go away at some point. Only local storage owned by you is actually, well, owned by you. If it is something that matters, keep it locally.

Local copies ftw for sure, and it's not just free or cheap cloud providers you have to worry about

Following hard disk failure last week, I attempted to recover only about 1Gb of data from SpiderOak. Without going in to all the roadblocks, bugs and strange design decisions that exist when recovering data from them, I'm yet to recover anything worth having.

Been a customer for over 8 years. I guess the old maxim is true; an untested backup is worthless.

I managed to recover most data from various local backups I had lying around. That's the direction I'm going to go now, with a physical snapshot off-site every now and again. Not perfect, but much less hassle than what I've just been through, and also cheaper.

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

#143

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. Didn't learn your lesson then, I see.

Yep. I use STACK by https://transip.nl/, which is just a hard drive hosted by someone else that I access via WebDAV or SFTP.

If you can’t see the actual JPG/MP4/FLAC files, you can’t be sure they’re actually there and eventually you’ll be burned.

Use cheap online storage for an offsite backup, and use any cloud (Apple, Google) in parallel for convenience.

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

#144

I wish I could use an AWS S3 bucket as a virtual SD card. That way I own my storage and I use the photo manager I choose

There's software that can mount an S3 bucket as a drive. It's going to be slow and you won't be sure how much all the access will end up costing.

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

#145
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? I mean if there is readership interested in that content, nothing wrong with using the ad impression. Text storage requirements are insignificant

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

#146

I wish I could use an AWS S3 bucket as a virtual SD card. That way I own my storage and I use the photo manager I choose

It's a little hacky, but you could probably do it on Android using the rclone-mount module for Magisk (root).

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

#147
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well they are trying to move it from advertising based to subscription based :)

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

#148

Its really frustrating that there's no good, opensource, Android media backup tool. I just want a simple app that will auto upload photos and videos to an https endpoint (or an S3 bucket). There are a few tools out there but they all seem to have bit rotted to the point where they don't work reliably on modern Android.

PhotoSync is actually very good: https://www.photosync-app.com

I really like the iOS version too. With a shortcut I back up all my photos straight to my own SFTP server.

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

#149
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because not caring is the default?
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