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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

#161

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 us…

> the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum

Could we expect the same to happen to Gmail? It also has a 15GB free quota.

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

#162
post #160

I use self hosted nextcloud now. It takes time to manage but can’t handle more drama like these

Can you elaborate on what exactly is taking time to manage? Isn't it a setup-once-and-forget kind of platform?

Updates and adding more storage, at times changing backup regime. Also testing new plugins :). It can be setup-once-and-forget but it's really good if we make sure we hear or know about all security flaws around it.

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

#163

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

The shipped has LONG sinced sailed on my expecting Google to fix Photos in this regard. I've spent literally YEARS dealing with this Photos shortcoming. They have all the information they need.

And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.

Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.

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

#164
post #161

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 us…

> the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum Could we expect the same to happen to Gmail? It also has a 15GB free quota.

I don't think that will happen. But 15Gb shared between email, drive and photos is not that much nowadays.

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

#165
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also no longer hand out Christmas presents. But those had been on a downhill slope for a while.

$400 dollar donations to charities we can choose from is fine by me and A LOT of other Googlers.

Eh, money is fungible. They could have always just given everyone a I'm a bit out of the loop. How limited is the list of charities to choose from? Is it a small list, or essentially free for all?

(For charity, I usually just pick whatever GiveWell suggests at the moment. Everything else feels like an insult to humanity to me.)

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

#166
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$400 dollar donations to charities we can choose from is fine by me and A LOT of other Googlers.

Eh, money is fungible. They could have always just given everyone a I'm a bit out of the loop. How limited is the list of charities to choose from? Is it a small list, or essentially free for all? (For charity, I usually just pick whatever GiveWell suggests at the moment. Everything else feels like an insult to humanity to me.)

There is a very big list. It's even filterable by continents. I have always found the charities I want to donate on there.

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

#167
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good replacements? I mean, if people really miss Picasa (and I personally know several) -- it's worthwhile to reimplement it and make money.

RSS readers existed before Google Reader and they still exist after it. https://netnewswire.com https://feedly.com

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