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Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

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Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#341

Post by cnick »

caeril wrote: post #333
thrdbndndn wrote: post #46

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.

It's also highly suspect. 240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade. If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution. Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism. The author is either lying about the photo li…

In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-phot...

Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count.

There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#342

Post by brokenmachine »

varispeed wrote: post #318
vocatan wrote: post #27

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!

I would be careful with hard drives. As I learned couple of days ago when I got my 10 year old hard drive from storage, I was unable to read most of the data as the drive would start to intermittently disconnect from the computer. Most likely the drive is okay, but the board has developed an issue - maybe capacitors gone bad or something. Now, I am yet to check if it is the one that has hardware encryption (I suppose…

I recommend ddrescue for data recovery, worked really well when I needed it.

It will resume when you hook the drive back up, and work around dead sectors.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#343

Post by brokenmachine »

hbn wrote: post #177
thrdbndndn wrote: post #46

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.

The point of these services is they're supposed to be an easy-to-use, worry-free photo backup. Amazon/Google/Apple should surely have the resources available to keep my photos stored somewhere with some redundancy. I don't want to worry about how they do it, but that's the idea. In exchange they're probably training image recognition algorithms or what have you on my photos, and I certainly wouldn't keep anything too…

>YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly

My experience couldn't be further from that.

When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted".

I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#344

Post by brokenmachine »

godshatter wrote: post #218

This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans. I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especi…

>Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.

Imagine if the nazis had access to the data that people store online now...

There wouldn't be any Schindler's list, he'd already have been in jail because the algorithm said so.

You can't opt out when everyone else has already opted you in.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#345

Post by paledot »

justin_oaks wrote: post #199
tyingq wrote: post #185

This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive. Google is especially frustrating for me. By default, an Android tries to sync all videos and photos up to Google photos. You can turn that off, but not in any sort of granular way. For example, you can't say "sync photos, but d…

While I still use Google Photos, there are times that I don't want pictures I take with my phone to be synced to the cloud. Since Google Photos does not allow such functionality, I installed a second camera app. That app allows me to choose where the picture are saved, so I save them to a folder that doesn't get backed up by Google Photos. It's annoying to have to do this, but at least I can finally choose what gets…

You can do this with locked folders.

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10694388?hl=en

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#346

Post by rpgbr »

exitb wrote: post #152
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc). I also maintain a…

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?

I’ve been using this tool to backup Apple Photos library to an external drive: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#348

Post by getoffmyyawn »

FireBy2024 wrote: post #313
getoffmyyawn wrote: post #281

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had s…

We do the same. What's a good alternative for videos?

I've been looking into authoring blu rays. Seems to be several promising apps but I haven't tried any yet.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#349

Post by getoffmyyawn »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #312
getoffmyyawn wrote: post #281

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had s…

Rough strategy: 1) use iCloud Photos 2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above) 3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space” 4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time. 5) setup Time Machine for that computer 6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library…

That's a nice comprehensive approach. I'm actually pretty happy with my setup from a data loss prevention perspective. It is just that, as I approach 2 decades of saving digital photos, I question the utility of it.

My parents have photo albums going back a few generations. The family tradition is that they are passed to the cousin with the most children, to maintain for future generations. If I were handed 500K+ images in a drive or a cloud account from each family member, I doubt I would ever look at most of them. With a bound and curated album, I know they are full enjoyed by every family member with an interest in the past.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#350

Post by lebed2045 »

I urge everyone to use external disk backup, possibly with prism opensource alternative to cloud photo storage. After Facebook deleted my acc for no reason and google locked my account due to payment system problems- you start to rethink who really own your memories in the cloud and how securely they stored.
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