Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data for training neural networks?
Is unlabeled data even useful for that purpose?
Unsupervised learning can identify all the distinct people (and animals) in every photo you've taken. Then they ask you "who is this"?
Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
201–210 of 256 posts
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#202I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free .
As I understood it, it is only free for previous Pixel owners until they buy a new Pixel. So it is free for the lifetime of the device, not the users lifetime.
Isn't that how most people would have understood the offer anyways? Why should Google store the photos from e.g. your new OnePlus for free just because you owned a Pixel in the past?
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#203> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.” Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
You could argue that all hyper growth “build it and they will come” types of companies do this bait and switch. It’s inherent to the startup culture that emphasizes capturing users above earning profit in the early stages of a company. Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech gen…
Google 'subsidizes' some of their services by leveraging them to gain valuable information. Google voice was used to train their voice analysis algorithms. Recaptcha has been used to transcribe text for google books, road signs etc for street view, and now objects for waymo.
If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).
I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#204Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.
Well they still want extra 15GB.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole. Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), consid…
Is google mining photos for profit? What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?
From photos you can find every person you (in person) know, everywhere you've gone, everything you do, everything you own (and don't). So long as it shows up in a picture once. If storage for 200gb costs _them_ a couple bucks, and that's the price of a few ad (conversions), it would seem to work out. I'm an outsider of course, would be interesting to understand the actual economics from someone more familiar with the details. Of course, if the story were this rosy they obviously wouldn't be charging. So I'm sure its quite a bit more nuanced than this.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#206what I want to know: why would storage prices increase when storage costs continue to plummet (and network ingress costs remain cheap due to asymmetric use vs serving) spitballing... - gphotos was free when google wanted the data for training algorithms. They now have the data they need and it's become a cost center. Given Android integration, that amount is substantial. - the paid plans are underperforming, and this…
I expect that the issue is more likely that 99.999% of people are using the service are doing so "normally", but the 0.001% who are not are using disproportionally large amounts of data/abusing the service at the detriment of others etc. I have no doubt that there are people out there doing shady/dodgy things to abuse the free "unlimited" storage and pumping in huge huge huge amounts of data or have hacked up some cr…
or you could just set limit which would be enough for 99.99% users and charge the people who don't find it sufficient
but 15GB is what, 1000-3000 photos at best nowadays with zero videos, with videos it will be gone within days/weeks
I would more understand if they would set up 1000 photos monthly limit instead size limit
btw. I don't use Google photos, so I don't really care what they offer
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#207I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos. To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year. Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.
> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, t…
I don't think that's inefficient as such, that's just the price you pay for data durability. Sure you can buy a high capacity HDD on Amazon for very little, but most people would be pretty sad if/when the hard drive dies and takes the family photo collection with it.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not charging a dollar. That's my point. They're raising their prices, while storage costs fall. Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.
> Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation. Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing. At…
Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward.
That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month?
Get it now?
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#209For anyone looking for other options: I've been very pleased with Microsoft's Onedrive offering; I pay $70/year for access to all the Office apps plus 1TB of storage and their family plan is $100/year and supports up to 6 people, with 1TB of storage per account.
Yandex disk has unlimited photo storage for now and I don't think Yandex is going anywhere, at worst they will start charging for it.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#210It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business tha…
It didn't work though, there's like 1 billion ways to store photos. At the end of the day DropBox started as just a wrapper around Amazon S3 buckets, it's not exactly a high barrier to entry.
The storage is a small piece of the Google Photos offering. Good luck searching for a persons name or "sunsets", getting time hops, stylized suggestions and collages, or easy group sharing on a trip in solutions like DropBox or S3, especially for the average user.
That's the weirdest thing to me about this conversation. People act like storage is the main thing Google Photos does, but that's not by a long shot the most compelling piece of the offering.