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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

#271
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have too, but when they have a bad policy they’ll defend it to death. Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping. Action…

> They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-…

No excuse, so I walk with my feet.

I never see senseless product listings on Ebay. For that matter, I get Ebay shipments from Japan faster than AMZN gets me packages from a warehouse in the next state. People selling animals and farm stuff on craiglist sometimes struggle to spell words like ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ but once more the listings make sense.

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

#272
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-…

Or Amazon could pay someone to review reported listings. This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.

> This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.

...if they could do that, why would you need to be able to report listings? They'd just block the bad ones automatically.

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

#273
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)

Not sure if it has been mentioned already but photoprism added face recognition a few releases ago and it is working well for me: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism The quality of this software is overall extremely good. It is a solo-developer as well so you might want to consider sponsoring them if you end up using it. I am not affiliated, just a happy user :)

Photoprism is absolutely amazing. It was the quickest donation I’ve ever made to an OSS project.

I have a Photoprism instance running on my home server backed by a raidz1 ZFS pool (1st backup). Photos are periodically synced to a Backblaze bucket with versioning enabled (2nd backup). The source of most photos is an iOS device with iCloud enabled (main copy). I rely on PhotoSync to periodically sync from the iOS device to Photoprism.

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

#274
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what do y'all actually do with your hundreds of thousands of photos? I just bulk delete everything older than a month when my phone is low on storage. Do you ever actually go back and look at any of the hundreds of thousands of pictures? When do you do this?

Fun party trick: look up old photos of people when you meet them after a long time and show it to them. Everyone is shocked/embarrassed. Extra points if you can pull up childhood photos of them.

I liked that the X-Files reboot kept the old credits. Mulder and Scully look like babies. Then the credits end and reality intrudes. Of course, I'd aged at the same rate (maybe faster) but it was still a shock.

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

#275
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Amazon could pay someone to review reported listings. This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.

> This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad. ...if they could do that, why would you need to be able to report listings? They'd just block the bad ones automatically.

I meant the system including human reviewers.

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

#276
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-…

No excuse, so I walk with my feet. I never see senseless product listings on Ebay. For that matter, I get Ebay shipments from Japan faster than AMZN gets me packages from a warehouse in the next state . People selling animals and farm stuff on craiglist sometimes struggle to spell words like ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ but once more the listings make sense.

> I never see senseless product listings on Ebay.

Do you believe that this is because Ebay knows something that Amazon doesn't know? I personally think Ebay just doesn't drive the kind of sales volume — or have the particular expected sale+logistics lifecycle (immediate payment to enable immediate shipment of locally-warehoused goods through Prime, etc) — that makes these particular scammers interested in exploiting it.

Also, as you're describing this more, I'm increasingly confused, because I don't think I've ever seen an Amazon store listing that is truly "senseless" in the way you're describing. Maybe it's just that I've only ever visited Amazon's Canadian storefront, and these particular attackers aren't active on there; but while I see lots of AliExpress-dropshipped product listings, lots of page grooming, etc., but never a completely-senseless listing. I believe you that they exist; but can you link an example?

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

#277
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!

Self-host and use Photoview [1], it has face recognition. I use this since 2 years with 5TB of photos (on ZFS) and it works flawlessly. It is worth it - everything under your control and you decide when to migrate. My phone's photos are also uploaded automatically to a Nextcloud folder, which is read-mounted to Photoview and scanned automatically.

[1]:https://github.com/photoview/photoview

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)

There's a difference between face detection and face recognition. Last I checked (less than a year ago) it could find faces, but was abysmal at recognizing them. I spend a few days on it, tweaking this and that, taking to the devs. It was crap.

It was pretty bad until just recently (a couple of months ago?) when I noticed it was incredibly improved, might want to try it again.

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

#279

And people laugh when they hear about my USB HDD docking station and a fleet of 3.5" HDDs backup setup....

And then you read up on bit rot and HDDs dying when not used for a long time, and there goes the fuzzy feeling. :(

Just wait until you read about what happens to those cold-storage SSDs!

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

#280
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad. ...if they could do that, why would you need to be able to report listings? They'd just block the bad ones automatically.

I meant the system including human reviewers.

In that case, you're wrong: the Denial of Service is "jamming the human review queue", and it would be very successful. Even Amazon doesn't have infinite money to hire moderators to keep up with the number of [99.99999% automated and illegitimate] reports that would flood in.

(Actually, it's probably a supply problem more than a demand problem — there probably aren't enough people willing and able to work as moderators on the entire Earth, to manually review the number of complaints that would be generated here. It would cost them orders of magnitude less to just hire people to manually review all changes made to product listings! ...which they still won't do, because that's still apparently too high a cost to bear.)

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