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Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

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Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#51

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

superkuh wrote: post #47
smrtinsert wrote: post #7

Trust the cloud they said, it's always there they said. In all seriousness, the need for local, speedy, transparent and ubiquitous data redundancy is still there and if anything growing. Consumers want a 'refrigerator' of data - be it documents, photos, etc. Buy, set and forget. Huge opportunity there.

It won't work because ISP are slowly but steadily turning home internet connections to one way flows. It starts with data caps and ends with IPv4 exhaustion and every single account behind Carrier NAT. The type of internet where anyone could host and interact freely with other parts of the internet are already past. People just haven't realized it. It'll be Internet TV.

Or just sucky upstream - my local cableco, Wave, has a 1Gbps DOCSIS3.0 service - except the upstream is a paltry 10mbps - that's a 100:1 down/up ratio.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#52

Post by j2bax »

mandazi wrote: post #11

Google's version (photos.google.com) is great. I love the auto-generated albums, animated gifs and movies. It's also very easy to share and create group albums.

I was using Google Photos until really recently when I decided I'm just not comfortable giving them that much un-gated insight into my life... Switched over to iCloud and I have no regrets. Google did some fun/novel things with my photos and their ability to render hundreds of photo thumbnails quickly on my mobile was impressive but I can live without it for privacies sake.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#53

Post by mikestew »

vaishaksuresh wrote: post #35

Maybe I'm too old for this, but I read the title as "Dropbox discontinues photo galleries" I still can't get used to the fact that drop means release.

You're thinking "drop" like a "drop point" where the binaries go after the build server is done with them. "Drop" in this case is like bike racing: "I dropped him on the last hill", i. e., I got rid of him by speeding up. "I dropped that like a hot potato" (picture holding a potato just out of the 200C oven with bare hands), a common U. S. phrase to indicate getting rid of something or having nothing to do with it.

So, Dropbox is dropping photos in the hot potato sense, not the build server artifact sense.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#54

Post by ChuckMcM »

ghaff wrote: post #50
ChuckMcM wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with this. Local broadband access is good enough, and IPV6 spread widely enough, that you could make a network accessible data fridge that lived in your house work. Using the cloud for offline encrypted backups only. To work though it will require some exceptional simplification and product engineering.

I'm very cautious about exposing my home network to the Internet. I can't really see putting my primary data storage on a system that's fully exposed if some critical vulnerability is discovered. I need everywhere access to a pretty small portion of my data. Even given properly managed encryption one has to assume the system could get wiped which makes other backup regimes necessary. As you say, hard to get bulletpro…

I think you are right to be cautious. It would be an interesting paper to read on the attack surface of a 'cloud storage provider' versus the attack surface of a single appliance.

In an earlier life I managed the implementation of system software on an Internet appliance. Later I worked in a team that implemented the system software in a storage appliance. It is a challenging thing to get right for sure. As with most things you can't really get to perfect. But I do believe you can get to "good enough" which is to say that for a large swath of the population I believe it is possible to build a dedicated storage appliance that you could leave connected to the Internet 24/7 and its systems would not be compromised.

And if you worked with applications that currently use 'cloud storage' so that your data is always available to you anywhere you have net access, I expect you could limit cross application vulnerabilities. You would do that by brutally simplifying what could be done on the appliance to the bare minimum, not even an OS as many would define it.

The advantages over the current notion of 'cloud' would be three fold, one your appliance would never withdraw its API and make your application unusable, two it would never be possible for a third party to be served an NSL which would give access to your data without you knowing about it, and third there would be no "giant bucket of user credentials and information" honeypot that once compromised at the cloud server would force a massive re-validation exercise on you and possible other issues with a re-used password.

I know from experience that attacks directed at an appliance stand out. That helps in making defense easier.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#55

Post by whyenot »

Their monthly price for 1TB of storage is still less than Google Drive, but I've become increasingly frustrated with Dropbox. If I want 2TB instead of 1TB, I have to pay 4.5 times more. I can understand that they may want to go after business users and that I am not a core customer, but the pricing seems out of whack and then they keep on cutting features. For me, it's time to get off the train.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#56

Post by Angostura »

Jabbles wrote: post #37
jmathai wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you asked :). Here's how I get all the benefits of Google Photos without relying on the service to be around in order to have my photos. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...

Isn't _the_ benefit of Google Photos (over any other storage service) the ability to search your photos for keywords e.g. "mountain"?

Actually, Apple Photos is getting pretty good at this now

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#57

Post by 0xffff2 »

superkuh wrote: post #47
smrtinsert wrote: post #7

Trust the cloud they said, it's always there they said. In all seriousness, the need for local, speedy, transparent and ubiquitous data redundancy is still there and if anything growing. Consumers want a 'refrigerator' of data - be it documents, photos, etc. Buy, set and forget. Huge opportunity there.

It won't work because ISP are slowly but steadily turning home internet connections to one way flows. It starts with data caps and ends with IPv4 exhaustion and every single account behind Carrier NAT. The type of internet where anyone could host and interact freely with other parts of the internet are already past. People just haven't realized it. It'll be Internet TV.

My solution to this is a cheap Linux VPS. It's still "in the cloud", but I think simple VPS hosting is much less likely to go away or change drastically than more complex cloud services. It seems like co-location would be even better, but I have no idea how that would work for individuals looking to host a single server. I've always assumed it would be prohibitively expensive.

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#58

Post by Paul-ish »

nnutter wrote: post #38
727374 wrote: post #32

Annoying. I was happy paying $100/yr for Dropbox to store my photos along with a few extra files. The photo features weren't great, but good enough for basic browsing through galleries. I bought into the idea that if I was paying for the storage it would be more durable and permanent than some fly-by-night photo startup or google/amazon feature. I realize the photos aren't going anywhere, but my use case is. Cancelin…

Dropbox only dabbled in photos. Despite my desire to support Dropbox both because they pioneered the online synced folder and because they supported Linux I ended up paying Google because Google Photos came out of the gate way ahead of Dropbox’s languishing attempts at photo management/sharing and Google Photos has kept a strong pace.

How do you sync from Linux?

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#59

Post by tomrod »

Paul-ish wrote: post #58
nnutter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox only dabbled in photos. Despite my desire to support Dropbox both because they pioneered the online synced folder and because they supported Linux I ended up paying Google because Google Photos came out of the gate way ahead of Dropbox’s languishing attempts at photo management/sharing and Google Photos has kept a strong pace.

How do you sync from Linux?

They provide an installation method.

For servers, you can just run the daemon. For desktop, Nautilus is supported (or you can just run the daemon!).

https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

Re: Dropbox Drops Photo Galleries

#60

Post by nnutter »

Paul-ish wrote: post #58
nnutter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox only dabbled in photos. Despite my desire to support Dropbox both because they pioneered the online synced folder and because they supported Linux I ended up paying Google because Google Photos came out of the gate way ahead of Dropbox’s languishing attempts at photo management/sharing and Google Photos has kept a strong pace.

How do you sync from Linux?

For Dropbox? You install the official Linux client. For Google? There are third-party sync products and Gnome can mount it as a network drive but I didn’t mean to imply that I did; I don’t sync Google Drive with Linux.
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