I really hope this update will sort out the lack of meta data regarding which photos the Photo app compressed during upload. Even with the "Original" option set, the Android app would silently(!) switch to the compressed form, then happily tell you to delete the originals to save space(!!). I now have a random mix of photos both on Drive, Photos and copied over USB to my HDD but haven't found the time to unpick this schmozzle. I'm a paying customer.
Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#52Does it still not count photos above a certain megapixel count towards the free space?
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#53Maybe one day soon we'll see an official Linux client.
Ok but which Linux? Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? etc... Which desktop should they integrate with? Gnome? KDE?
I suppose they could go the Steam route and only support Ubuntu, but then that would be Ubuntu support, not really Linux support. It would be nice to have at least some support on Linux for sure, but unfortunately deciding to support Linux isn't an answer to a question, it's opening a whole extra big bag full of knotty questions.
Until that issue gets sorted out in Linux land, providing first class Linux support in any professional, commercial grade application or service is going to be problematic.
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#54If only Google Drive's app actually worked reliably (see the discussion from the day before yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732023 -- "It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me") this might be worth trying out. Since they can't even reliably sync the Drive folders they claim they can, who would trust their "backup" of the rest of the system?
Just like the discussion in that post, that user is such a far out edge case that it's just flat out disingenuous to say that the Google Drive app doesn't work reliably. It's not perfect, but it works for 99.9% of the people using it. 700,000 files at more than 2TB is not the typical use case for Google Drive.
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#55Still, no linux client.
I am mystified as to why Google keeps ignoring Linux especially for Drive. Don't a non-trivial number of Google employees run Linux? It also rules out Drive for company wide deployment if any of the people are using Linux, since they will be excluded. That is one thing Dropbox at least gets right.
Linux marketshare is around 1.5%, and I'd speculate those choosing Linux tend to be less willing to trust google/the cloud with their data than average.
It's just not worth it when the best-case outcome is indistinguishable from a rounding error,
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#56This is so confusing. What's that? A replacement, an addition? Will this clutter up my photos? It's like an invitation to: Try it out to find out what it really does and if it clutters up your photo stream... deal with it. Update: oh the blog actually writes it is an replacement. Great... now I don't know if this works in any way with Insync in parallel :(
Exactly! "We've made a whole bunch of really great assumptions. Can you guess what they are? Why not experiment with your precious data and find out!"
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#57Let's not kid ourselves. This is Google trying to fill up your account so you will purchase extra space sooner.
Are you insinuating their storage offers are offers for storage? That sounds like quite the conspiracy.
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
These "real customer pain points" seem pretty specific and isolated to me.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/play/86WVa8b_... 1,022 comments about a single aspect of the G Suite account restriction, relating to a single Google product (Play Music)... in this 1 thread alone. Doesn't seem that specific and isolated to me.
3 million paying g-suite "businesses" (Assume 3 customers per business as that's the minimum and you have 9 million accounts) and 1000 comments? Or 0.03% of customers or 0.01% of accounts.
Seems pretty specific and isolated to me.
Don't for a moment think I don't agree with that though. I am a paying g-suite user for my family and would love to have access to family sharing. But I do recognise that I am in a minority.
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#59If only Google Drive's app actually worked reliably (see the discussion from the day before yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732023 -- "It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me") this might be worth trying out. Since they can't even reliably sync the Drive folders they claim they can, who would trust their "backup" of the rest of the system?
Just like the discussion in that post, that user is such a far out edge case that it's just flat out disingenuous to say that the Google Drive app doesn't work reliably. It's not perfect, but it works for 99.9% of the people using it. 700,000 files at more than 2TB is not the typical use case for Google Drive.
The backup case is of the same scale as the original poster's situation.
My team found it unreliable for much smaller directories as well. 6 people, 6 independently unhappy with it. It was only on a conference call when we realized we were looking at different copies of files that we all complained of the same symptoms. Anecdote rather than data, I admit, but it's disturbing that each of us silently assumed we were the only ones having trouble.
(FWIW we stuck to google for realtime shared docs, but moved to DB for general file storage, including spreadsheets and presentations)
Re: Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive
#60Because Google Photos does not have an Android TV app, I periodically do a full Google Takeout to pull all my images so that I may rsync newer ones over to my NAS so that they appear in Plex and my wife can then view them on the Google TV. Can you stop reinventing things that already exist, and perhaps fix things that are real customer pain points. Like not being able to view Photos on an Android TV, like not being a…
It's not going to be easy to just put Google Photos on Android TV. Android TV has no concept of accounts or privacy so the only way it could really work right now is to either open up the entire user's photos to anyone currently using the TV or invent some sort of hard to use scheme such as only displaying photos "tagged" a certain way as public/tv which most people probably won't do. Or they could ask for a PIN each…
Can you cast photos from the Photos app in your phone?