I just got the email from Google.
For a company this size, a one month notice is an asshole move.
Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#62Whoever sent this email should be reprimanded. The vast majority of recipients have never used this "product". The images will not be deleted when it's killed because they actually reside in other products such as Blogger and will still be downloadable using Takeout[1], so approximately nobody needed to be notified. But now this is yet another PR cycle for the "Google kills everything" meme. [1] https://support.googl…
I had one image added in 2013 in this service. No idea what this is exactly but the mail was indeed confusing.
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#63This appears to be NEITHER your "Archive" NOR your albums in Google Photos. This is basically a collection of media you uploaded to Blogger, Hangouts, and Picasa Web Albums. Still, doesn't hurt to Takeout your Google Photos every ~6 months. (I am working on an app that will help you organize and view them, together with your text messages, location history, and other online-only data.)
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Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think give some time to make sure you've changed all your log-ins. there's bound to be accounts out there you've forgotten about and might not be able to use. maybe once you don't get any important emails for 6 months? and then there's like updating and moving all google authenticator entries to something else. things like that. anyway, don't just rush it!
Note to anyone who might be reading this and thinking "that's me" - if it's you, then you should move to a password manager and create a database of all your accounts. I once spent a couple days moving every account I have ever created into KeePassXC, and changing all of their passwords to unique randomly-generated ones. You only have to do this once, and given enough time (making sure you add accounts over time that…
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Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#65This appears to be NEITHER your "Archive" NOR your albums in Google Photos. This is basically a collection of media you uploaded to Blogger, Hangouts, and Picasa Web Albums. Still, doesn't hurt to Takeout your Google Photos every ~6 months. (I am working on an app that will help you organize and view them, together with your text messages, location history, and other online-only data.)
Does that mean blogger will also be shut down soon?
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got the email, thought, “huh, never heard of it.” Wasn’t curious enough to find out until I saw this post. Still didn’t understand what exactly this was or how I used it, so I clicked. 30% of the screen (on mobile) is a banner telling me I should be using chrome. Another 40% banner is telling me the site is going away soon soon soon. Another 10% is exhorting me to make connections with my account so others can see…
sounds nightmarish Though I’m not seeing what you describe on Safari with iOS 16.5
it was so bad, I actually took a screenshot and was going to post it, but I guess imgur doesn’t allow anonymous uploads anymore. Wonder how long that’s been the case.
I’ll look for a decent looking photo host that’s not going to mercilessly exploit my metadata and edit and post the screed cap.
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#67I had never heard of album archive, but apparently I have one. I started the export which might take 'hours or even days'. Looking forward to discover what is in there.
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#68I just downloaded the archive it created: basically a couple of random photos. The archive was 3.3MB. The last activity was from 2013 when somebody else took a photo of me and shared it with me somehow via picasa web. The other activity was from 2007.
Not very recent in other words.
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#69WTF does this mean for Blogger? Does it have a migration route for the photos? If there's no migration route, a tool that could be created by one Google developer, it means thousands of people now have work to fix thousands of Blogger posts. Cumulatively ~48 hours of work for a tool has just turned into at least 48000 hours for everyone else. What's worse is, people will fix their blogs but I bet Google will use brok…
This is only a guess, but I get the impression Album Archive is some sort of aggregator service. The original Blogger images appear to still be stored in Blogger's own media manager.
For example, many images referenced from Blogger posts contain links with URLs like https://1.bp.blogspot.com/... further strengthening the case that these images originate from Blogger, not the Archive service.
So in summary, my guess is that shutting down Album Archive will not affect Blogger media files.
Another case for this conclusion, is that it seems totally insane to delete all of Blogger's media files, and not inform Blogger users directly, but instead do it through some obscure Archive service notice.
Would be nice to get an official confirmation on this, but let's say we can make an educated guess that people's Blogger photos are probably safe.
Re: Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive
#70Why the flurry of decommissions from Google recently?
More compute for the Bard maybe?