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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

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Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#71

Post by ghaff »

pnutjam wrote: post #61
ghaff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, organizing old photos in general (especially scanned in pre-digital ones) is pretty much a horrid task in most cases. I'm dealing with it right now and stuff is linked to all over my hard drive, dupes in different formats at different levels of quality, limited metadata, etc. New stuff suffers from there being just so much of it--much of it repetitive--but at least it's in some semblance of order.

Afew years ago, I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date. I may have retained the old name in the metadata. I'm looking for the script I used. I also have some tools that compare hashes and find duplicates. You can google that stuff, or if you want to hire me to help, PM me.

I sorted stuff by ages and, very roughly, by content ages ago. So it's not horrible. By biggest issue is that when I first started using Lightroom I didn't really have a good orderly ingestion workflow so there's a duplication of raw scans, PSDs, JPGs, different versions of edits, etc. It's hard to automate and what to save and what to toss from the catalog is somewhat a matter of judgement.

>I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date.

I actually don't care about the filename, although maybe once things are cleaned up I'll do an export of everything. It's all in a Lightroom catalog now. It's "just" a matter of adding more primarily location-based metadata and making sure everything I especially care about is in appropriate Collections.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#72

Post by ghaff »

gravitas wrote: post #64
pnutjam wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afew years ago, I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date. I may have retained the old name in the metadata. I'm looking for the script I used. I also have some tools that compare hashes and find duplicates. You can google that stuff, or if you want to hire me to help, PM me.

Years ago when Flickr made a big change and I needed to extract my original uploaded content (almost same exact scenario as this thread), I found this script as a starting point (it uses jhead ): http://neverfear.org/blog/view/148/Rename_all_jpeg_files_by_...

For me, Flickr has always just been about copies of local files. At some point though, I do need to look at what all I've uploaded there. At one point, my Lightroom database got corrupted. I was able to recover it but I lost the local service mirror of what I had uploaded. (And a fair bit of stuff pre-dated using Flickr in any case.)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#73

Post by colejohnson66 »

bayindirh wrote: post #49
oefrha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

I follow r/Datahoarder for best practices and methods for getting my own stuff (like HumbleBundle or purchased eBook libraries) to my own local storage but, some of them really abuse online storage providers. I cringe sometimes reading all the posts. Why on the world someone try to mirror nearly everything to somewhere like Scrat from the Ice Age?

It’s mainly because they can, but I also bet it’s that feeling that you’re “cheating” the system (like why people cheat in online video games)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#74

Post by colejohnson66 »

ddorian43 wrote: post #69
worldofmatthew wrote: post #6

Storage keeps getting cheaper. A $5/month income per user should allow at least 1TB of storage. If they use unraid (at 20% redundancy) than more like 1.7TB per user and that is not even going into them using used hardware (Not the HDDs but servers) or shunking HDD's which could allow over 3TB per user.

What is "unraid" ?

Software RAID and virtualization. You install it, (optionally) RAID drives together, then you can assign cores to certain OSes and do PCIe pass through (among other things). Basically, it’s a GUI for VT-x, but runs “below” your OS, not “above”.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#75

Post by [deleted] »

anoncake wrote: post #46
Spivak wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up. Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of…

Unlimited literally does mean unbounded, not "we don't tell you the limit". You cannot abuse a service by using it for its intended purpose. Storing data for possible later retrieval, even exabytes of data, is the purpose of a data storage service. Storing large amounts of random data merely to waste space might qualify as abuse. But that is a) a strawman as far as I can tell and b) it isn't always possible to tell a…

[deleted]

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#76

Post by colejohnson66 »

imtringued wrote: post #44
giantg2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think accuracy is important. If an author isn't trustworthy or correct on this, then why should we listen to their other information in good faith? I think it's not just new users. It's also new content/files. Existing users uploading more pictures can also generate revenue, right?

The problem is that there is no overarching word that describes this class of "scheme". There are pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, matrix schemes, unlimited schemes and so on. Everyone uses an example of this class of scheme and then say that X is "ponzi scheme like" instead of saying that X is an instance of "circular fraud" where "circular fraud" is a term for this class of scheme I just made up on the spot. Just in…

Others here have suggested “bait and switch” which, IMO, is a more apt descriptor

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#77

Post by mceachen »

gravitas wrote: post #30
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.

The organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.

I discovered ratarmount the other day (pip3 install ratarmount), which fuse-mounts tgz. Fancier, you can glob all your Takeouts into a single merged directory (ratarmount *.tgz ~/takeout). Even fancier, PhotoStructure will then read and de-dupe that directory hierarchy. I just added person and album metadata parsers (those will be in the next release), which were the last bits that we're missing.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#78

Post by bluedino »

lou1306 wrote: post #53
oefrha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

> r/DataHoarder To be honest, 99% of the posts there are about building your own NAS. And I don't fully agree with the "we can't have nice things" narrative in the Google Photos case. How bad was Google hurt by the actions of these few "power users"? Before that, how much did they profit by driving out competition with their "unlimited" plan? (Which, by the way, was neatly integrated and advertised into their own mob…

99% of the users of unlimited plans are only storing a smalll amount of data

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#79

Post by ghaff »

jsmith99 wrote: post #60
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

Google Photos isn't 'safe' or versatile enough to be a good location for your master copy. It works better as a convienient photo browser with some backup and sharing features. There is a rclone backend for Google Photos but it has a few limitations due to the api. Theoretically you can use this to mount Google Photos locally but there are a few restrictions.

Personally, I think that using any of these services as your master is a mistake. But I realize it's what many consumers do. (And, to be fair, it probably is safer for most people than storing one copy on a spinning disk drive was. Which is also what many consumers did.)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#80

Post by selectodude »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #55
_flux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest. I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you a…

You're still calling it unlimited while placing a limit. You've been clever about how you impose the limit, but it's still there.

Unlimited storage means just that. They never said infinite inbound data transfer speeds. "If you can get it to us, we'll store it" is totally reasonable.
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