6 ms·

this is why i'm not completely 100% with google photos. i'm ready to spend the monthly fees to store all my pictures in its original resolution, use google phot

by swang 10y ago

this is why i'm not completely 100% with google photos. i'm ready to spend the monthly fees to store all my pictures in its original resolution, use google photos to manage/search my photos. except i don't want to commit to using it and then finding out google doesn't want to support it and just dumps it. same thing with google voice. i use it but i've never committed to using it as my main phone number. maybe it's a catch-22, but maybe google should stop sunsetting so many products so as to cause people to have no faith in their products. pretty much the only untouchable thing is gmail since the negative press for that would probably end google to the general public.

riprowan 10y ago
I'm right there with you. Long term Google product user here (Android, Fi, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Etc) and I'm winding it all down, except gmail which will remain my spam-mailbox.
- tiatia 10y ago
  Gmail is shit. Gmail is Email Extraordinaire but if something goes wrong and you lose access, good luck gaining it back. Try to call somebody. This, and all the privacy issues.
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Account recovery is a shitshow everywhere, either it's almost useless or it's a huge vulnerability with no good middle ground I've seen. For a moment I thought this would be a good use case for federated authentication, but who would you even trust to run that securely?
    - tiatia 10y ago
      How about a company that you pay and that you can call? (and maybe submit a passport copy if need be or something) They sell email for your own domain (you can also buy a domain there): https://www.infomaniak.com/en https://www.infomaniak.com/en Bonus: Based in Switzerland, no EU or US jurisdiction.
naskwo 10y ago
www.famipix.com - online since 2005, and free for schools
imglorp 10y ago
What would happen if they wanted to sunset Voice? There's a large bank of phone numbers people migrated in there. I'm guessing they could spin out Grand Central again as its own business?
- mkaziz 10y ago
  Or they could just say, migrate your phone number elsewhere.
nattaylor 10y ago
I'm betting that Google Photos will necessarily stick around in order to keep Android competitive with iOS (and perhaps Windows.) I desperately hope they make it a paid service, if needed, rather than shutter it. I've fully committed and have uploaded 40,932 photos. All of the automation has been amazing.
- coldpie 10y ago
  I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?
  - ams6110 10y ago
    This is the reason I pretty much stopped taking photos altogether. I realized I almost never go back and look at them.
    - tzakrajs 10y ago
      Photos are like Steam games, maybe when you are in the hospital for a stay you can knock both out in one go, eh?
  - jjnoakes 10y ago
    I find a nice way to be reminded of some memories is to have random pictures show up as my desktop or phone background once in a while. I also go back through them and pull out some for use during big lifetime events (10*n birthdays, weddings, retirement, etc).
  - nattaylor 10y ago
    This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless. In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them. To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100 albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I want a trip down memory lane, etc. As for the other ~36k, I don't have any statistics but: * On ~10 occasions I've sent emails to friends after getting one of the "this day in YYYY" notifications with a link to the photos * On a few (~4) occasions, I've used the faces grouping to find old, fun photos of friends * Yesterday I happened to get a "This day in YYYY" notification that reminded me about an event I photographed at my neighbors house, but had forgotten to send the photos (7 years ago, oops) * I'd rediscovered some DSLR photos I probably would have missed thanks to the "approx location tagging" (that taps in my phones location history) * I share photos far more frequently since its free, unlimited and auto-upload * The auto-animations and auto-panoramas have made me go back and rediscover photos from some old trips * Just the other day my Mom was interested in a photo she remembered me taking on a trip in 2013. I was able to search the place name and find the photo in seconds I started down the path of Google Photos because my old workflow of manually merging smartphone and DSLR pics on disk and then not having a good centralized album management system felt clunky. I'm surprised by how often I find myself going to http://photos.google.com http://photos.google.com now.
overcast 10y ago
Why not just use CaptureOne/LightRoom, and have encrypted offsite backups? Using a specific product to "store" pictures sounds silly.
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  I can't speak for the person you replied to, but I rely on a product to "store" pictures so I can access them when I'm not at my main computer. I'd like to show them to others using my phone, share them with other computers (like my wife's) so she can edit some, or add to the collections, and they are also accessible to the machines hosting my web sites, so that others can browse the ones I choose to publish. Encrypted backups are great for recovery, but they don't address many other useful features of these additional products.
- owenwil 10y ago
  I use Lightroom, but it's fairly "dumb" in its approach to photo management: no features, no surfacing of old content, just a useless grid. GPhotos on the other hand surfaces old photos in interesting ways, shows you moments from the past and even sometimes creates cool edits on its own. It's actually pretty magic, and feels years ahead of Lightroom.
  - stefco_ 10y ago
    Well, they're also for different use cases, so I don't think "ahead" is the right word. Lightroom is pro-oriented and assumes that you know what photo you want to find, whereas consumer photo apps are more about browsing and availability than anything else (hence the autogenerated montages and cloud storage integration). But that is exactly why I use a combination of Lightroom and Apple Photos. (edit: Though I wouldn't mind having some of these slick organization/discovery features in Lightroom as long as they didn't ruin the rest of the experience.)
SnowingXIV 10y ago
Gmail and Google Drive, my biggest ties. I can't see either of these going away, because like many mentioned these services are consumer based which Google seems to care about more. Well, I heavily use Adwords professionally and that support used to be pretty decent - though I feel it's gone downhill very quickly lately. Someone will answer your call but the expertise is lacking which is fine for your level 1 support but even their offshore "specialists" only seem to give cookie cutter optimization advice or the famous "add more money." They've recently transitioned to this "beta" health checkup feature that gives the same advice except without people! It's automated and to be honest, it's even better than the support I was getting. This could view my stuff and if I was missing a critical component (I have a lot of ads running) it'll call it out. I don't know what happened to Adwords but about a year ago, I had amazing onshore support and the person listened to business case scenarios and we would have discussions on possible strategies and ways to save money but be more effective. I would love to be a fly on the wall on some of these higher up Google exec meetings on where they switch priority on a dime.
- CamelCaseName 10y ago
  The strategy makes sense to me. Hire people who deeply understand the product to support users. Get as much feedback and use cases as you can. Then eliminate support costs once you've found your place in the market by first replacing staff with lower paid, less knowledgeable people, then automate it.
mholt 10y ago
With similar concerns, I wrote photobak so I always have my photos locally: https://github.com/mholt/photobak https://github.com/mholt/photobak
navs 10y ago
They might not kill Gmail but I wonder about Inbox. Is that receiving much love?

by swang 10y ago

riprowan 10y ago

I'm right there with you. Long term Google product user here (Android, Fi, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Etc) and I'm winding it all down, except gmail which will remain my spam-mailbox.

tiatia 10y ago
Gmail is shit. Gmail is Email Extraordinaire but if something goes wrong and you lose access, good luck gaining it back. Try to call somebody. This, and all the privacy issues.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Account recovery is a shitshow everywhere, either it's almost useless or it's a huge vulnerability with no good middle ground I've seen. For a moment I thought this would be a good use case for federated authentication, but who would you even trust to run that securely?
  - tiatia 10y ago
    How about a company that you pay and that you can call? (and maybe submit a passport copy if need be or something) They sell email for your own domain (you can also buy a domain there): https://www.infomaniak.com/en https://www.infomaniak.com/en Bonus: Based in Switzerland, no EU or US jurisdiction.

naskwo 10y ago

www.famipix.com - online since 2005, and free for schools

imglorp 10y ago

What would happen if they wanted to sunset Voice? There's a large bank of phone numbers people migrated in there. I'm guessing they could spin out Grand Central again as its own business?

mkaziz 10y ago
Or they could just say, migrate your phone number elsewhere.

nattaylor 10y ago

I'm betting that Google Photos will necessarily stick around in order to keep Android competitive with iOS (and perhaps Windows.) I desperately hope they make it a paid service, if needed, rather than shutter it. I've fully committed and have uploaded 40,932 photos. All of the automation has been amazing.

coldpie 10y ago
I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?
- ams6110 10y ago
  This is the reason I pretty much stopped taking photos altogether. I realized I almost never go back and look at them.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    Photos are like Steam games, maybe when you are in the hospital for a stay you can knock both out in one go, eh?
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  I find a nice way to be reminded of some memories is to have random pictures show up as my desktop or phone background once in a while. I also go back through them and pull out some for use during big lifetime events (10*n birthdays, weddings, retirement, etc).
- nattaylor 10y ago
  This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless. In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them. To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100 albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I want a trip down memory lane, etc. As for the other ~36k, I don't have any statistics but: * On ~10 occasions I've sent emails to friends after getting one of the "this day in YYYY" notifications with a link to the photos * On a few (~4) occasions, I've used the faces grouping to find old, fun photos of friends * Yesterday I happened to get a "This day in YYYY" notification that reminded me about an event I photographed at my neighbors house, but had forgotten to send the photos (7 years ago, oops) * I'd rediscovered some DSLR photos I probably would have missed thanks to the "approx location tagging" (that taps in my phones location history) * I share photos far more frequently since its free, unlimited and auto-upload * The auto-animations and auto-panoramas have made me go back and rediscover photos from some old trips * Just the other day my Mom was interested in a photo she remembered me taking on a trip in 2013. I was able to search the place name and find the photo in seconds I started down the path of Google Photos because my old workflow of manually merging smartphone and DSLR pics on disk and then not having a good centralized album management system felt clunky. I'm surprised by how often I find myself going to http://photos.google.com http://photos.google.com now.

overcast 10y ago

Why not just use CaptureOne/LightRoom, and have encrypted offsite backups? Using a specific product to "store" pictures sounds silly.

jjnoakes 10y ago
I can't speak for the person you replied to, but I rely on a product to "store" pictures so I can access them when I'm not at my main computer. I'd like to show them to others using my phone, share them with other computers (like my wife's) so she can edit some, or add to the collections, and they are also accessible to the machines hosting my web sites, so that others can browse the ones I choose to publish. Encrypted backups are great for recovery, but they don't address many other useful features of these additional products.
owenwil 10y ago
I use Lightroom, but it's fairly "dumb" in its approach to photo management: no features, no surfacing of old content, just a useless grid. GPhotos on the other hand surfaces old photos in interesting ways, shows you moments from the past and even sometimes creates cool edits on its own. It's actually pretty magic, and feels years ahead of Lightroom.
- stefco_ 10y ago
  Well, they're also for different use cases, so I don't think "ahead" is the right word. Lightroom is pro-oriented and assumes that you know what photo you want to find, whereas consumer photo apps are more about browsing and availability than anything else (hence the autogenerated montages and cloud storage integration). But that is exactly why I use a combination of Lightroom and Apple Photos. (edit: Though I wouldn't mind having some of these slick organization/discovery features in Lightroom as long as they didn't ruin the rest of the experience.)

SnowingXIV 10y ago

Gmail and Google Drive, my biggest ties. I can't see either of these going away, because like many mentioned these services are consumer based which Google seems to care about more. Well, I heavily use Adwords professionally and that support used to be pretty decent - though I feel it's gone downhill very quickly lately. Someone will answer your call but the expertise is lacking which is fine for your level 1 support but even their offshore "specialists" only seem to give cookie cutter optimization advice or the famous "add more money." They've recently transitioned to this "beta" health checkup feature that gives the same advice except without people! It's automated and to be honest, it's even better than the support I was getting. This could view my stuff and if I was missing a critical component (I have a lot of ads running) it'll call it out. I don't know what happened to Adwords but about a year ago, I had amazing onshore support and the person listened to business case scenarios and we would have discussions on possible strategies and ways to save money but be more effective. I would love to be a fly on the wall on some of these higher up Google exec meetings on where they switch priority on a dime.

CamelCaseName 10y ago
The strategy makes sense to me. Hire people who deeply understand the product to support users. Get as much feedback and use cases as you can. Then eliminate support costs once you've found your place in the market by first replacing staff with lower paid, less knowledgeable people, then automate it.

mholt 10y ago

With similar concerns, I wrote photobak so I always have my photos locally: https://github.com/mholt/photobak https://github.com/mholt/photobak

navs 10y ago

They might not kill Gmail but I wonder about Inbox. Is that receiving much love?