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Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

• Forge36 6y ago
  I recently ran out of storage (i was using the "original image size") So I setup my phone to auto-Backup to my home server. Best choice I made. Looks like I'll now need to turn off photo backup from Google.
• nvrspyx 6y ago
  For anyone with a technical inclination, we knew this day would come eventually, thus Google did as well. But for the layman or casual user, one would assume the unlimited space would remain free forever. Companies really need to be upfront about the sustainability of their free options and the forecasting of when those things will change. Google had to have known that they couldn't sustain an unlimited free plan forever and should have stated such from the beginning. I'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.
• dmitrygr 6y ago
  I guess Google thinks they have enough training data, and can this stop offering free storage. Or maybe they think it is sticky enough to start charging and not lose clients. Either way, I wish them luck.
• speedgoose 6y ago
  Tldr: low quality but unlimited storage is expensive, so it will go away in June. However everything uploaded before will not use space for some time. High quality storage has never been unlimited so no changes. A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.
  • ggm 6y ago
    > A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons. This doesn't exist. But you can schedule a year of e.g. 2 monthly incremental takeouts at takeout.google.com and stop-limit your dataloss scenario to a window. btw: I think it should exist. I think google should clarify its 'we terminated you' process to include the takeout function for export of the data they currently hold hostage.
    • Fogest 6y ago
      This is exactly what I do. Every 2 months I get an email about a new backup being ready. If I know I have done a lot of stuff on my google account in the last 2 months I'll download a fresh archive of it and dump it to my NAS. It's kinda a tedious process since I have to go through and download all the zip files they have.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      I don't want to have to backup the data myself. I pay Google so they can backup my photos.
      • ggm 6y ago
        If you pay Google you won't be affected by this change since its about non paying people.
  • ISL 6y ago
    The way to guarantee the latter is to make your own periodic backups.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      But then these is almost no point to use Google Photos.
      • ISL 6y ago
        The instant sync from my phone is pretty rad and my primary use-case. For real backups, I manually sync the phone's images/movies/dngs to my home photo archive.
  • seized 6y ago
    Google Takeout. Or RClone can be used to download with some limitations (bursts dont download, GPS EXIf data is stripped, videos are true original nitrate). I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my NAS to backup the true original files.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      Yes but then I need to host the backup in a reliable way. I think Google is very competent to keep my personal data.
  • ianhowson 6y ago
    Keep in mind that the photos you download from Takeout have the GPS data stripped out, so (sibling commentors) already have an incomplete backup. PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) lets you do a good-old-fashioned dump to a NAS.
    • Octopuz 6y ago
      Does PhotoSync keep the GPS/location data when downloading from Google Photos? Their website is not very specific and slightly outdated (Picasa login anyone?)
      • ianhowson 6y ago
        Sorry, I wasn't clear. PhotoSync copies the photos from your device to some destination (NAS, SMB, S3, whatever.) It doesn't interact with Google Photos. When it copies stuff it copies the original HEIC/JPEG/RAW/whatever, so the GPS EXIF is preserved.
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    > low quality but unlimited storage is expensive I guarantee Google still makes money from those users. Google Photos adds value to the Google ecosystem, attracting more users and more paying users. The more history you have stored with Google, the harder it is to move. It also promotes other Google services users do pay for. I'd guess this is a move by someone in middle management to increase revenues for their product, without seeing the bigger picture, where this move probably has negative shareholder value.
• Hamuko 6y ago
  Well, luckily Google One is quite cheap. You can get 100 GB for 20 euro per year to get started and even the 2 TB plan is cheaper than for example Dropbox and iCloud when paid annually.
  • chrisjc 6y ago
    If you're an Amazon Prime user you can use their photo app that still has unlimited, full-res uploads. https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011 https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?node=13234696011 >Amazon Photos offers unlimited, full-resolution photo storage, plus 5 GB video storage for Prime members. Printing from amazon isn't too bad either.
    • anuila 6y ago
      Videos aren't free though and I feel that those 5 GB will start filling up pretty soon, which means you'll have to start paying anyway.
      • chrisjc 6y ago
        I'm not sure videos were unlimited on google either though. So I'm not sure you're losing a feature there.
        • anuila 6y ago
          They were included up to a certain resolution and duration, if I remember correctly, which covers most videos shot by the average person.
  • rektide 6y ago
    Free, however, meant that photos could stay online potentially past the end of someone's life. Now the dead will have their memories & photos that they've shared vanish. This is a dark day.
    • tyrust 6y ago
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  TLDR: unlimited high quality photos going away. Will start counting against your storage quota.
• th0ma5 6y ago
  Whatever... I just wish they actually let you manage your own content. I guess I could just download it all, but I certainly can't sort by size or really do just about anything useful in staying under the limits, so I feel really strong-armed into paying.
  • pythonaut_16 6y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. Good thing they discontinued Picasa in favor of pushing everything into the cloud for Google Photos.
  • mvgoogler 6y ago
    A new tool will launch on June 1 that will make it easier to manage quota usage. The goal is to make it easier to understand what is using quota and reduce the amount of quota that is used. It will show things like your largest photos and low quality (blurry, dark, etc) photos that you can review and decide what to delete.
  • actuator 6y ago
    Does something like this help? https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9776477 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9776477 I prefer not to manage the content actually. It is way better for Photos to group on dates, location, content. That way finding content becomes way easier on different dimensions.
• jeffbee 6y ago
  Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad "Backup and Sync" program for MacOS, which over the years has added thousands of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I'm happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.
  • washadjeffmad 6y ago
    Originally for Picasa, but still relevant: https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/google-photos-1/how-to/how-to-remove-duplicates-in-google-photos https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FA... Tl;dr - Either filter and curate online, or deduplicate. Also, fix your backup settings.
  • Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
    That is more of the G Drive itself than the software. I had several issues with G Drive like not showing the current version that was revised 10 min prior, sometime it will take from an hour to a whole day to show the changes to other users in the shared folder. My job use GSuite unfortunately, so I am stuck with it.
  • jeromenerf 6y ago
    The same issues happen with third party applications. I use rclone. Duplication, missing items, quotas, stalled sync ... Some days, it just doesn’t want to work server side.
  • brailsafe 6y ago
    Big Sur is coming out tomorrow, might be a decent chance to build a native app that's way better
    • judge2020 6y ago
      If Apple can put iOS’s ‘files’ app API to use in Finder these companies might just be able to drop macOS native (macOS only) apps in exchange for only distributing catalyst apps.
• TuringNYC 6y ago
  Anyone know why the strange tiers on Google One? There is a 2TB ($100/yr) and 10TB ($600/yr). - Usually prices scale log, but here, there is a storage premium going from 2TB to 10TB. - Does anyone else think 2TB is a bit low for a moderately savvy family plan? Why isnt there a middle tier like 5TB?
  • baskire 6y ago
    Probs they expect a 2TiB plan user to never use a significant amount of the 2TiB. Whereas the 10TiB plan user is more likely to use a higher percentage of allotted storage.
    • FireBy2024 6y ago
      I think that's product guys trying to entice their largest group of customers to move to the next tier. Make it look like it's the best deal.
  • kevincox 6y ago
    I agree. The price/GiB between looks like someone was throwing darts. I wish there is a straightforward pay-as-you go option. However there is the mental downside that everything you store is costing money, whereas the package deals you feel free (until you hit the limit).
• p1anecrazy 6y ago
  Wow. What a disappointment. I started saving my photos with Google for two reasons: - I’m an iPhone user and didn’t want a single company to have access to all my assets, - it was free and this compensated for the discomfort of using a non-native app. Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers. Since Apple tries to rebrand itself this way, I would expect more former customers to go there.
  • actuator 6y ago
    > Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers. Photos data isn't used for ads according to the post. Are you concerned about photo analysis for tagging? You can upload to Google Drive in that case and manage the photos yourself like any other provider.
    • p1anecrazy 6y ago
      I think in general Google is perceived not as a privacy-friendly company due to its ubiquitousness. Whether it is true does not matter much.
• fakedang 6y ago
  Yes Pichai, please keep McKinseying the shit out of Google so that we can have an Apple-Huawei duopoly soon.
  • PradeetPatel 6y ago
    What do you mean by McKinseying? Sorry English is not my first language. Nothing showed up on Google either.
    • olvy0 6y ago
      Possibly McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm [0]. Read that article to see some companies its consultants ruined by recommending the wrong business strategy. Also, from that link: McKinsey's alumni have been appointed as CEOs or high-level executives at Google, American Express, Facebook, Boeing, IBM, Westinghouse Electric, Sears, AT&T, PepsiCo, and Enron. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company
    • resonantjacket5 6y ago
      McKinsey is a management consulting company https://www.mckinsey.com/ https://www.mckinsey.com/ which is famous (or infamous) for promoting highly 'streamlined' business practices. They're known for turning around failing businesses into profitable ones but also for the enron and 2008 scandals with the housing bubble. Though I'm not too familiar with exactly what 'McKinsey' would imply, it seems to just be a shorthand for whenever a business starts charging for something that was previously free. Aka luggage fees.
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      Apart from what others said, Sundar Pichai was a management consultant at McKinsey before he joined Google.
    • fakedang 6y ago
      McKinsey is a management consultancy that, among other things, often advocates costcutting through skimping on services, outsourcing abroad and currently, automating a number of auxiliary functions such as customer support and other cost centers.
• cglong 6y ago
  Interesting to keep photos uploaded from Pixels exempt from this new policy.
  • zapt02 6y ago
    Probably due to advertising on the box or in-store touting this feature.
  • seized 6y ago
    Pixels have always had that special selling point but newer ones have an end date of free storage for original quality. I think only the Pixel 1 has lifetime storage.
    • gst 6y ago
      On one hand I wonder if it makes sense to get an old Pixel 1 from eBay so that I can continue to upload free photos forever (or at least until the Google Photos APK is not updated anymore for the old Android version running on the Pixel 1). On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if Google just closes the accounts of people who upload large amounts of pictures and videos (taken on another phone) with the Pixel 1.
  • singhkays 6y ago
    I fully expect that to change next year. It already changed once from Original quality->High quality
• hackily 6y ago
  > If you have a Pixel 1-5, photos uploaded from that device won’t be impacted. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality from that device will continue to be exempt from this change, even after June 1, 2021. All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.
  • teen 6y ago
    I bought a Pixel 1 and never got the free storage of raw photos. Eventually had to export everything to dropbox and convert everything to lower quality within photos. There is no way to fix this.
  • chrismeller 6y ago
    Somehow I suspect that is less about fulfilling their promise to the consumer and more about “let’s not piss off regulators in any more ways than they already are”...
  • plorg 6y ago
    It may just be cleaner to write it this way because the guarantee was different between generations, but the choice of "High quality" looks intentional. Pixel 1-3 (I don't remember 4, but definitely not 4a) were guaranteed unlimited storage at "full resolution", and for subsequent models the guarantee was changed to "high quality". I have a Pixel 3, and this feature was important to me when I purchased the phone.
    • williamtwild 6y ago
      Same for me. It was part of the selling point of the 3. I should have known better since it was Google.
    • grishka 6y ago
      Pixel 1 is unique in that they forgot to put a deadline into the deal. They didn't make the same mistake for the next ones. And, yes, unlimited original quality still works for me as of today, but I'm not taking any chances with deleting my local copies. Though, to be honest, Pixel 1 is absolutely horrendous when it comes to replacing the battery. Even if you did manage to open it without breaking the screen, good luck putting it back together. I did a poor job on mine, part of the bottom bezel didn't stick and there are weird green glitches on the screen when you press on that part. This thing really wasn't designed to ever come apart. So, anyway, I have a Pixel 4a on its way to me, and I'm paying 50€/month for a server with much more disk space than I know what to do with. Are there any decent self-hosted replacements for Google Photos?
• Naac 6y ago
  Are there other services providing unlimited ( for now ) photo storage? The only other company I can think of is Amazon which provides unlimited storage if you pay for Amazon Prime.
  • robotmay 6y ago
    SmugMug and Flickr (same company these days) both do if you pay, and I'd trust them far more with photos than any of the bigger companies.
  • fuzxi 6y ago
    Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) has an unlimited storage plan for $20/month. You might have to contact them to sign up for it. The plan is called Enterprise Standard. Of course it's not especially wise to switch from a gutted google product to another gutted google product, but there aren't many good options for high capacity cloud storage at a reasonable price.
  • _fn 6y ago
    Amazon photos provide unlimited photo storage for Prime customer.
• jcomis 6y ago
  I wonder if they will ever fix the problem when you actually do upgrade to google one, there is no way to make your old photos go from "high quality" to "full res" without bringing them on to a desktop device, uploading them a second time, and often getting duplicates. I'm a paying customer and I can't even back up my old photos in full res that are on my device without a TON of work.
  • mvgoogler 6y ago
    That is supported on at least Android (I think it is on iOS as well, but I'm not 100% sure). When you switch the backup options from High-Quality to Original quality you should get a prompt asking if you want to re-upload the photos on your device in Original Quality.
    • jcomis 6y ago
      I'm not seeing this on ios or android
  • davide_v 6y ago
    So if I upgrade my photos don't upgrade to full res automatically, but if I download them they are actually full res? I don't have the original photos anymore, that's why I'm asking if Google keeps the full res and I'm able to retrieve them with a paid plan.
    • jcomis 6y ago
      Only if you originally uploaded them in full res. If you originally updated them in high res and that's it, that is all they have.
• ugh123 6y ago
  I think Google is missing a clear opportunity to compete with Instagram and the like. Google Photos is nearly default on just about every new and recent android phone in the world and its "partner" sharing feature (limited to just 1 partner) resembles a private IG-like share experience. Imagine having that breadth of user base already active in your app but not simply adding a public network around it (with adequate privacy controls). Add a few ads here and there and it could pay for itself...
  • actuator 6y ago
    Please, no. Photos has way more personal photos of mine. I would prefer to pay and have my content be there without ads. Also, maybe I am the odd one out here but I don't like concept of public sharing. The only reason I have wanted to upload pictures on Instagram instead of individually sharing photos with my friends is to make my dating profile look better.
  • iscrewyou 6y ago
    I think they’ve been bruised by Google+. I will never trust Google to not add a version of this that keeps your email handle different from your supposed username. Even if they do, I expect them to pull the rug out from under the users in the future to tie the image account and google account together.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • pkulak 6y ago
    Please no. Photos is where I put _all_ my photos. I don't want any social complexity layered on at all, ever. I'll gladly pay for the dumb storage solution they've got now (and, in fact, I do).
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Social media like Instagram has actually shown that people appreciate having to explicitly upload select images to their online persona. It's simpler and it also removes overhead like "wait, which photos can people see again?" Facebook had to build a complicated "view your profile as X" system early on just to address this trepidation.
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  The search function in Google photos is really the main factor why I'd want to continue using it. I wish there were a photo search index I could run on my own hdd.
  • spunker540 6y ago
    Curious what indexing features you find most useful. For me the killer feature was how ocr rendered a lot of photos searchable by the text contained in the photo. But also cool how you can search “mountains” and see all your photos related to that.
    • perryizgr8 6y ago
      I like being able to search by location and peoples names. Similar features are present in my phone's gallery (Samsung) but it obviously works only on the photos in device. Google photos searches all the photos taken by my wife and I over the last half a decade.
  • thekyle 6y ago
    If you use Windows the built-in Photos app has pretty good indexing.
  • duskwuff 6y ago
    Apple's Photos app has a decent search-by-contents feature. Even better, the analysis is all on-device -- it isn't server-side, and doesn't rely on you uploading your photos to iCloud.
    • perryizgr8 6y ago
      Samsung gallery also has same features but it works only on the photos stored on the phone. A big plus with Google photos is that it operates on my entire collection even when I clean pics up from my phone.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  • floatingatoll 6y ago
    If they don’t start charging money for it, yes, they’ll run out of space.
• ffpip 6y ago
  Google is 100% running out of space. Google Photos no longer unlimited - https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-unlimited-cap-free-uploads-15gb-ending https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u... GSuite no longer unlimited - https://9to5google.com/2020/10/08/google-workspace-drive-storage-limits/ https://9to5google.com/2020/10/08/google-workspace-drive-sto... Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days. Before, it stored till you perma deleted - https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/drive-trash-auto-delete-30-days.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/drive-trash-aut... Google Docs to be counted as storage space. it was unlimited for all before - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ Guess the cloud's gonna start filling up soon eh.
  • chrismeller 6y ago
    More like “tapping that lucrative subscription revenue” because they finally have enough people locked in
    • arkanciscan 6y ago
      That's my cue to start self-hosting again!
      • actuator 6y ago
        Is it cheaper and better though? You will need to setup redundancy if you use your own hardware, verify your client and server scripts, take care of encryption etc. Also, syncing anyone from Dropbox to Onedrive can do. I like the photo tagging to be powerful when I am looking for old photos.
        • arkanciscan 6y ago
          Depends how lazy you are!
        • part1of2 6y ago
          Hosting yourself is better than Google reading and disabling your account because you used a couple words that might violate it's TOS. I can't imagine a researcher trying to write a book in Google Docs about 1960's civil rights without tripping Google's abuse engines. It is creepy https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-reading-docs/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...
• jbay808 6y ago
  Now I see why Google phones don't have SD card slots.
• mittermayr 6y ago
  While I instinctively knew Google is not to trust with the word "free", especially since "you're the product" isn't applicable as easily here as with other products, I still decided to thoroughly test Photos for a long while to see if they'd introduce some limits. They are a corporate entity out to make money (and externally pressured to make more quarter by quarter), so I fully get it. But for Photos, it almost seemed like it could be a long play for them. A fantastic place to upsell users into all the other Google products. One that could just possibly stay free, forever. So, the fool I am, I started recommending it to just about anyone. Helped onboard relatives, many friends and so forth. And now, this. We're at the next step of a funnel they could've (and should've) been more transparent on from the start: they're starting to apply force to add "a form of payment". After which, naturally, they'll be able to keep on raising those prices freely with such an impressively solid lock-in at hand. The more data stored inside Google Photos, the harder it'll be to migrate it away. I am, once again, contemplating to give up entirely on the "cloud" and figure out something else. The issue isn't paying for services, but I do have a problem with intransparent funnels. It's not about paying a buck or two a month, it's about them now being able to raise prices without mercy, regardless of actual storage pricing going down! To migrate away will be quite the effort once we're storing past 100 GB+. Frustrating. Fully to be expected, but still. Google is acting so desperate, their struggle with milking the good ole' advertising cow is becoming more obvious by the minute. I wonder how long Chrome (not Chromium) is going to survive until it'll end up in a monetisation funnel.
  • actuator 6y ago
    I don't get this honestly. None of us will like if our photos are used for ads as they are deeply personal. How do you think this should be monetized then?
    • mittermayr 6y ago
      Definitely not with ads, sorry if it came across like that. I meant that Google Photos (as a product) already got me to stay logged in to my Google account. So it can be a driver for Google account usage. The sharing features may be useful to get other people to sign up for Google (and Google storage for other things). I used to run a free site that had a lot of users, and I mostly kept it up and running because I placed ads for my other (paid) SaaS services on it, and it converted like crazy. So my ideal scenario for Google would be to have a few of those launching pad products, where they show we can trust them on their word (and with our data), and that makes me want to invest more in the wider brand (buy a Pixel phone, get Google Home devices, Chromecast, etc.)
• nonfamous 6y ago
  We are altering the deal. Pray we don't alter it any further.
• mholt 6y ago
  Time to dust off my side project, Timeliner [1] which downloads your Google Photos (and other content from various services) and indexes them in a local SQLite DB. Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space. I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested! (One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.) [1]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
  • akx 6y ago
    And then you're responsible for backing that local content somewhere else... maybe the cloud?
    • mittermayr 6y ago
      The Google Photos interface itself isn't that big of a product (I think), if you can lose some of the sharing features, I guess it'd be quite an easy app to make that can be run off a v-server or Amazon at considerably less long-term trouble. The big big issue is the seamless auto-upload from phone to Google Photos, that's the fantastic feature that locked me in.
      • majora2007 6y ago
        MegaUpload and Plex offer both of those things. Using Plex allows you to control the full storage and interface, then you can sync those to a cloud service or keep on a HDD yourself.
        • Normille 6y ago
          There's also Yandex Disc [0] which is still offering unlimited photo uploads from mobile devices. Although it wouldn't surprise me if they followed Google's lead on this and curtailed their offering as well. As they seem to pretty much mirror everything else Google does. Yandex Disc also has an AI which allows you to search for objects within your photos. [0]https://yandex.com/promo/disk/unlim https://yandex.com/promo/disk/unlim
• liminal 6y ago
  I've found Microsoft Office to be the best deal for online storage. $70/year gets you a bunch of useful apps and 1TB of storage, or $100 year provides 1TB for up to 6 accounts. Nothing else seems to come close.
  • arkanciscan 6y ago
    How do you store photos there? Do they make an Android client that syncs your phone's photos to the cloud?
    • liminal 6y ago
      Yup, on Android photo upload works the same as Dropbox/Google. It doesn't have the AI smarts of Google Photos though. Just tried searching for 'cat' and the results were useless. But the storage works.
    • arkitaip 6y ago
      The android app exists but it's wonky as in sometimes the thumbnails of your photos simply won't load They are there, you just have to click on a blank thumbnail to watch the photo.
  • pnutjam 6y ago
    I can get a 1TB storage server from Time4vps for about $60 (they charge in euros). That gives me the ability to store stuff with sftp, rsync, or more full featured backup solutions like borgbackup.
    • shiftpgdn 6y ago
      Have you tried using that full 1TB? Many small time hosts oversubscribe and will look for a reason to boot you if you go beyond a reasonable usage %.
      • pnutjam 6y ago
        Yes, I have. I ran it full for a couple months, on accident. I had a symlinked directory getting backup up twice... I never heard a word from them, but I eventually noticed and fixed it. I generally run around 600GB.
• ffpip 6y ago
  Guess the face detection AI has become good enough. It was already way too creepy.
• cactus2093 6y ago
  Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Nice of them to announce so far in advance and let existing content stay free for now, and that should help them avoid an abrupt exodus. This seems like a big win for Apple though, especially with their new focus on services. As with other apps like maps, they’ve by now basically caught up with Google who had started off with a huge lead. When Google photos first launched with facial and object recognition and ability to search photos without ever tagging them, it was pretty incredible but now that’s basically table stakes. For any iPhone and Mac users who haven’t been paying specifically for cloud photo storage and will now need to, I don’t really see much reason to stick with google photos over the native solution using iCloud or Apple One. I’m sure that’s what I’ll do eventually.
• advisedwang 6y ago
  Sad as I am to see "unlimited" go away, this is probably the best way to do it: * Grandfathering existing photos means I don't have to worry about going back and deleting objects or getting an sudden bump in cost. * 15 GB is pretty generous... iCloud includes 5GB for free. * $2/month isn't a huge jump to the next level of storage.
  • ryanobjc 6y ago
    To be clear the 'high quality' is still unlimited. Only the 'original quality' will be quotaed.
    • llimos 6y ago
      Not so, that's exactly what's changing.
      • ryanobjc 6y ago
        yes i see, its hard to read these things which are trying to be as positive as possible
  • sgrinich 6y ago
    Heads up on the term 'grandfathering' and the racial overtones of what this means: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586...
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • gabagool 6y ago
      What term should be used instead?
      • ttam 6y ago
• politelemon 6y ago
  > Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it's a scale I've never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us never will. I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to contend with.
  • treis 6y ago
    >28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. If I've done my math right that's something like 3-4,000 hard drives per week assuming 10mb per file and 10tb per hard drive.
    • kajecounterhack 6y ago
      (*3 because Google can't lose your data and stores multiple copies, /x because neural compression)
    • anuila 6y ago
      10mb per file only if you average videos, multiple sizes/formats and assume some redundancy. The single photo file stored by Google averages 2 megabytes.
    • martimarkov 6y ago
      They also have data deduplication. I’d guess at a block level so it would be less than that
  • jl6 6y ago
    For context, if you assigned each photo a unique integer ID, the list of IDs (just the list of numbers, not the data itself, not even any other metadata) wouldn’t fit on the largest HDD available today.
  • smueller1234 6y ago
    For what it's worth, this (sort of thing) was one of the reasons why I joined Google. And lo and behold I do in storage infrastructure now. :) (Alas, I am not at liberty to speak for the company or share any numbers.) I appreciate that working for Google isn't everyone's cup of tea for a myriad of reasons, and would never pretend otherwise. And yes, the interview process can be onerous. But we are hiring! Certainly the 'technical scale' bit didn't disappoint me. As with any other big company, if you're wondering how it is to work there, I would strongly recommend looking up acquaintances in the company and getting an inside view of the workplace dynamics to get a sense of what would await you and whether you'd enjoy it, even if experiences across this large an organization will vary greatly. If they're not close personal friends chances are if you just know them casually, they would still be happy enough to give you an unfiltered and honest summary of their experience.
• Daishiman 6y ago
  I am actually very much in favor of paying for what I use. Truth is that upfront payment for storage and convenience is a much more sustainable model than subsidizing this through spyware and other services. Also given the amount of storage needed his seems pretty inevitable.
  • judge2020 6y ago
    The problem with this is that there’s not a way to pay google $x/year to not see ads and also not be tracked everywhere you go (obviously requiring you allow cross-site google cookies) and/or limit what systems your browsing data is piped to. With this announcement, it’s just more income diversification since search ads might be pulled from them via antitrust.
• rektide 6y ago
  Really really really sad that the internet now no longer has a free way to store photos for eternity. This was such a wonderful service for us all.
• llimos 6y ago
  I only use them because it's free. Sure, the creations are cute (especially the kids ones). But if I'm going to have to start paying someone, I'm afraid it won't be them. I suspect I'm not the only one making that calculation either.
• bbu 6y ago
  it's a shame, google photos is a really good product. but not that good that I'd pay extra - I already have 1 TB of storage from Microsft 365. I guess it's time to move on in June.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• deanclatworthy 6y ago
  Pretty upset about this. I added the app to my mothers phone as it auto backs up everything at high enough quality for her at no cost. Trying to explain to a 65 year old woman with no computing skill how to set up a recurring subscription for online photo storage is going to be a tough ask.
  • arkitaip 6y ago
    My mother is at the same age and I set up the subscription for her and she never has to think about it. Or, you could share your subscription with your mother.
  • mvgoogler 6y ago
    Google One family subscriptions would be a good fit here. You can manage the subscription and just add your mother to the plan. It's what our family does. <disclaimer - I work on Google Photos>
    • deanclatworthy 6y ago
      I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tip.
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    I did the same but I'm really not worried. How long is it going to take for her to fill 15GB really?
    • deanclatworthy 6y ago
      It's funny how people make assumptions about technology use among the elderly - myself included. She got a 16GB iPhone a few years ago and filled it with videos within half a year. She wants her photos/videos with her at all times, but then she would need at least 256gb phone which she cannot afford the contract for. Google photos was a perfect balance for this, as the app works very very well as a photo browser where everything is in the cloud - meaning she could offload all the photos and videos (at an acceptable quality for her [impaired] vision) from the phone.
• thekyle 6y ago
  Personally I like this new direction Google is going. I am someone who much prefers to pay a few bucks a month over having my data used for ad targeting. Ideally I'd like to see them make all Google platforms ad-free for Google One subscribers.
  • kingnothing 6y ago
    They're still an ad company at the end of the day. Now they're going to charge you and advertise to you. Win win for them.
    • mvgoogler 6y ago
      Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for ad targeting. <I've worked on Google Photos since before it was launched>
      • Normille 6y ago
        >Photos doesn't show ads or allow your photos to be used for ad targeting. I think you forgot a "yet" in that sentence.
      • kingnothing 6y ago
        You don't think some team at Google is using photo metadata for ads? There's plenty of value prop in pushing different ads to me if you know that I'm on vacation based on location metadata, or knowing that I buy new shoes and take pics of them every 2 months in order to push me shoe ads at that cadence. I'd be astonished if that isn't the case today or won't be tomorrow.
        • mvgoogler 6y ago
          I am very confident that photos metadata is not used for ad targeting. I know enough about the infrastructure and the folks that run it that it would take a seriously tin-foil-hat type scenario for this to be happening without the team's knowledge. I work on Google Photos and prior to that I worked on datacenter level infrastructure.
• tmaly 6y ago
  I hit that limit a few years ago. With kids you take a lot more photos. It cost me something like $2.99 a month for 100GB on Google
• tsm 6y ago
  Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?
  • robotmay 6y ago
    If you're just looking to back up your photos off your phone, I use SyncThing to sync them to my server, which works quite well.
    • ajsnigrutin 6y ago
      This! just set the folder on the phone as send only, and backup on the pc.
  • galbar 6y ago
    I selfhost Nextcloud. Great for syncing files and photos
  • fsflover 6y ago
    Perhaps Pixelfeld could work here.
• pwinnski 6y ago
  This is a good thing. I've been having trouble weaning myself off this service, one of few Google services I still use, but now I have just over six months notice to find something different. I'm happy to pay someone for storage, but not Google. So now I'll get on that.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Shit ... now how do I get my photos out ???. And please don't tell me to use rclone - never got it working properly.
  • izacus 6y ago
    Goggle Takeout will give them in a dump.
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    Google takeout.
  • easton 6y ago
    https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout It may take them an hour or two to build the archive depending on how many photos you have, but there it is.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years. A little bit of good news, IMO. Next, they need to do like Reddit and start making "dead" account names available for re-use. (Something Reddit does for sub-reddits and which Google seems to not do for, say, BlogSpot.) Edit: I say this as someone with old, dead google accounts I will never recover and I would rather the data be deleted than fall into the hands of nefarious third parties. Also, we bellyache about the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin as an environmental hazard, but we think Google should keep abandoned accounts intact indefinitely? Why? All systems need some means to clean out the cruft and recycle stuff and not just permanently freeze it for people who may be dead, who may have forgotten they made that account while high that one night, etc.
  • duskwuff 6y ago
    Allowing email addresses to be reused is a huge security and privacy problem. It means that any email which was still being sent to the old address -- including account recovery emails -- becomes accessible to the new owner of the email address. Deleting data from "dead" accounts is fine and good. But they need to stay dead, not come back to life.
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I'm talking about recycling BlogSpot addresses. Currently, it's common to see a BlogSpot blog with a single post from ten years ago and it means all the best URLs are gone and will never be available.
      • duskwuff 6y ago
        That's vulnerable to a different sort of hijacking -- SEO spammers recreating blogs with URLs of deleted sites that previously had a lot of incoming links. It'd also risk destroying historically important content that was published in "one-off" Blogspot sites.
        • 6y ago
• AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  In light of multiple companies attempting to redefine what the words "free" and "unlimited" mean, I would like to propose the following update-for-the-21st-century definitions: Free: A product or service that is entirely without cost to the end-user until after it has already been purchased. Unlimited: A reasonable amount that should in no way exceed average consumption.
• idrisser 6y ago
  can someone recommend an easy way to migrate Google Photos straight into Dropbox? (without having to download the Google Takeout exports locally (I've got like 400 GB of photos...))
• mierle 6y ago
  If you're interested in self hosting and willing to put in a bit of work to collect data from your online presence for archival, take a look at Perkeep (previously known as Calimstore) [1]. [1] https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/
• Jabbles 6y ago
  I wonder if this is antitrust related? Offering services for free just because you have excess cash certainly prevents competitors whose only business is photo-related.
• warrentr 6y ago
  Has anyone found a good family friendly alternative? In particular I would really like to: - Pay for the service (sustainable/trustworthy business model) - Be able to very tightly control access to albums as I really don't want kid photos ending up on facebook or similar due to crazy aunt kathy (in google photos anyone with access can add anyone else and until recently there was no way to remove people) - Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security) - Confirmed and well-tested backup as a feature (sha1 of the backup matches my local, original copy, no stripping of the geo data!) - Decent ios and android clients that can auto backup all photos on the device
  • pqoek 6y ago
    > - Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security) I believe all services provide that, because both have their upsides and downsides
  • traskjd 6y ago
    Sounds like you should just use Google Photos as it delivers most of that, with perhaps some improvements in 'backing up' outside of GP.
    • jwr 6y ago
      Well, perhaps apart from the fact that you are giving your photos to the company that makes money on targeted advertising and invests bajillions into AI technologies that learn from data. Some of us are distinctly uncomfortable with that, especially given what has been done to Gmail — your mail is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you.
      • three_seagrass 6y ago
        >especially given what has been done to Gmail — your mail is being fed to machines and used to build an advertising profile for you. Google has not mined emails in GMail for ad targeting for years now: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
• throwaway5752 6y ago
  Storage isn't free and is finite, therefore it was never unlimited. Nothing that is offered for free but has an underlying cost and finite is ever really unlimited. This is a welcome step towards realistic marketing.
• aaomidi 6y ago
  Just FYI Amazon Photos has unlimited photo storage for prime users.
  • elsonrodriguez 6y ago
    Now that Google and Apple are charging for photo storage that'll be like leaving money on the table.
  • ValentineC 6y ago
    I wouldn't trust Amazon's consumer offerings, after they removed the unlimited offering from Amazon (Cloud) Drive [1], and continued to remove API access after that [2]. Not only that, but I have quite a few files that were corrupted on Amazon Drive, so I wouldn't trust them for long-term photo storage either, unless the photos were also backed up to other services. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511935 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/d0jg8w/your_integration_to_amazon_drives_api_will_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/d0jg8w/your_in...
• pqoek 6y ago
  Hell, I guess this was doomed to happen, but I did not think of it when I transitioned to Google Photos. Dropbox has been pretty bad for syncing photos from my device, so I started using both, now I'm thinking that maybe I should just use some Apple service for it since I only own Apple devices. What do people use to sync their photos?
• kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons— [1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company. [2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.
  • wolco2 6y ago
    I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. In a year they will start charging for gmail. In two or three they will start charging for search.
    • andybak 6y ago
      I’m not sure you’ve thought through all these examples to the same degree.
    • cogburnd02 6y ago
      If they start charging for search then 1/3 of Earth will use Baidu, 1/3 DuckDuckGo, and 1/3 Bing.
      • kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
        aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"
• bigmattystyles 6y ago
  Do they extract data from your photos (meta + image recognition) for your user ad targeting profile (and probably the other people in your photos). I always assumed that was the tradeoff in using them to store photos for 'free'. If they do extract data, I wouldn't expect them to stop once they start charging either.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• andyjpb 6y ago
  I guess the free lunch is finally over. For ~15 years (since the launch of GMail) Google has differentiated itself on storage. Both in terms of products offerings and in terms of company image. To me it signifies a change in the market. They don't feel like they currently need to compete with Apple or Microsoft on any of these fronts right now. The market is pretty stable and there are more battlefields ahead. So time to apply some levers at the points where everyone else is charging (iCloud) and get ready for the next big consumer adoption battle. It makes sense right now but changes the playing field enough that some (old) disruption opportunities might start to open themselves up (again). I guess Google doesn't feel like those are a threat any more or right now tho'. It'll be interesting to see what happens next. Bandwidth between handsets/eyeballs and datacenters is possibly one of the next most important costs and Google has a good story there. Lots of peering, a good network, and control of the software on both ends, so they are well positioned to make the most cost-effective use of that bandwidth.
  • andromeduck 6y ago
    I think it's more that cost per TB for HDD and NAND scaling started stalling a few years ago.
  • pkaye 6y ago
    I think its more that as better privacy laws come into place, its hard to make money through ads and give free stuff away so they are dialing things back for the long run.
    • donalhunt 6y ago
      Partly that and partly the fact people have shifted to the cloud and are willing to spend money on good services (if you can guarantee bits on disk and provide a useful UI, I'm in - Google does both better than I can).
  • fomine3 6y ago
    AFAIK Google deploys massive HDDs to get massive parallel I/O. Possibly they changed storage strategy to mainly use SSD (lower capacity, higher IOPS) , so they no longer able to provide wasting capacities?
• nikolay 6y ago
  They got enough free training data, so...
• rch 6y ago
  I'm happy to see business models for services I've come to rely on emerge from the shadows, notably with Google, Spotify, and various news sources. I would like assurances that direct payments imply a reasonable expectation of data privacy however.
• m0zg 6y ago
  Wonderful. So now they also want people to pay for getting their life data-mined. It's like cable TV - started without ads, now has more ads than content, and nobody seems to mind enough to cancel.
• nikolay 6y ago
  Is there another photo hosting service, which has such a great face recognition (including videos), and flexible search by time, location, people in photos, etc.? I made Google Photos my primary, because we accumulate thousands and thousands of photos, so, no other service I know offers such quality search. But maybe I'm wrong.
• dirtyid 6y ago
  Google One is pretty cheap, but wish Picasa was still around for offline backup.
• tetusaiga 6y ago
  I ve been waiting fr this. I am going to build my cloud storage product. Only difference will be in pricing and bucket size. Here is how it ll go Steps of 10 Gb - 20 rs/month no fixed plans like google or apple. This will save users some money. mc-mu(u+1)*1.69/2 this is the cost equation, basically this will give u the amount of money you will lose by going with a fixed plan say 100GB over my suggested 10GB steps. eg. if u only generate 1GB per month you ll lose ~4400rs due to unused space if you go with 100GB plan.
• dirtyid 6y ago
  I wonder how much typical account uses free storage. I was recently helping a family member troubleshoot their over quota Google Photo backup, originally setup for full quality, since I thought 15GB was enough for life time. Was surprised to find they shot close to 60GB worth random shit in the last few years after putting them on my One family circle. I guess explosion in camera sensors and high res recording is making a lot of croft. I think Google should start throwing some deduplication photos in Google Feeds everyday, help them clear up some space and help users clear up their gallery which is often filled with so much useless shit that it's hard to use. There's something about physical film where each shot was precious and developing photo came with it's own sorting / curation process. Online photo are pretty tedious viewing experience compared to physical albums, I know a lot of people who practice inbox zero but virtually no one who keeps their online photos kempt.
• ig0r0 6y ago
  Looking at the talk about various ways to downlod Google Photos,I use this for regular backups https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync
• jcmontx 6y ago
  Unfortunate. I guess I will have to start to pay for the extra storage eventually. I really like the service and wouldn't like to drop it.
• Octopuz 6y ago
  I would be happy to pay up if I could be sure that my account is safe at Google. I am mentioning this because of multiple reports of people who saw their account being closed because of an unnamed TOS violation, and no way to get it back. The people working at Google might not be able/allowed to comment on this, although I would appreciate their view on this issue.
  • deanclatworthy 6y ago
    Yep. This is giving me anxiety too. I know us technical folk talk about what a backup solution really is and that the cloud is not a reliable backup solution. The reality is a lot of folks don’t think this way and don’t want to have usb hard drives laying around or NAS in the living room next to the router. People are storing their digital lives with Google. And they’re having them destroyed too, without any recourse.
• fsflover 6y ago
  Great time for FLOSS federated project pixelfeld: https://the-federation.info/pixelfed https://the-federation.info/pixelfed
  • Normille 6y ago
    Pixelfed's more like a crappier version of Instagram. It's hardly a substitute for Google Photos.
    • fsflover 6y ago
      It at least allows to host it on your own or ask a friend to do it for you. It's of course hard to have all the features of Google Photos, but it's FOSS, so anyone can contribute.
      • Normille 6y ago
        It's more the huge myth perpetrated by the fediverse movement: "It's your data. If you don't like <service> you can take it with you" that irritates me, more than any particular functional limitations. But that's a rant for another day.
• robotnikman 6y ago
  Damn, and I set this up on my parents phones as an easy way for them to back up all the photos they take that 'just works' Looks like I have some bad news for them...
• domano 6y ago
  Having mixed feelings about subscribing to Google One last month, now it seems that space is going to fill up really fast.
• Shorel 6y ago
  I pay pCloud for 500 GB of storage and while it is nowhere close to "Unlimited", it is far greater than the 15 GB Google gives me if I want to save my photos in their original resolution.
• jayFu 6y ago
  I'm the cofounder of Lomorage, https://lomorage.com https://lomorage.com, we believe the digital assets should be taken care by ourselves, store locally, backup locally, that is the primary, and cloud backup is the tertiary backup, a good complementary, the price of existing cloud storage is too high, and some of the companies(Shoebox, Canon Irista) doing the business gradually shutdown the services, this is a money losing business, it’s not the efficient way to manage huge amount of assets centralized (flicker CEO’s open letter sent last year confirmed this), they have to either make it more expensive, or make you the product. Cloud service is convenient for the user, people don’t need to buy expensive hardware, don’t need to be the professionals to maintain that, don’t need to worry about the energy fee to keep it run 24x7, but things are changing, single board computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more energy efficient, storage are getting cheaper with larger capacity, software are getting more intelligent, people are having more and more concerns about the privacy, it’s now viable to host the Photo service, your private cloud, at your own place.
• pvorb 6y ago
  I read that as: "Our database for learning any AI model we'd like to have has grown big enough, so we no longer have use for you being the product. Pay us to be able to grow dataset." ;-)
• vvoyer 6y ago
  I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos. I've used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos. Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind. Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on "enterprise cloud storage" and "workplace sharing". Apple: I love the privacy features of Apple, but what I've come to realize is that, with a very big photo library, no iPhone or Macbook can analyze them all and share the results with all my devices. Only a server can analyze 10,000+ pictures, identify faces, organize by date. All in a slick and fast UI. There's definitely space for Google Photos competitors. Build a product that automatically triage photos, using and sometimes guessing the exif data. With face identification, location identification, automatically creating albums from photos batches (like if you take 40 photos in 2 days). Managing our online pictures will be extremely important in the future (it is now), because we take more and more of them.
  • identity0 6y ago
    Do you actually use that? Maybe it's just because I have few photos, but I always thought it was a massive gimmick. If I wanted to see photos from a specific vacation, I just remember when it happened, or look up the location in the geotagging thing. No ML needed. I've never once wished I could see all my photos of "dog on beach" in one place.
    • com2kid 6y ago
      > Do you actually use that? Maybe it's just because I have few photos I use it all the time. I wanted to recommend to a friend a restaurant I'd visited in San Diego, I couldn't remember the name of it but I knew I'd taken a picture of the food there. "Food San Diego" and all my food pictures from my trip to San Diego pop up. Tap more info, boom, map appears with the restaurant name on it. If I wanted to remember what year I went to San Diego, well, I'd either search in Google Photos, or in my timeline on Google Maps. (which is another way to find the name of the restaurant!)
    • hamilyon2 6y ago
      It is life-changing feature for those of us who don't remember when they took picture of what. Even with a few thousand photos, looking up something important in seconds (instead of an hour) is huge.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  You can get Lots-O-Terabytes drives for cheap. Just store them there, and don't worry about your cloud storage going dark. Get two drives and make a backup.
• Normille 6y ago
  Just thinking about Google's claims that it may [for which I read "will"] also start deleting data from inactive accounts: I would assume that, as well as their 'live' storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account actually be deleted? I can hardly see Google digging through their tape archives to delete cold-stored data from dead accounts. It would be so much hassle and be more costly than just leaving it as is. It could very well be the same situation with actual 'live' data in data centre, belonging to dormant accounts. Say you have a multi-TB hard drive in a data centre somewhere and, on that multi-TB drive, you have one or two users whose accounts are deemed to be now dormant. Would it really be worth Google's while to delete those one or two users' 'stuff'? OK. the data savings would add up with thousands of inactive accounts, spread across data centres. But if all that freed up space is in relatively tiny amounts, dotted around thousands of hard drives, it would be a nightmare to manage and keep track of. Unless Google has some kind of system in place which is constantly shuffling data around to effectively 'de-frag' entire data centres?
  • ahmedtd 6y ago
    https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-file-system-gfs/ https://www.systutorials.com/colossus-successor-to-google-fi... Effectively, all storage for production systems at Google goes through this layer. No service is ever interacting with individual disks, even including databases like Spanner. Google Cloud Storage is a thin-ish layer over this system.
  • mvgoogler 6y ago
    Deleted photos, accounts, etc are definitely deleted and purged from our systems. We have teams at Google whose sole purpose is to ensure that data that should be deleted is deleted in a timely manner (as defined by TOS and the law). Basically, every piece of user data that is stored at Google has to have a documented and audited retention plan that covers how it is stored, how long it is retained, how it can be used, etc. The retention plans are reviewed by legal counsel and are audited by independent teams. From a technical standpoint, Photos doesn't deal directly with individual machines or hard drives. There are several layers of abstraction to map what we think of as a "file" and the storage system are doing something that is _effectively_ at least a defrag on a regular basis. [I work on Google Photos and used to work on storage infrastructure]
• TLightful 6y ago
  Photo storage is worth paying for. But just not at Google. www.smugmug.com Feel free to suggest others.
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  Any open source software for displaying and organizing photos as albums? I already take care of the uploading (I have a big nextcloud server with multiple copies), however there is no affordance provided for collecting albums and sharing them. And just to clarify, an album to me it's just a list of paths to photos and the ability to generate password protected links that I can share with family members. Oh, right, the photos shared through this way should hide all exif tags to prevent leakage.
  • t-writescode 6y ago
    I use NextCloud to share albums, too. You can share a whole folder publicly
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
      I have all the photos in a single folder, i would not like to change that, especially because some photos should appear in multiple albums. How do you manage that?
      • t-writescode 6y ago
        I don’t do anything special for photos appearing in multiple albums. My use-cases don’t align to that. My whole photo-taking process tends to be: * take a bunch of pictures * find the best ones * further refine the best ones until it’s a reasonable number * photoshop those to how I want them * share the narrow list And most of my photos come from events, so they’re in folders based on events. If your goal is virtual galleries and avoiding duplication, this is sufficiently different I don’t think I can give suggestions there, I’m sorry
        • Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
          Oh ok, no problem, thanks for the input. My use case is essentially ONLY virtual galleries. I want to bookmark the photos I like the most, then organize based on "whatever comes to mind" (e.g. horizontal-sleeping-daughter, playing-with-toys) and share those galleries.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  > Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. 15 gigs of photos is nothing. > Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years. Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I'm relying on cloud storage. I'm a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mutual fund, saying they hadn't heard from me in a few years and were going to hand my account over to the government if they didn't hear from me soon. Two years is nothing when you're my age. I have piles on the floor in my office that need attending to that have been there 5-10 years.
  • sib 6y ago
    These days, 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing. If I go on a trip for a week to take pictures, I can easily shoot 50-100GB of images. (Using my full-frame DSLR, shooting in raw, average image size is over 50MB, meaning < 20 images per GB).
    • bootlooped 6y ago
      I don't think I'm making too many assumptions when I say RAW photos from a DSLR being uploaded to Google Photos is not anywhere near the intended use-case. However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.
      • sib 6y ago
        Well... their own marketing does say: "A home for all your photos and videos" and they have a blog post titled: "Easy Wi-Fi backup from your Canon camera to Google Photos" in which they say "you can choose to automatically transfer original quality photos to Google Photos"
        • bootlooped 6y ago
          Interesting, I didn't know there was a camera that could do it directly. I always did want that for my Sony a6000. But for jpeg, not raw. After sitting in front of Lightroom for hours upon tedious hours adjusting vacation pics, I will never shoot in raw again.
• lunarboy 6y ago
  For those who are considering or already self-hosting, I'm genuinely curious whether it's worth the time/effort vs privacy comfort of mind? Google One prices seem reasonable (except the lack of middle tiers). Even the price aside, they also claim to not use data for ad targeting, and I personally haven't seen ads based on my media content (but obviously I'm just one anecdote). I feel like the only real concern around Google is accidentally violating some obscure policy, and getting perma-locked out. Then why not stay on Google Photos in addition to duplicating it somewhere else, instead or moving away completely. Haven't really looked elsewhere in depth, but nothing else seems to offer even close to the polish and especially search functionality.
  • ValentineC 6y ago
    > For those who are considering or already self-hosting, I'm genuinely curious whether it's worth the time/effort vs privacy comfort of mind? People who are time-poor can consider a turn-key self-hosted appliance like a Synology NAS. I've heard some good reviews about their Moments app: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments
    • lunarboy 6y ago
      That does seem pretty nice for self hosting. But isn't a physical device in your house just as vulnerable to fire, water, etc damage, in which case you want another cloud solution anyways?
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    Google Photos was so many leaps and bounds ahead of what I was doing before to save my smartphone pictures, I'm not even thinking of leaving. Automatic backup, dead simple albums, easy sharing, browsing on web and mobile. It may be the most satisfied I am with any Google product. Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Maps are probably the other top-tier ones. There are untold numbers of mid-tier and crap-tier ones.
• fma 6y ago
  Flickr pro is $5 a month (billed annually) for unlimited original quality storage. Google photos is $3 for 200GB...$10 a month for 2 TB. So if you have more than 200GB, Flickr is the way to go. Additionally, I don't see any mention of Google privacy, but I'm pretty confident Flickr doesn't mine my data for advertisers.
• scurvy 6y ago
  I hope that they can handle all those deletes on their spinning hard drives. Append-only is easy, since you're never deleting and there's no chance for fragmentation. Once you get deletes, you're going to get fragmentation and performance goes to hell.
• dingdingdang 6y ago
  They don't actually want peoples data for free any longer so they are failing at capitalising it which could mean a bump on the road for big data but maybe it's the real deal and they are saturated with what they can deal with and hence more data becomes a cost to them going forward. Could also mean that the big G has reached it's max market valuation in abstract terms..!
• Havoc 6y ago
  Did it ever take off? Last I looked the res spec didn't even allow me to upload my decided entry tier DSLR content never mind RAW images I'd imagine modern cellphones and their 40gpixel res crush that multiple times over
• deleted 6y ago
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• tomasreimers 6y ago
  For those of us that already pay for personal GSuite, does anyone know if we ALSO need a Google One subscription now? Or if the GSuite space will be enough?
• choppaface 6y ago
  "... more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded" So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m / month in storage and a mere $140k / month growth. (And Google's internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2... the discounts they offer to public Google Cloud customers per petabyte are pretty big). In comparison, Facebook is getting hit with more than 10PB of photos per month. YouTube surely dwarfs all of that. (Google Photos may be harder to monetize, but traffic is also way way lower). Surely Google is being exceptionally stingy with this move to charging for Google Photos. Google Cloud itself has many many contracts that are north of $20m per month. This move is likely less of "the gains to ad targeting from private photos fell short even during the pandemic ad surge" and more of "the YouTube price hike went swimmingly, how can we gouge more for services now that the pandemic has shown people will pay?" Also probably with a sprinkle of "we're starting to have high employee turnover, how can we make sure the product doesn't become a zombie risk in 5 years?"
  • zeroxfe 6y ago
    Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object detection, gene.) Running all that for 28 billion photos a month costs a lot of money. (And that excludes all the engineering cost of building front ends, android apps, integrations, etc.)
    • choppaface 6y ago
      All the software infra and processing was built years ago for Google Plus, so the ongoing engineering costs are minimal. The compute might be more than Backblaze, but it's predictable (the majority happens on upload) and it's a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of daily search indexing, YouTube, etc. The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.
• alliao 6y ago
  Isn't the social contract being we get tracked and get free stuff? no wonder some are throwing their toys a bit...
• fudged71 6y ago
  Google Photos still feels like the safest way to keep an archive of thousands of images across my family, agnostic to devices. I’d rather have High Quality backups than losing the originals on some outdated hard drives. The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.
• lonesword 6y ago
  https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ is a privacy focused alternative to Google Photos, and came up in HN a while ago.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  I never understood why people used this service. I'm not a professional photographer but I care about image quality. Google's "high quality" option really means "16 Megapixels or less" which is lower quality than most modern cameras can capture, so by taking advantage of unlimited storage, you're sacrificing image quality.
  • esaym 6y ago
    I did a "deep dive" trying to compare my raw photos with what I had on google and I could spot nearly no difference even after zooming way in. The one difference was a 5MB vs 700KB file size though. I was actually quite impressed. But I think these were all 12MP photos.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I have Google One for $20/yr and iCloud for $12/yr and they provide sufficient value. Google Photos is the best photo app there is. It really takes advantage of Google's skill with hard CS problems and their platform advantage. The search is unparalleled. The Google Location History integration is beautiful. Just today I used it to find a dish I ate in a place years ago by finding the place in Location History and clicking through to the photo of the dish that was integrated into the view. Jesus Christ. This was the promise of AI assistants. It is here.
• qwertox 6y ago
  Funny how Google pushes the automatic syncing between partner accounts. These automatically imported images go against the storage cap, and most don't realize it. There should be an option to filter those imported images for easier deletion. I haven't seen one.
• motoboi 6y ago
  "We already have too many photos for our ML pipelines." Thank you very much. Now you must pay.
• Sloppy 6y ago
  Timely. I just got my closet server on the internet with WebDAV behind auth and SSL. Also installed PhotoSync on my phone. I do miss the image GP browser though (a little).
• madiyar 6y ago
  One free alternative is Snapchat app. I am using it as a camera app as well as a camera roll (Memories).
• jfoster 6y ago
  I don't think this change is so bad in isolation, but one thing I'm beginning to feel is that Google are removing things & changing propositions so much that at any point in my life, I'm trying to adapt to their newest whim on at least one of their products. I had purchased a bit of music through Google Music and it was nice. I kept it downloaded on my device, played it whenever I wanted, and it integrated nicely with Google Assistant, as promised. This year, Google decided to migrate all that into YouTube Music. I thought that wouldn't be a problem; just a new name and change of UI, surely? Well, YouTube Music is incessant about nagging you to subscribe. Unless you subscribe it doesn't work well with assistant and won't play without the app open. I only wanted to listen to the music I had already purchased on the same terms on which I had purchased it, though. Luckily, it was just a handful or so of music and they've agreed to refund it. But now I'm still in the situation where I will be looking for something to replace the gap. This is just one example. At some point, I'm not going to be bothering with Google products anymore. I already feel a moderate bias against using their stuff. I'm switching from Google Cloud to Vercel, for example. I just hope Vercel doesn't get acquired by Google. I haven't yet done anything about Gmail, Drive, or Photos, but I feel a bit insecure about such important stuff currently being in Google's hands.
• chenpengcheng 6y ago
  move them to Amazon. before Amazon discontinues unlimited storage, download everything to a portable storage. at the end of the day, you will realize that only yourself can be trusted.
• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Photos is the most annoying thing I didn't want to migrate over when trying to de-google myself. It's handy to share the kids' photos with relatives. I guess this will make it easier. An instance of NextCloud can do wonders and there is even an app that does face recognition.
• 627467 6y ago
  Can't complain for the end of free service. Now, am i the only one who wished that, rather than just catalogue and organized bazillion photos, photo storage services would actually help us curate our own photos? At some point I wish there was a service that would help me narrow my 30K+ photos down to maybe 1000 o so.
  • mceachen 6y ago
    I originally started down this path, trying to automate "culling," but found that (at least with the transfer models that I played with) ML-based "quality" scores weren't that great. I read a paper about stochastic search, tried it out with my own photos, and found a novel UI that many of my beta testers think is one of my best features: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#fast-and-fun-browsing-of-samples https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#fast-and-...
• mastazi 6y ago
  I am what you would describe as a “privacy conscious person” so over time I’ve been moving out of Google products. Instead of making me pay for additional storage [1], I wish I could pay for the ability to use all of Google’s products with increased privacy (no tracking, no reading my emails, ability to turn off YouTube recommendations etc.). I would pay for that because the products themselves are great. [1] https://one.google.com/about https://one.google.com/about
• donclark 6y ago
  Im fine for paying for Google photos IF: Google signs an agreement stating they will not use or share my photos in any way. They agree that I can migrate all my account data if they want to disable/lock my account. *In other words, keep the control for the user/customer.
• siproprio 6y ago
  Where's that Google Photos superbowl ad that makes fun of icloud storage and says that it has unlimited storage for life?
  • codyogden 6y ago
    This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prr-K12RJxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prr-K12RJxI
• Brajeshwar 6y ago
  Reading the comments, I realize many seem to think that the Unlimited High-Res was their original photos. It is a high-res version but not your original photo resolution. I always shoot at the highest available resolution where I can (along with RAW, when possible). For those, worrying about Google banning your account and losing your photos, here is how I do mine. Still not the best but hope to inspire others. 1. Our family shoots mostly with iPhone, and DSLRs and the first point of consumption are Apple Photos. 2. I have Google Drive Backup to back up the "original" resolution photos to Google Photos. This helps to share with friends, families, and others who are pretty much not on the Apple Ecosystem. This also serves as my second backup and I like the cute things that the Google Photos team does to the photos. A lot of fun moments for the family. 3. Besides the digital house-keeping that I quickly do every Month, I do a checklist of Backups, trimming, minimizing, etc, every year (usually in JAN). Here the Photos from Apple Photos are exported to the yearly folder but I'm not happy that the exported photos pretty much have scrambled metadata. I'm fine for now, as this is my last resort if the above two sources kinda die. This is not yet something that I'm happy about and will continue to look for something in the lines of every tool (such as Apple Photos, Google Photos, and others) being just clients to a primary source available on my local NAS and somewhere online (with backup replicas -- cloud such as AWS, Wasabi + elsewhere). On a personal note, I do skip lunches once a while each month to cover up for the 2TB Google One and Apple One Family plans, which I'm fast running out too. That lunch-skipping is good for health and pays for the monthly plans.
• vishnumohandas 6y ago
  ente[1] is an E2EE alternative to Google Photos I’ve been building. Please sign up for the beta program if you’re interested. [1]: https://ente.io https://ente.io
• MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/alphabet-profit-margins-slide-as-google-costs-march-upwards https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/alphabet-... probably has something to do with decreasing profit margins, or they are projecting a bad recession where firms will expend less on advertising. Also they don't actually need to buy the good will of us with free bytes (we are just clicking on adds & feeding the machine with data). They own the market, so why should they?
• mkhpalm 6y ago
  I do pay for some storage and I bought phones that said unlimited for life. Because of the second I feel a bit burned and am likely to avoid products from google in the future. I always knew they'd do this so I've been backing up all my photos locally.
  • shaklee3 6y ago
    Which phones?
• freakynit 6y ago
  ML Models trained, okay then. See ya!
• sreejithr 6y ago
  I would never "pay" for Google products. I'm 101% sure they would still harvest my data for their advertising business even if I pay them. Then why should I pay for giving off my data? At least I should get free shit.
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  See also: predatory pricing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
• franzwong 6y ago
  If I need to pay to upload new photos, I would choose a cloud service based on the features it provides. Of course I can keep the old photos in Google Photo and upload new photos to other cloud service, but I would lose the ability to search "all" photo in a single place. Now, I just want to have a function to download all photos from Google Photo and consider switching to others.
• Markoff 6y ago
  Pay Google for privilege to have your data harvested? No thanks, I left Google Photos years ago when I could understand they provided something "for free" in exchange for your data, but even pay them for this? What a joke. I am sure there will pop up companies happy to harvest your data for free. Personally I just do multiple physical backups, it ain't so convenient, but I have control over my data. Btw. there is Yandex Disk for people who don't wanna pay for OneDrive or Amazon Photos. For cold storage is maybe cheapest Backblaze.
• pieter_mj 6y ago
  Could these pictures be stored in a youtube video with sufficient quality?
  • tzfld 6y ago
    Even a 4k video has only 3840x2160 px resolution. Thats not a lot but still viewable on different sized screens.
• dusted 6y ago
  I'm hearing Nelson from the Simpsons go "Haahaaa" in my head, because we all knew this would happen. Gmail is next. This is why people need to host their own data.
• sam1r 6y ago
  Didn’t Dropbox do something similar but at the time (2011) I believe, it was 2gb but unlimited. Still, to this day in 2020, I receive quarterly emails of them threatening to close my account (next month they say)...and not provide access, which is fine because... I went over their limit with half .mic 4K movie blob of Avatar (or blue ray or whatever), since my ps3 ran out of space.
• szhu 6y ago
  My main issue with going from a free service to paying for storage isn't that it's not free anymore. It's that, at some point in the future, I would run out of storage and I'd need to pay more per month. I'm only good at estimating how many GBs of photos I produce per month. Also, what if I accumulate more than 2TB of photos? I don't even see an option to upgrade past that. It's very hard for me (and many other people) to estimate how many GBs of photos I would produce total because (1) I don't know what camera technology would be like in a few years and (2) I don't know how many years I will be alive and producing photos for. I know that they can't just our old uploads free forever, but I'd like the product framing to adapt to my mental model rather than the other way around. They can still price it such that it's profitable for them. Another issue I have is vendor lock-in. Sure, I can take my data out of Google Photos, but I can't take my data out for 5 years, and at some later point decide to use it again, and have it be in exactly the same state as it was before. A lot of metadata (edits, social interactions like comments/shared album data) would be lost. To me, these "non-exportable features" almost feel like ads, since they entice people to modify their content in ways that can only be shown to them in the future if they continuously pay for the service. I think the Facebook/Google Data Transfer project would help this second issue to some extent. https://engineering.fb.com/2019/12/02/security/data-transfer-project/ https://engineering.fb.com/2019/12/02/security/data-transfer...
• JimWestergren 6y ago
  This is going to be a problem in the future. Cameras keep getting better outputting bigger and bigger video and photo files. Big percentage of the population has Google Photos as their single point of backup. I don't like Googles threat of login each 2 years or we nuke everything. People could be in coma, prison, religious sects etc for longer than 2 years without internet connection. Lot's of people living in exotic areas don't have regular internet connection as well.
• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  I'm confused.. it was unlimited before? I received an email saying my google drive quota (16.5 of 17gb) was reaching its limits and I needed to buy google one to go over that. It looked like Photos was taking up the most space and I assumed that was included in the google drive cap. Did they just get me to sign up earlier than I needed to?
• habosa 6y ago
  Googler here but opinions are (obviously) my own. I've got a few issues with this but my biggest one is the combination of Drive/Docs/Gmail storage with my Photos quota. I have 18GB of that stuff ... so I'm done before I take a single photo. If I had a 15GB runway starting on June 2021 that's plenty of time to consider my options. Now I have no runway, gotta start researching how to move a decade of photos.
• WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  What really pisses me about google is that they're a company where the user is the product AND they pretend to have users pay them. If a company puts their users first, I can understand why they'd charge them; that's their business model. But for a company with interests so orthogonal to their users, it just amazes me that they decide to charge -- and also, that their users would be willing to pay.
• ishikawa 6y ago
  I think it is OK. The problem is how they did not predict they would not be able to keep the product as is. So a lot of people created a dependency on it. The app itself will need to change. It is now the official photo backup app. Now it will have to come by default disabled or it will incur costs. Also, it should be tied to better Google One offerings.
• deleted 6y ago
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• deleted 6y ago
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• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Someone at Google gave me a gmail invite many years before it was public and that was the start, for me, of using their services. I find paid for Google services much better. Google WorkGroups/GSuite provides CloudSearch. Buying books and movies is easy and avoids having everything in one Amazon account. It is easy enough to control how much information they collect. I would like it if Twitter and other services I use offered paid accounts with some privacy guarantees and no advertising.
• markdog12 6y ago
  Explanation of the change from an email I received from them: "In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future" This is just gross.
• npv789 6y ago
  we're trapped!
• m-p-3 6y ago
  That's too bad, I guess the ROI of freely hosting images in exchange that they continuously feed it all to their Machine Learning to train it over time isn't worth the cost of permanent storage.