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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 b

by 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.
- bootlooped 6y ago
  It starts to make it viable to not meticulously organize things into albums.
kumarm 6y ago
I never understand people on HN complaining about Ads on YouTube, life long Storage on Google Photos costing $. Probably for 90% of people on HN, it costs more (Opportunity cost) to type a comment complaining about ads on Youtube compared to a month subscription. But for some reason people like to complain.
- fomine3 6y ago
  There are people who complaining Ads but also avoids YouTube Premium. I don't know what they want. Pay option to remove ads is great, isn't it?
  - nomad543 6y ago
    It's not about accepting or not accepting paying to view videos. It's about how Youtube decimated competition and now the user cannot choose another pricing option and is left with the only option of paying the amount Google wants you to pay.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      It's serious dominant problem but not for ads. Don't blame Ads/Premium.
  - neop1x 6y ago
    I am happily paying for YT Premium but also using youtube-dl ocassionally. There is great content on YT. On the other hand, I stopped paying and using Netflix. There was not enough interesting content for me.
- Kye 6y ago
  Or maybe your criteria for valuing things and deciding what's worth complaining about isn't as universal as you think.
acdha 6y ago
> 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. How big is your photo library? I have about 100GB and that’s all worked perfectly well on iOS/macOS for many years - even on the old 2010 MacBook Air I used until it stopped getting security updates. You can see a difference in quality but it’s a judgement call: Google Photos definitely indexes more things in pictures but it also has a much higher false positive rate - for example, it took until 2018-19 before searching for “cat” didn’t have two pages of results for my dog before any actual cats.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  ... And apple can't find cats correctly at all. Which would you want? Google can put a name to your cat and index by typing the name, and in that case it only finds you specific cat.
  - acdha 6y ago
    How about the reality we actually live in where Apple Photos does find cats reliably with fewer false positives?
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      Which reality is that? Apple photos is consistently worse at finding them. I've never heard anyone say their image recognition is anywhere near as good, and that's my experience as well.
fireattack 6y ago
Google Photos' face recognition feature is pretty good.. until Google started to think person A and person B are the same person and you want to fix it manually: which is basically impossible. I used to use this feature heavily, and have to give up. Don't get me wrong, I still think Google Photos is the best in class. The point is, even the "best" is not enough due to the lack of options to fine tune it. And once it breaks, it jumps from "holyshit" to "unusable" straightly. I wrote a very long article to detail it somewhere else before, here is the gist of it: ------- * There is no way to tell Google to "split" a person/face. All you can do is remove wrong results (person B) from person A (you can also say it's "wrong person" on web, but not in app). You can't manually re-tag them as B in batch. * These removed results don't seem to get re-recognized as other people; it's either not get re-analyzed at all, or often times, they will be re-recognized back to the wrong person again! * You can't multi-select more than a few hundreds pictures and remove. It says "can't remove results" on both app and web if you select, say, 1000 photos. This is extremely annoying since I have people that have 10k images and I have to do so in small batch. * You can manually assign a face, but can only do so one by one. And that's assuming Google actually detects the face, no matter how obvious it is. * The people you added manually (by selecting a face from a photo, and manually add a name) are somehow treated as second-class citizens. When you visit https://photos.google.com/people https://photos.google.com/people, their names appeared at the very end of the list of named people (no matter how many photos you have for him/her), and they are almost never considered as face-recognition candidates when you upload new photos. I guess Google simply doesn't use the manually assigned people/face in their AI. * And the final nail on the coffin is, even if you went to the trouble and fixed all these problems manually, which I did, nothing stops Google to recognize the newly uploaded photos wrong. That means you need to repeat the process again and again. Also from an AI/machine learning point of view (I'm guessing, I'm not in this field), the more tricky cases that the user allowed/confirmed, the model for that person became more overfitted. So eventually it started to think other people are the same guy/gal. This is typical, but the problem is, you, as the supervisor, can't tell the AI that he was wrong, and re-tag the training set as easily. I think all this can be easily fixed if Google can add a way to "split" a person, and then force the AI to re-train the models based on the photos from now two different people. But I won't hold my breath for a free service.
djanogo 6y ago
I disagree, all that photo meta data/db is Google's, you can't export that out of Google. If google bans you or removes/changes that indexing you will loose it all.
_cs2017_ 6y ago
I'm trying to use Google Photos but find it hard to manage albums. Like I have a few thousand photos, I want to find all the ones that I didn't assign to albums yet. Doesn't seem like there's a way to do so. I also want to press one shortcut key to put a photo into a certain album and at the same time archive it. As it is, it takes several buttons and a mouse selection and a mouse click (with some delay in between), which is super painful when you have to repeat it thousands of times. Edit: Hmm, I saw there's Google Photos API. If it's easy(ish) to use, could I possibly write some small python or JS scripts to get this functionality? Or is there a reason this isn't as simple as it sounds?
leokennis 6y ago
I agree that Google Photos is better than iCloud in important aspects. However, for iPhone users, iCloud is so much more convenient that it makes up for the slight degradation in search quality etc. Also, in general, do not rely on Google or Apple as backup of your photos. Use something like PhotoSync to back up to a second cloud location, and also keep a local backup.
lm28469 6y ago
> Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind. > identify faces That's a negative point for many people. I want to store picture, not train the image recognition AI they might sell to the NSA in 10 years...
libso 6y ago
Google photos is one of the worst among the lot. It is Apple of photo apps. Very little user control. No way to manually tag stuff or name stuff. The only reason I use it is for the free storage. The design philosophy treats users as dumbfuks. I'm looking to move everything out.

by vvoyer 6y ago

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.
bootlooped 6y ago
It starts to make it viable to not meticulously organize things into albums.

kumarm 6y ago

I never understand people on HN complaining about Ads on YouTube, life long Storage on Google Photos costing $. Probably for 90% of people on HN, it costs more (Opportunity cost) to type a comment complaining about ads on Youtube compared to a month subscription. But for some reason people like to complain.

fomine3 6y ago
There are people who complaining Ads but also avoids YouTube Premium. I don't know what they want. Pay option to remove ads is great, isn't it?
- nomad543 6y ago
  It's not about accepting or not accepting paying to view videos. It's about how Youtube decimated competition and now the user cannot choose another pricing option and is left with the only option of paying the amount Google wants you to pay.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    It's serious dominant problem but not for ads. Don't blame Ads/Premium.
- neop1x 6y ago
  I am happily paying for YT Premium but also using youtube-dl ocassionally. There is great content on YT. On the other hand, I stopped paying and using Netflix. There was not enough interesting content for me.
Kye 6y ago
Or maybe your criteria for valuing things and deciding what's worth complaining about isn't as universal as you think.

acdha 6y ago

> 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. How big is your photo library? I have about 100GB and that’s all worked perfectly well on iOS/macOS for many years - even on the old 2010 MacBook Air I used until it stopped getting security updates. You can see a difference in quality but it’s a judgement call: Google Photos definitely indexes more things in pictures but it also has a much higher false positive rate - for example, it took until 2018-19 before searching for “cat” didn’t have two pages of results for my dog before any actual cats.

shaklee3 6y ago
... And apple can't find cats correctly at all. Which would you want? Google can put a name to your cat and index by typing the name, and in that case it only finds you specific cat.
- acdha 6y ago
  How about the reality we actually live in where Apple Photos does find cats reliably with fewer false positives?
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    Which reality is that? Apple photos is consistently worse at finding them. I've never heard anyone say their image recognition is anywhere near as good, and that's my experience as well.

fireattack 6y ago

Google Photos' face recognition feature is pretty good.. until Google started to think person A and person B are the same person and you want to fix it manually: which is basically impossible. I used to use this feature heavily, and have to give up. Don't get me wrong, I still think Google Photos is the best in class. The point is, even the "best" is not enough due to the lack of options to fine tune it. And once it breaks, it jumps from "holyshit" to "unusable" straightly. I wrote a very long article to detail it somewhere else before, here is the gist of it: ------- * There is no way to tell Google to "split" a person/face. All you can do is remove wrong results (person B) from person A (you can also say it's "wrong person" on web, but not in app). You can't manually re-tag them as B in batch. * These removed results don't seem to get re-recognized as other people; it's either not get re-analyzed at all, or often times, they will be re-recognized back to the wrong person again! * You can't multi-select more than a few hundreds pictures and remove. It says "can't remove results" on both app and web if you select, say, 1000 photos. This is extremely annoying since I have people that have 10k images and I have to do so in small batch. * You can manually assign a face, but can only do so one by one. And that's assuming Google actually detects the face, no matter how obvious it is. * The people you added manually (by selecting a face from a photo, and manually add a name) are somehow treated as second-class citizens. When you visit https://photos.google.com/people https://photos.google.com/people, their names appeared at the very end of the list of named people (no matter how many photos you have for him/her), and they are almost never considered as face-recognition candidates when you upload new photos. I guess Google simply doesn't use the manually assigned people/face in their AI. * And the final nail on the coffin is, even if you went to the trouble and fixed all these problems manually, which I did, nothing stops Google to recognize the newly uploaded photos wrong. That means you need to repeat the process again and again. Also from an AI/machine learning point of view (I'm guessing, I'm not in this field), the more tricky cases that the user allowed/confirmed, the model for that person became more overfitted. So eventually it started to think other people are the same guy/gal. This is typical, but the problem is, you, as the supervisor, can't tell the AI that he was wrong, and re-tag the training set as easily. I think all this can be easily fixed if Google can add a way to "split" a person, and then force the AI to re-train the models based on the photos from now two different people. But I won't hold my breath for a free service.

djanogo 6y ago

I disagree, all that photo meta data/db is Google's, you can't export that out of Google. If google bans you or removes/changes that indexing you will loose it all.

_cs2017_ 6y ago

I'm trying to use Google Photos but find it hard to manage albums. Like I have a few thousand photos, I want to find all the ones that I didn't assign to albums yet. Doesn't seem like there's a way to do so. I also want to press one shortcut key to put a photo into a certain album and at the same time archive it. As it is, it takes several buttons and a mouse selection and a mouse click (with some delay in between), which is super painful when you have to repeat it thousands of times. Edit: Hmm, I saw there's Google Photos API. If it's easy(ish) to use, could I possibly write some small python or JS scripts to get this functionality? Or is there a reason this isn't as simple as it sounds?

leokennis 6y ago

I agree that Google Photos is better than iCloud in important aspects. However, for iPhone users, iCloud is so much more convenient that it makes up for the slight degradation in search quality etc. Also, in general, do not rely on Google or Apple as backup of your photos. Use something like PhotoSync to back up to a second cloud location, and also keep a local backup.

lm28469 6y ago

> Mostly because its face/object/place/whatever recognition is the best of its kind. > identify faces That's a negative point for many people. I want to store picture, not train the image recognition AI they might sell to the NSA in 10 years...

libso 6y ago

Google photos is one of the worst among the lot. It is Apple of photo apps. Very little user control. No way to manually tag stuff or name stuff. The only reason I use it is for the free storage. The design philosophy treats users as dumbfuks. I'm looking to move everything out.