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I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos. To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant

I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos. To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year. Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.

thehappypm 6y ago
Yeah, and Google Photos you can easily access no-nonsense from your phone, your friend’s house, multiple laptops, etc.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  That's the main thing for me, and probably for the majority of people who don't want to or can't set up a home storage system with backups and redundancy etc.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  I got married recently. We really enjoyed the shared photo album feature of Google Photos. Apple has this too, but Google Photos is platform-agnostic. It works on Android, iOS, and the plain old web. We were able to set up a shared photo album, text a link to friends, and they could add all their photos to the album pretty easily. Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.
emaildanwilson 6y ago
I think it's terrible that the next step up from that plan is $999/year up to 20TB. Consumers shouldn't have to pay in orders of magnitude for storage they "could" but are not yet consuming. I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit the 2TB limit.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  I'm legit planning to just download it all, store on multiple drives/computers, send a copy to my brother in another state to stash in his vault, and then clear the 2TB and start over. Unless they boost the storage.
londons_explore 6y ago
> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.
- remus 6y ago
  I don't think that's inefficient as such, that's just the price you pay for data durability. Sure you can buy a high capacity HDD on Amazon for very little, but most people would be pretty sad if/when the hard drive dies and takes the family photo collection with it.
jeanofthedead 6y ago
The full-size photos are still compressed, unfortunately. And Google Photos turns Live Photos into 2-3 sec video files, which destroyed a huge chunk of my photo library when I made the switch to iCloud Photo Library.

thehappypm 6y ago

Yeah, and Google Photos you can easily access no-nonsense from your phone, your friend’s house, multiple laptops, etc.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
That's the main thing for me, and probably for the majority of people who don't want to or can't set up a home storage system with backups and redundancy etc.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
I got married recently. We really enjoyed the shared photo album feature of Google Photos. Apple has this too, but Google Photos is platform-agnostic. It works on Android, iOS, and the plain old web. We were able to set up a shared photo album, text a link to friends, and they could add all their photos to the album pretty easily. Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.

emaildanwilson 6y ago

I think it's terrible that the next step up from that plan is $999/year up to 20TB. Consumers shouldn't have to pay in orders of magnitude for storage they "could" but are not yet consuming. I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit the 2TB limit.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
I'm legit planning to just download it all, store on multiple drives/computers, send a copy to my brother in another state to stash in his vault, and then clear the 2TB and start over. Unless they boost the storage.

londons_explore 6y ago

> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.

remus 6y ago
I don't think that's inefficient as such, that's just the price you pay for data durability. Sure you can buy a high capacity HDD on Amazon for very little, but most people would be pretty sad if/when the hard drive dies and takes the family photo collection with it.

jeanofthedead 6y ago

The full-size photos are still compressed, unfortunately. And Google Photos turns Live Photos into 2-3 sec video files, which destroyed a huge chunk of my photo library when I made the switch to iCloud Photo Library.