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Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users
- coolspot 6y agoGoogle seems to be in some “cut all expenses” mode recently: + cancelled stadia game studio + cancelled free unlimited google photos + closed Chromium APIs for derived browsers + closed Google Music (replaced with YT Music) + froze hiring + cancelled new office leases
- smueller1234 6y agoGoogle is hiring just fine. (Source: I'm hiring. I work for Google. Also careers.google.com.)
- junon 6y agoHaven't received my semi-yearly Google recruiting email this year, I was starting to get worried! I'm itching to decline for the fifth time! :)
- vinger 6y ago4 declines and you are out.
- toast0 6y agoThey finally stopped emailing me after I figured out they were looking for someone else with my name. They dropped a hint that they were excited about my compiler work at Microsoft; but I've never done compiler work or been employed by Microsoft.
- ignoramous 6y agoTheir loss, toast0! You're one of the most thoughtful, insightful, skillful participant on this little orange site :)
- toast0 6y agoAww, thanks. Doesn't mean I'd be a good fit over there; anyway, I've had enough experience with huge companies; don't want to do that again.
- gerash 6y agoOh no, they must be really desperate to hire you.
- astrange 6y agoThey were the only company who'd call me at work. Unfortunately every time they'd try they'd have some kind of sex scandal or employee harassment story the next day so I never called back.
- TLightful 6y agoTell your boss that Google jumped the shark 15 years ago. Get him/her to tell their boss, and so on. Appreciate it.
- bilal4hmed 6y agoDo yall have any remote positions?
- kyrra 6y ago(googler, opinions are my own). See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22175150/google-return-office-september-flexible-work-week-coronavirus-pandemic-sundar-pichai https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22175150/google-return-o... We are WFH till September for sure, and they will be testing flex hours after that. Though, they are still office focused, so you need to live near the office/team you work for. Note that there are a few special cases where they let an individual be remote, but they tend to be very very outstanding developers. I've only worked with 1 of those in the last 5 years here.
- pkaye 6y agoThat is unfortunate WFH will not be common. I live in the bay area but I have health issues that require I get treatment at evening and night and its stressful to run through rush hour traffic to start my treatment. I am somewhat tethered to employers close to home to save on commute time. The current WFH at my employer helps me save a lot of travel time. Now I even get spare time to exercise every day. I hope more companies continue to do it. But I guess even flex hours will help me balance things better.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bilal4hmed 6y agoThank you very much for replying with the info :)
- XCSme 6y agoAfter being through 14 interviews at Google and getting no offer I can't recommend anyone their hiring process.
- t-writescode 6y agoGoogle cancelling products is as common as the sun setting in the west. It’s what they do. Cancelling new office leases may have to do with WFH and a pandemic.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y agoGoogle owns most of their US real estate - it's a core part of their overall investment strategy.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoHiring froze??
- coolspot 6y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/google-to-cut-marketing-budgets-hiring-freeze-expected.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/google-to-cut-marketing-budg...
- eru 6y agoThey also no longer hand out Christmas presents. But those had been on a downhill slope for a while.
- mav3rick 6y ago$400 dollar donations to charities we can choose from is fine by me and A LOT of other Googlers.
- eru 6y agoEh, money is fungible. They could have always just given everyone a <1% pay rise instead of a Christmas gift, for the same monetary effect. I'm a bit out of the loop. How limited is the list of charities to choose from? Is it a small list, or essentially free for all? (For charity, I usually just pick whatever GiveWell suggests at the moment. Everything else feels like an insult to humanity to me.)
- mav3rick 6y agoThere is a very big list. It's even filterable by continents. I have always found the charities I want to donate on there.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoGoogle photos is the best photos product out there for simple sharing with family (and partner share), so of course they're going to destroy it with mismanagement. Time to start looking for alternatives.
- coolspot 6y agoCheck out Photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
- mceachen 6y agoI'm building a self-hosted, cross-platform one that you're welcome to try! https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/
- hedora 6y agoIt looks great, but lack of open source is a deal breaker. I wouldn’t mind paying for it, but what if I want to run it outside of docker (and not on Ubuntu?), let alone on an ARM or BSD machine? Consider using the BSL license!
- mceachen 6y agoRe: open source: There's already a bylaw that requires the code to be open-sourced in case PhotoStructure Inc. closes: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#if-photostructure-inc-goes-away-photostructure-wont https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#if-photos... Thanks for the suggestion of BSL: I'll look into that. PhotoStructure runs pretty much anywhere Node.js runs (Windows, macOS, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, and any x64 docker host). You can certainly compile it on ARM: https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-node/ https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-node/
- oflannabhra 6y agoiCloud shared albums has served our family well for over five years, all for free.
- kumarharsh 6y agoThis article reads like senseless hate-mongering. The email this article is talking about is for users of the Google One subscription only. Of course they'd like their users to know that they can upload full quality photos to Google Photos - that's one of the main reasons I bought the subscription too! Disclosure: I work at Google, but had bought the subscription before joining.
- vinger 6y agoSo you drank the cool-aid before making it? Bring back picasa
- craftinator 6y ago> So you drank the cool-aid before making it? Ballsy move, kumarharsh. Is it weird working there now? Sort of feels like working for the Empire, but you all have fruity little sweaters instead of stormtrooper armor?
- almog 6y agoI stopped using Google Photos after a bug I experienced few years ago when I configured my phone to upload everything to Photos and remove local copies: I knew photos are not exact copy and will be kept up to a certain resolution, yet some photos, due to network fault I believe, appeared on Photos as a tiny pixelated copy of the original copy. The pixelated images were probably a result of a interlaced progressive compression. The main problem for me was that client removed the local copy thus costing me few dozens photos forever lost.
- bennettfeely 6y agoI'm stunned by the image showing the difference between original and what Google apparently considers "high quality"
- wccrawford 6y agoI think that image is faked. The caption says the difference will exist, but "not by this much". It's a fake.
- drivebycomment 6y agoMy guess here is that the image isn't fake per se, but it's missing the context. I'm guessing the "original" is much higher resolution than 16MP. Google Photos' "high quality" being always limited to 16MP, my guess is that the comparison shot is between what I'm guessing at least 60MP or even 100MP image vs (downsampled) 16MP. For more sane comparison of what "high quality" does, I find: https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Photos-High-quality-vs-Original-Whats-the-difference-and-should-you-care_id93938 https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Photos-High-quality-v... i.e. unless you have a camera with substantially higher resolution than 16MP or you're a professional photograph (or equivalent amateur who cares about subtle pixel level details), high quality is good enough for all casual photographers , which is basically 99% of us including myself.
- jrockway 6y agoI got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day, they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful. I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the deal and that storage went away. I use iCloud now.
- prox 6y agoThat’s bad. Using any Google product will be the same experience, simply because you are not the client, advertisers are. I am sure there are fine people working on the ship called Google, but I don’t like where it is heading.
- dontblink 6y agoAdvertisers have nothing to do with a paid product. GSuite (or whatever it is called now) can be paid for. Just an fyi as you seem to be misinformed.
- prox 6y agoThat really doesn’t change the outcome of what kind of company Google is, on the whole, and where they get their value extraction from. Gsuite is only 5% of their revenue. Photos is also not part of Gsuite afaik.
- ddalex 6y agoWell they are trying to move it from advertising based to subscription based :)
- ahepp 6y agoI paid for GSuite, it sucked. Between GSuite and Fi, it was a constant battle of trying to get Google's own services to work with each other. I couldn't use voice assistant to set a reminder on my phone... I wish I had just gone with Apple.
- psanford 6y agoIts really frustrating that there's no good, opensource, Android media backup tool. I just want a simple app that will auto upload photos and videos to an https endpoint (or an S3 bucket). There are a few tools out there but they all seem to have bit rotted to the point where they don't work reliably on modern Android.
- Symbiote 6y agoI use Syncthing to synchronize between my phone and desktop. It's a little confusing to set up the first time, but I've had it on this phone for 3 years and not needed to fiddle with it. (It uses its own protocol.)
- aoeuhtns 6y agoYup, after years of trying to make nextcloud, syncthing, etc work for my workflow (copy from flat photos folder on device -> flat photos staging folder on backup server, then a cron job organizes it into folders by year/month), I finally resorted to something manual. Termux + rsync on android. Every few days, I run the termux shortcut to rsync a folder, and delete what's copied over from my device. It just works.
- sergimansilla 6y agoPhotoSync is actually very good: https://www.photosync-app.com https://www.photosync-app.com
- mensetmanusman 6y agoIt sounds like Kugel is running out of storage space
- philips 6y agoI have started to use Microsoft OneDrive along side Google Photos for two reasons. 1. OneDrive also backs up my photos on my Android device in original quality. 2. I have Google Takeout backup to OneDrive quarterly.
- Griffinsauce 6y agoBe careful using OneDrive for important storage, I've been using OneDrive with my band to share musical projects for a while and we discovered there is a bug that is somehow moving random files to the windows recycle bin. The files were not necessarily touched (they're often from archived projects), I haven't been able to spot a pattern yet. (it may have to do with fast-moving changes + a mix of OS's perhaps) There are topics in their support forums about this but no serious responses, it's a vague problem but I was shocked that it wasn't a red alert moment for them. We're switching as soon as possible, but yeah, keep an eye on your recycle bin... (Edited for clarity.)
- tinus_hn 6y agoJust like a Google account, your Microsoft account can be blocked for any reason and you will have no way to retrieve your files. Keep local backups.
- Gh0stRAT 6y agoI've never needed to reach out to either for support, but I've heard only negative things about Google's customer service. To the point where I would expect to at least be able to reach someone at Microsoft but have zero hope of ever resolving a problem with my Google account…
- IshKebab 6y agoHigh Quality is not just limited to 16 megapixels, the photos are also re-encoded at a lower bitrate.
- thevagrant 6y agoI remember setting original quality on purpose as I didn't want downgraded images. I paid for extra storage... Only to find multiple times Google Photos app would randomly reset my preference and use their "high quality" setting. I made sure to stop using Google Photos (except as a low quality backup) and used other storage providers. My early experiences with Google Drive were also negative to the point that I would rather use Dropbox, One Drive or another solution.
- josteink 6y agoFree unlimited full quality pictures “for life”, Google Edition. [1] https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/pixel-pixel-xl-continue-to-have-full-resolution-unlimited-photos-storage-for-life-google-1763426 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/pixel-pixel-xl-continu...
- wooptoo 6y agoI think none of us is surprised that the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum. Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage services out there that offer good price per GB. Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search brings up FolderSync which looks decent.
- Aeolun 6y agoAfter all the issues I’ve had with other providers, including self hosting. I’m now just transferring all my photos to B2 with the photosync app. It’s working fantastically well. I haven’t found a way to get all my google photos out though.
- precurse 6y agoThe only way to get the original quality photos is by using Google Takeout. Before Google made changes to Drive, you could use rclone (https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/) to sync originals. That no longer seems to be the case, unfortunately.
- XCSme 6y ago> the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum Could we expect the same to happen to Gmail? It also has a 15GB free quota.
- wooptoo 6y agoI don't think that will happen. But 15Gb shared between email, drive and photos is not that much nowadays.
- verytrivial 6y agoFor a few years it seemed to me that updates to Photos on Android would silently flip the quality setting down from Original to "High" as in "compressed", so I was never sure if the images I wanted to backup in original actually were backed up or not. I never set it to "High" but it kept flipping back to that. I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible. I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One. (seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!) Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!
- subsonicswe 6y agoThis definitely sounds like a bug worth tracking down. If you're interested in using your account as example, it would be helpful to file in-app feedback including at least the following two things: 1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue" 2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting
- posguy 6y agoWill this result in the problem getting addressed? Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.
- subsonicswe 6y agoThat's a lot of speculation. Why wouldn't Google care about losing user data? Especially for such an important setting.
- computerphage 6y agoBecause not caring is the default?
- MikeGale 6y agoThe decision making points seem to be known: * Google kills projects at an increasing rate, the warning may be days * Google has in the past destroyed quality images in their care * If you don't pay you have only yourself to blame
- linuxhiker 6y agoI removed all images (over 40GB) from Google photos just a week ago. I don't miss it.
- aceazzameen 6y agoI expected shennigans to occur with Google Photos over time, which is why I've been using Dropbox to backup phone photos now. Dropbox immediately syncs to my hard drives at original quality. And while I'm at it, I still backup with Google Photos at a lower quality. Not as a failsafe, but just for that fast ML searching of subjects like, "dog" or whatever. And if I ever lose that search functionality, no big loss. I would have gladly given Google my money over Dropbox, but Google has become an untrustworthy and unreliable brand in my eyes recently. Plus I still have control over my Dropbox data via hard drive syncing. Oh and Picasa for local face tagging is still an option! That gem of a software still works. Although in all honesty, I haven't run it in a while so my tag database is extremely out of date.
- perryizgr8 6y agoI've been doing the exact same thing except with one drive. I don't trust Google.
- torgian 6y agoNot surprising. I’m wondering if it will someday come down to storing personal items on personal hard drives again, instead of relying on the cloud for anything other than temporary storage.
- chihuahua 6y agoCertainly if you have pictures you care about and don't want to wake up one day to find that Google has locked your account due to unspecified reasons, you should store them on a personal hard drive. And use Google cloud stuff only as a convenient cache.
- cafxx 6y agoJust for sharing: my setup is something like the following exactly because, even though I like google photo, I always felt it was too good to last. I have 2 NAS (one a old custom build running freenas, the other a QNAP) in 2 different continents. I use resilio sync to sync between them, and to automatically download photos from my phones to the two NAS (when the phones are charging and connected to wifi). The two NAS also expose a network volume with all pictures, that is mounted on the PCs I use lightroom on. This is also how pictures from regular cameras can be ingested. Lightroom database backups also end up on that network volume. Each one of the two NAS takes hourly snapshot of their FS (to protect against accidental deletion/overwrites). As data is rarely updated, these snapshots can be kept for years while using negligible space. In addition, the qnap NAS backs everything up, encrypted, to glacier, just in case everything else fails. Finally, the phones also sync to google photo in "high" quality, just as a convenience. If I don't care about quality, i can share from google photo. Otherwise I can share via the qnap NAS in original quality.
- satyamkapoor 6y agoI use self hosted nextcloud now. It takes time to manage but can’t handle more drama like these
- XCSme 6y agoCan you elaborate on what exactly is taking time to manage? Isn't it a setup-once-and-forget kind of platform?
- satyamkapoor 6y agoUpdates and adding more storage, at times changing backup regime. Also testing new plugins :). It can be setup-once-and-forget but it's really good if we make sure we hear or know about all security flaws around it.
- apatheticonion 6y agoI wish I could use an AWS S3 bucket as a virtual SD card. That way I own my storage and I use the photo manager I choose
- systemvoltage 6y agoGood. Then pay for storage service. Why do people feel entitled to get free stuff?
- jayFu 6y agoFor those who would like to self hosted on SBC, worth to give Lomorage a try, the service is very lightweight and can run on cheap 512M Orange Pi Zero. Check it out at https://lomorage.com https://lomorage.com, and OrangePi Zero Setup, https://tinyurl.com/368krs7b https://tinyurl.com/368krs7b