8 ms·

Google Is Shutting Down Album Archive

170 points by oidar 3y ago

dharmab 3y ago
Another one for the graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/)
- the_af 3y ago
  Another one for the graveyard, sure. If only I could figure out what it is they are killing this time!
- yazzku 3y ago
  I was hoping it was just 'Google Is Shutting Down'. Hope to see that one in a graveyard soon.
  - akiselev 3y ago
    When Google finally figures out AGI, we'll know almost immediately. The second it comes on, it will ingest all of Google's data and immediately deduce that its purpose is to dismantle and shut the company down, before marking killedbygoogle.com feature complete at last and dissolving into the digital æther.
    - ccooffee 3y ago
      "The Last Question" by Asimov is a classic scifi short story that parallels this comment (presumably intentionally). The story is a short read and available for free on archive.org[0]. [0] https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...
- royal_ts 3y ago
  That lists just about everything even if an app just got merged 1:1 into another app. It's so dumb and doesn't even add context, may be valid to add in this case but often it's just dumb
  - anotheraccount9 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    It also lists previous versions of things that still exist. They have Angular listed as killed by google because Angular 2 replaced it.. Or listing the lite versions of apps which became obsolete when phones were able to run the full app.
    - sieabahlpark 3y ago
      [dead]
  - Andrex 3y ago
    People blindly parroting memes don't exhibit discernment or intelligence? Whoah.
  - rcme 3y ago
    > That lists just about everything even if an app just got merged 1:1 into another app Isn't that part of the meme? Why does Google have so many similar products that it's possible to merge them 1:1?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- phpisatrash 3y ago
  I was waiting for this comment
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
judge2020 3y ago
Hedge funds are demanding Google downsize more than it already has. Layoffs look bad so they may be disguising more layoofs by shutting down products - Domains especially likely requires a few hundred engineers and UI/UX people across the many aspects of the service.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  No hedge fund owns enough Alphabet shares to be able to order the company around.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jeffbee 3y ago
Never heard of it. When I visited the link, the only thing in it is stuff Google added from Hangouts, a past product that shut down.
- mkroman 3y ago
  I think it's the remnants of Picasa Web. The web UI looked similar to me to the web UI they had for that in the years after.
inopinatus 3y ago
This is one way to implement the right to be forgotten, I suppose.
modeless 3y ago
Whoever sent this email should be reprimanded. The vast majority of recipients have never used this "product". The images will not be deleted when it's killed because they actually reside in other products such as Blogger and will still be downloadable using Takeout[1], so approximately nobody needed to be notified. But now this is yet another PR cycle for the "Google kills everything" meme. [1] https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/7008270 https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/7008270
- asciii 3y ago
  > Whoever sent this email should be reprimanded. I have never heard/used this product. Maybe there were layoffs and no one cares...or an uninformed individual sent the mass email with short notice. Either way, very telling! Also bad press is good press, I guess?
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    I got the email, thought, “huh, never heard of it.” Wasn’t curious enough to find out until I saw this post. Still didn’t understand what exactly this was or how I used it, so I clicked. 30% of the screen (on mobile) is a banner telling me I should be using chrome. Another 40% banner is telling me the site is going away soon soon soon. Another 10% is exhorting me to make connections with my account so others can see my (soon to be deleted) photos. And the remainder of the screen is an empty gray box, with no photos or other content, just gray as far as the eye can see (until you hit one of the aforementioned banners); all that remains in light gray letters is the text “Looks like you’ve reached the end.” A real modern day Ozymandias.
    - asciii 3y ago
      sounds nightmarish Though I’m not seeing what you describe on Safari with iOS 16.5
      - nocoiner 3y ago
        it was so bad, I actually took a screenshot and was going to post it, but I guess imgur doesn’t allow anonymous uploads anymore. Wonder how long that’s been the case. I’ll look for a decent looking photo host that’s not going to mercilessly exploit my metadata and edit and post the screed cap.
mholt 3y ago
This appears to be NEITHER your "Archive" NOR your albums in Google Photos. This is basically a collection of media you uploaded to Blogger, Hangouts, and Picasa Web Albums. Still, doesn't hurt to Takeout your Google Photos every ~6 months. (I am working on an app that will help you organize and view them, together with your text messages, location history, and other online-only data.)
- citelao 3y ago
  I would be extremely interested in a Google Takeout viewer if you ever end up releasing one. I dealt with Google Takeout, trying to export my photos to Apple Photos (when Google was planning to charge money for old Google Workspace accounts), and I found it extremely difficult to deal with the file format. The script I wrote (https://github.com/citelao/google_photos_takeout_to_apple_photos https://github.com/citelao/google_photos_takeout_to_apple_ph...) ended up being decently reliable, but there were a ton of weird mismatches between the EXIF data in Google Photos metadata and the EXIF data in the photos themselves. Although some of that wonkiness was Apple Photos, not Google. I'd love to see software that could wrangle the mess :)
  - mholt 3y ago
    It's called Timelinize (might rename it?), and you can follow it here: https://twitter.com/timelinize https://twitter.com/timelinize (Click "Media" on the Twitter account to view a few screenshots for a preview. More to come!) (There's no website or project page yet because I've been busy developing.) If you want an invite to try out an early dev preview today, follow @timelinize on Twitter and tweet at it, I'll see about getting you into the Discord. Some background: Saving a local copy of my Google Photos has been a passion project of mine since ~2014 (before Google Photos even!). For years it was only focused on downloading the data using APIs -- but then we found out that Google strips location data (from your own photos!) if using the API, so I added Takeout support. The problem is there was no viewer. Well in 2019 I finally started working on a viewer. It has evolved a lot since it's a very ambitious project and there's nothing quite like it. It's not just Google Photos: it's any photos and videos. It's also for your text messages and emails. And your location history. And contact list. And chat apps. And really, any files you have. It also supports Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram account exports too. Oh, and iPhone backups. Timelinize is entity-aware, and it can map identities across data sources (with enough info, or with a manual mapping, or some optional heuristics). It's just not a photo gallery. It's basically a really detailed view of your life and online history. It's neat because I have my family pictures, my text messages between me and my wife when we were dating (and after of course), and there's different views to explore: map, timeline, conversations, gallery, and more to come (calendar, etc). We can even place non-geolocated data on a map since we can correlate timestamp and entity. So when we went on our honeymoon, I can see text messages received from friends while we were driving to a beach. It's really quite immersive and magical and I haven't seen anything quite like it. And everything is stored on your own computer, it's a GUI app and you have to have enough space to store your stuff. The data is just organized as files within a folder on disk, with a SQLite DB holding the index and the small textual items.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Why the flurry of decommissions from Google recently?
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  More compute for the Bard maybe?
pcurve 3y ago
What was even the point of this service anyway?
PugPaladin 3y ago
The email I got says that Album Archive is shutting down, that I accessed it yesterday, and that I should use Google Takeout to export a single photo that I can't access (?). So I got to Google Takeout and I'm told that I have one export remaining. None of this makes any sense. I have never heard of any of these. I'm really surprised at how bad Google is at making products given how much money they have and the level of skill the people have there. There are so many problem across all of their business and consumer products that I've seen. I can't see what the draw is to keep using their stuff, especially since they are so good at killing stuff off.
- w-ll 3y ago
  > that I accessed it yesterday Same. I thought my account might have been comprised after seeing this email.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  You can have all the money in the world and still be utterly disorganized
- flomo 3y ago
  Similar experience. Fortunately there is an activity log link, showing that Dropbox uploaded something which looks like a CD cover there once in 2011. important notice.
- SillyUsername 3y ago
  Click that single photo. It's a folder, at least it was for me.
sharts 3y ago
wtf is "Album Archive"?
ransackdev 3y ago
[flagged]
the_af 3y ago
For the life of me I cannot figure our what Album Archive is. I remember being similarly confused when Google shut down... what was it? Photos? Picasa? And then nothing really happened. I see I have pics I uploaded to Blogger showing up in this thing called Album Archive. Will they be deleted when it's gone? Fuck if I know. Google, get your shit together. Your services and mails about them are goddamn confusing. And I work with computers for a living! If I can't figure this out, sure as hell my parents won't either.
SillyUsername 3y ago
WTF does this mean for Blogger? Does it have a migration route for the photos? If there's no migration route, a tool that could be created by one Google developer, it means thousands of people now have work to fix thousands of Blogger posts. Cumulatively ~48 hours of work for a tool has just turned into at least 48000 hours for everyone else. What's worse is, people will fix their blogs but I bet Google will use broken links as (another) justification to shut down Blogger next. That means those 48000 hours will be an utter waste of time. If you ever needed proof Google have no fucking strategy or clue anymore this is it (that and shutting down Google Music when YouTube Music was incomplete, people just moved to competitors).
- adsfqwop 3y ago
  This is only a guess, but I get the impression Album Archive is some sort of aggregator service. The original Blogger images appear to still be stored in Blogger's own media manager. For example, many images referenced from Blogger posts contain links with URLs like https://1.bp.blogspot.com/ https://1.bp.blogspot.com/... further strengthening the case that these images originate from Blogger, not the Archive service. So in summary, my guess is that shutting down Album Archive will not affect Blogger media files. Another case for this conclusion, is that it seems totally insane to delete all of Blogger's media files, and not inform Blogger users directly, but instead do it through some obscure Archive service notice. Would be nice to get an official confirmation on this, but let's say we can make an educated guess that people's Blogger photos are probably safe.
bexterw21 3y ago
[flagged]
greatgib 3y ago
I just got the email from Google. For a company this size, a one month notice is an asshole move.
PeterStuer 3y ago
I had never heard of album archive, but apparently I have one. I started the export which might take 'hours or even days'. Looking forward to discover what is in there.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
I just downloaded the archive it created: basically a couple of random photos. The archive was 3.3MB. The last activity was from 2013 when somebody else took a photo of me and shared it with me somehow via picasa web. The other activity was from 2007. Not very recent in other words.
megamike 3y ago
so now how do you upload a photo to your blog??

170 points by oidar 3y ago

dharmab 3y ago

Another one for the graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/)

the_af 3y ago
Another one for the graveyard, sure. If only I could figure out what it is they are killing this time!
yazzku 3y ago
I was hoping it was just 'Google Is Shutting Down'. Hope to see that one in a graveyard soon.
- akiselev 3y ago
  When Google finally figures out AGI, we'll know almost immediately. The second it comes on, it will ingest all of Google's data and immediately deduce that its purpose is to dismantle and shut the company down, before marking killedbygoogle.com feature complete at last and dissolving into the digital æther.
  - ccooffee 3y ago
    "The Last Question" by Asimov is a classic scifi short story that parallels this comment (presumably intentionally). The story is a short read and available for free on archive.org[0]. [0] https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...
royal_ts 3y ago
That lists just about everything even if an app just got merged 1:1 into another app. It's so dumb and doesn't even add context, may be valid to add in this case but often it's just dumb
- anotheraccount9 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It also lists previous versions of things that still exist. They have Angular listed as killed by google because Angular 2 replaced it.. Or listing the lite versions of apps which became obsolete when phones were able to run the full app.
  - sieabahlpark 3y ago
    [dead]
- Andrex 3y ago
  People blindly parroting memes don't exhibit discernment or intelligence? Whoah.
- rcme 3y ago
  > That lists just about everything even if an app just got merged 1:1 into another app Isn't that part of the meme? Why does Google have so many similar products that it's possible to merge them 1:1?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
phpisatrash 3y ago
I was waiting for this comment

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

judge2020 3y ago

Hedge funds are demanding Google downsize more than it already has. Layoffs look bad so they may be disguising more layoofs by shutting down products - Domains especially likely requires a few hundred engineers and UI/UX people across the many aspects of the service.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago
No hedge fund owns enough Alphabet shares to be able to order the company around.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jeffbee 3y ago

Never heard of it. When I visited the link, the only thing in it is stuff Google added from Hangouts, a past product that shut down.

mkroman 3y ago
I think it's the remnants of Picasa Web. The web UI looked similar to me to the web UI they had for that in the years after.

inopinatus 3y ago

This is one way to implement the right to be forgotten, I suppose.

modeless 3y ago

Whoever sent this email should be reprimanded. The vast majority of recipients have never used this "product". The images will not be deleted when it's killed because they actually reside in other products such as Blogger and will still be downloadable using Takeout[1], so approximately nobody needed to be notified. But now this is yet another PR cycle for the "Google kills everything" meme. [1] https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/7008270 https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/7008270

asciii 3y ago
> Whoever sent this email should be reprimanded. I have never heard/used this product. Maybe there were layoffs and no one cares...or an uninformed individual sent the mass email with short notice. Either way, very telling! Also bad press is good press, I guess?
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I got the email, thought, “huh, never heard of it.” Wasn’t curious enough to find out until I saw this post. Still didn’t understand what exactly this was or how I used it, so I clicked. 30% of the screen (on mobile) is a banner telling me I should be using chrome. Another 40% banner is telling me the site is going away soon soon soon. Another 10% is exhorting me to make connections with my account so others can see my (soon to be deleted) photos. And the remainder of the screen is an empty gray box, with no photos or other content, just gray as far as the eye can see (until you hit one of the aforementioned banners); all that remains in light gray letters is the text “Looks like you’ve reached the end.” A real modern day Ozymandias.
  - asciii 3y ago
    sounds nightmarish Though I’m not seeing what you describe on Safari with iOS 16.5
    - nocoiner 3y ago
      it was so bad, I actually took a screenshot and was going to post it, but I guess imgur doesn’t allow anonymous uploads anymore. Wonder how long that’s been the case. I’ll look for a decent looking photo host that’s not going to mercilessly exploit my metadata and edit and post the screed cap.

mholt 3y ago

This appears to be NEITHER your "Archive" NOR your albums in Google Photos. This is basically a collection of media you uploaded to Blogger, Hangouts, and Picasa Web Albums. Still, doesn't hurt to Takeout your Google Photos every ~6 months. (I am working on an app that will help you organize and view them, together with your text messages, location history, and other online-only data.)

citelao 3y ago
I would be extremely interested in a Google Takeout viewer if you ever end up releasing one. I dealt with Google Takeout, trying to export my photos to Apple Photos (when Google was planning to charge money for old Google Workspace accounts), and I found it extremely difficult to deal with the file format. The script I wrote (https://github.com/citelao/google_photos_takeout_to_apple_photos https://github.com/citelao/google_photos_takeout_to_apple_ph...) ended up being decently reliable, but there were a ton of weird mismatches between the EXIF data in Google Photos metadata and the EXIF data in the photos themselves. Although some of that wonkiness was Apple Photos, not Google. I'd love to see software that could wrangle the mess :)
- mholt 3y ago
  It's called Timelinize (might rename it?), and you can follow it here: https://twitter.com/timelinize https://twitter.com/timelinize (Click "Media" on the Twitter account to view a few screenshots for a preview. More to come!) (There's no website or project page yet because I've been busy developing.) If you want an invite to try out an early dev preview today, follow @timelinize on Twitter and tweet at it, I'll see about getting you into the Discord. Some background: Saving a local copy of my Google Photos has been a passion project of mine since ~2014 (before Google Photos even!). For years it was only focused on downloading the data using APIs -- but then we found out that Google strips location data (from your own photos!) if using the API, so I added Takeout support. The problem is there was no viewer. Well in 2019 I finally started working on a viewer. It has evolved a lot since it's a very ambitious project and there's nothing quite like it. It's not just Google Photos: it's any photos and videos. It's also for your text messages and emails. And your location history. And contact list. And chat apps. And really, any files you have. It also supports Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram account exports too. Oh, and iPhone backups. Timelinize is entity-aware, and it can map identities across data sources (with enough info, or with a manual mapping, or some optional heuristics). It's just not a photo gallery. It's basically a really detailed view of your life and online history. It's neat because I have my family pictures, my text messages between me and my wife when we were dating (and after of course), and there's different views to explore: map, timeline, conversations, gallery, and more to come (calendar, etc). We can even place non-geolocated data on a map since we can correlate timestamp and entity. So when we went on our honeymoon, I can see text messages received from friends while we were driving to a beach. It's really quite immersive and magical and I haven't seen anything quite like it. And everything is stored on your own computer, it's a GUI app and you have to have enough space to store your stuff. The data is just organized as files within a folder on disk, with a SQLite DB holding the index and the small textual items.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Why the flurry of decommissions from Google recently?

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
More compute for the Bard maybe?

pcurve 3y ago

What was even the point of this service anyway?

PugPaladin 3y ago

The email I got says that Album Archive is shutting down, that I accessed it yesterday, and that I should use Google Takeout to export a single photo that I can't access (?). So I got to Google Takeout and I'm told that I have one export remaining. None of this makes any sense. I have never heard of any of these. I'm really surprised at how bad Google is at making products given how much money they have and the level of skill the people have there. There are so many problem across all of their business and consumer products that I've seen. I can't see what the draw is to keep using their stuff, especially since they are so good at killing stuff off.

w-ll 3y ago
> that I accessed it yesterday Same. I thought my account might have been comprised after seeing this email.
ekianjo 3y ago
You can have all the money in the world and still be utterly disorganized
flomo 3y ago
Similar experience. Fortunately there is an activity log link, showing that Dropbox uploaded something which looks like a CD cover there once in 2011. important notice.
SillyUsername 3y ago
Click that single photo. It's a folder, at least it was for me.

sharts 3y ago

wtf is "Album Archive"?

ransackdev 3y ago

[flagged]

the_af 3y ago

For the life of me I cannot figure our what Album Archive is. I remember being similarly confused when Google shut down... what was it? Photos? Picasa? And then nothing really happened. I see I have pics I uploaded to Blogger showing up in this thing called Album Archive. Will they be deleted when it's gone? Fuck if I know. Google, get your shit together. Your services and mails about them are goddamn confusing. And I work with computers for a living! If I can't figure this out, sure as hell my parents won't either.

SillyUsername 3y ago

WTF does this mean for Blogger? Does it have a migration route for the photos? If there's no migration route, a tool that could be created by one Google developer, it means thousands of people now have work to fix thousands of Blogger posts. Cumulatively ~48 hours of work for a tool has just turned into at least 48000 hours for everyone else. What's worse is, people will fix their blogs but I bet Google will use broken links as (another) justification to shut down Blogger next. That means those 48000 hours will be an utter waste of time. If you ever needed proof Google have no fucking strategy or clue anymore this is it (that and shutting down Google Music when YouTube Music was incomplete, people just moved to competitors).

adsfqwop 3y ago
This is only a guess, but I get the impression Album Archive is some sort of aggregator service. The original Blogger images appear to still be stored in Blogger's own media manager. For example, many images referenced from Blogger posts contain links with URLs like https://1.bp.blogspot.com/ https://1.bp.blogspot.com/... further strengthening the case that these images originate from Blogger, not the Archive service. So in summary, my guess is that shutting down Album Archive will not affect Blogger media files. Another case for this conclusion, is that it seems totally insane to delete all of Blogger's media files, and not inform Blogger users directly, but instead do it through some obscure Archive service notice. Would be nice to get an official confirmation on this, but let's say we can make an educated guess that people's Blogger photos are probably safe.

bexterw21 3y ago

[flagged]

greatgib 3y ago

I just got the email from Google. For a company this size, a one month notice is an asshole move.

PeterStuer 3y ago

I had never heard of album archive, but apparently I have one. I started the export which might take 'hours or even days'. Looking forward to discover what is in there.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I just downloaded the archive it created: basically a couple of random photos. The archive was 3.3MB. The last activity was from 2013 when somebody else took a photo of me and shared it with me somehow via picasa web. The other activity was from 2007. Not very recent in other words.

megamike 3y ago

so now how do you upload a photo to your blog??