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Google Will Launch Google Photos, a Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage”
- dudus 11y agoGoogle already have unlimited storage for photos, maybe they are just increasing the size of things that count to the free storage. From: https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/6558?hl=en https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/6558?hl=en Keep in mind that photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count toward your storage limit.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoI think separation from Google+ will be the big thing.
- criley2 11y agoI'm super psyched about this. Photos was easily my favorite part of Google+, but I was never comfortable having my entire phone connected to a public-only social network. I never trusted photo backup from my phone to a public-only profile page. I understand that google respects privacy and tests their code well and doesn't auto-share photos, but the reality is I will never be comfortable with a public-only profile page directly connected to my cellphones camera with auto-upload. I may be that tiny, tiny minority but I'm very psyched I'll be able to finally use some of the great tools without having to worry about the fact that my phone is being dumped into a public-only social network that "should" protect my privacy.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Photos was easily my favorite part of Google+, but I was never comfortable having my entire phone connected to a public-only social network. In what sense is G+ a "public-only social network"?
- criley2 11y agoWhen you create a G+ profile, you explicitly must check a box that affirms that they are creating a publicly viewable profile for your account. That profile page will, no matter what, be a public internet page with no permission filter at all. You can then subsequently lock down features ON that page, such as hiding work information, hiding photos, hiding this, hiding that, (in fact, each of the dozens and dozens of options must be individually hidden), but the net result of that work is a public page with very little info on it. By proxy, I can set my Facebook page to "visible to friends only" and even if you have a hardlink, you'll receieve a "page does not exist" error when you view it without logged-in whitelist (friend list) approval to even know the page exists. I was never OK with the idea that, essentially, my android device had a public web page. A direct link between my data and a public profile page that I had no ability to remove access to. As evidence of this I made a dummy G+ for a mostly unused Google account I have. Even though I turned off all features and hid all sections and turned on all privacy settings, and have added 0 content, 0 customization, 0 demographic settings (completely and totally blank G+ profile, no posts, nothing), the G+ dummy profile has "715 views" in the past year. I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. It's forced-public, searchable, etc. The best you can do is have a public profile page that you mark "do not search" (but which will still be crawled because search engines often crawl then hide instead of ignore). You can never have privacy on G+ like Facebook, where you have a private page that does not even resolve as an address to non-friends.
- danellis 11y agoThat's default-public, not public-only. > I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. You didn't say what information was revealed on the profile. If it was completely blank, then how is that a privacy issue?
- criley2 11y agoThe information revealed was: forced real name and existence of page. I do not want the existence of a profile to be known. I do not want social networks, search engines, and government organizations crawling and recording information from a profile page connected directly to my cellphone. I explained this: on Facebook, if you click a link to my profile it will say "sorry this link is invalid". If you click it on Google, despite my best attempts, it will say "Hey, this user exists, here is their full name, oh, they don't share anything else with you". That's an invasion of my privacy, to me, to have a public page that resolves and identifies me against my will. The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you without your permission or knowledge. What do you think those 700 clicks are? People hitting a blank profile? They're bots, and they're data harvesters. The existence of a profile is great information to help build more complete profiles of me, my devices and accounts, and ultimately my browsing history, locations, purchasing histories, advertising history, etc.
- soylentcola 11y agoYeah, I thought they already had this. For a while it was sort of half branded under Picasa and half under G+/Photos but I set it up last winter for my girlfriend's mom. She has a load of scanned photos and digital camera photos on her laptop but no backup plan. Since she didn't want to buy a NAS or subscribe to online backup, I set it up so imported photos were backed up to Google+/Photos. Same stipulations: resized (but still decent) photos wouldn't count toward any limit but original resolution would require her to pay for Google storage. She agreed that the free storage of resized images was a decent compromise. Chances are she won't need the backups but if her laptop's hard drive dies then at least she will have decent copies of all of her photos. For a free solution it wasn't a terrible deal. She's not a photographer or anything so the smaller (but again, still decent) images would suffice for the cost.
- Arkanosis 11y agoI'd hardly trust Google again for a service I'd have to rely on in the future. Let alone for a service that doesn't force Google+ down your throat today or tomorrow. Sorry, but Google Reader, Hangouts and Android have been too much already.
- x5n1 11y agoTheir abuse compliance team has yet to get back to me despite the fact that I gave them my driver's license. It's been like 3 months.
- moskie 11y agoJust like with any product ever, if the product is popular and produces value, it will stick around. Products come and go all the time, the difference being with Google that since they are so big and have countless products, the company doesn't go away when a particular one fails. Many products fail in this world, but often the company that made the product also goes away, so you have no one to complain about going forward. Google is easy to pick on in this regard. If this same product was released by a company you had never heard of, would you use it? Would you honestly believe it to have a greater chance of survival? My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.
- XJOKOLAT 11y agoPotentially. Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP. Sorry, you must understand that there are now enough people out there who have been on the receiving end of Google's careless approach to their end-users (note, I intentionally did not refer to us as customers). Announcements like this used to excite me. Not anymore. I hope one day things will be different. [Edit: downvoted as expected. Feel free. Just come back and upvote when it's your turn to get on the Google support rollercoaster].
- x5n1 11y agoAmazon's S3 has been around since March 2006, so almost 10 years. That's a much better place for anythinig you want to stick around than Google. Amazon has my loyalty for the very specific reason that they don't release half-assed products and then pull them even when they have millions of users.
- drb311 11y agoIt will all be properly announced within a couple of hours but somehow I can't stop myself reading these previews and leaks. I'll be glad when they set Photos free from Google+. I hope they do something with Hangouts too.
- fapjacks 11y ago... until they decide they're bored with it and force you to migrate gigs of photos off the service before shutting it down. No thanks.
- e40 11y agoSo, Picasa w/unlimited storage? I'm not joking. It seems that's what it is.
- cheshire137 11y agoI remember Picasa! That's how I got all my old photos on Google to begin with, after migrating from Flickr back in the day.
- e40 11y agoI don't know if many know this, but you can still use the Picasa website. You just need to add something to the URL, otherwise it redirects to google+: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1 https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1 I still use it to this day.
- veidr 11y agoHaha, cool, thank you. It is even complete with a "New!" sidebar referencing a blog post from 2011... ;-)
- brightsize 11y agoWonderful, thanks for the link!
- FlaceBook 11y ago"Google wants you to upload all of your photos into their data mining machine"
- msoad 11y agoI use Google+ entirely for my photos. I pay $2/mo to have all my photos in full resolution. So this is good news!
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI pay the same for my grandfathered Flickr Pro account. Flickr gives all accounts 1TB of storage. I'd rather have a limit than an "unlimited" Google service that'll disappear at any time.
- angdis 11y agoIt won't just "disappear". I think we can safely expect plenty (months) of notice.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI concede, disappear is the wrong word. "Prematurely sunset" fits their actions better. This is why my data gets stored in S3, and not Google's nearline storage. I know S3 is going to be around several year from now. I have no such assurances from Google about any of the services they have "in beta". "Fool me once..."
- nolite 11y agoGmail was supposed to be "Unlimited Storage" too.. I like how that turned out..
- pimlottc 11y agoHave you actual run out of space in Gmail?
- notatoad 11y agosince they merged the gmail storage space with the drive storage space, i'm sure a lot of people have run out. I'm nowhere near 15GB of gmail storage, but it's pretty easy to dump 15GB into drive.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoThe next step is unlimited storage in Drive. Google already does this for educational customers. Dropbox's business model will get blown up when this happens.
- nolite 11y agoYes I have, and so have multiple friends.. 15GB doesn't go far these days... So yes.. I've spent the day deleting years of emails that I didn't intend to... thanks Google..
- danellis 11y agoWhy do you only have 15GB? I just looked and I have 100GB.
- jsalit 11y agoWhy do you have 100GB? Are you sure you're not paying $1.99/mo for that? The default for new accounts is 15GB. I've had my gmail account since 2004 and I "only" have 17GB (15GB + 2GB extra I got at some point for some kind of security bonus; perhaps enabling 2FA).
- mdeslaur 11y ago"Unlimited" until they retire the service 18 months from now.
- philjohn 11y agoCame here to say the same thing. I've started not to trust Google as a cloud offering because of their continued shedding of services. Look at AWS - they add things they know will fill a need, often because that need is present at Amazon, and as such I can't recall them retiring any of their portfolio. Google instead take a scattergun approach, which would be fine if they actually interated and improved these services, but look at the mess they made of Google Code - great at first, then no massive new features after a while and they left it to languish.
- slyall 11y agoSimpledb is a AWS product the don't promote much these days (it is often left off the list of products). I wouldn't be surprised to see a notice that they are turning it off at some point however. The big difference is that it has real revenue from customers whereas "free" services are a lot more prone to corporate fashion
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sz4kerto 11y agoTBH I much more like the OneDrive approach when photo sharing is unified with storage, and the photos can alternatively be organized into albums ('views' on the data).
- Veratyr 11y agoPhotos has Drive integration [0] since a couple of months ago so you're free to do exactly this. [0] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
- kuschku 11y agoIt’s especially interesting when one considers that during the NoCaptcha® relaunch several months ago they said that their algorithms could, by now, read text and detect animals and people better than humans could.
- georgefrick 11y agoSo people are just going to do this again? Hand over all of their photos in exchange for free storage? How far are we from a computer being able to determine what is going on in a picture, and then they can mine the things you've done.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sbrother 11y ago> How far are we from a computer being able to determine what is going on in a picture? http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-wort...
- fuzzywalrus 11y agoThat and also, what's the UVP here? Why not Flickr if you're going to sell off your photos for storage? Even as a somewhat avid photographer with RAW files dating back to 2004 (25k photos) I'm no where near the 1TB storage that Flickr offers.
- notatoad 11y ago>How far are we from a computer being able to determine what is going on in a picture that's one of the selling points of the new google photos app.
- moeedm 11y agoI don't want Google's servers looking over my images and analyzing them. No thank you.
- tjr 11y agoThen you can't put photos on the public web at all, right?
- moeedm 11y agoWell I choose what to put on the "public web". Unlimited photo storage means all your photos.
- tjr 11y agoHow would a user be forced to upload all of their photos? I have (allegedly) unlimited storage with Flickr, but I manually upload the photos that I choose.
- moeedm 11y agoThey're not forced to, they're tempted to. And most people will. From the presentation, it looks like as soon as you take a photo it's uploaded and backed up on Google's servers.
- middleclick 11y agoThis is pretty much what I try to do. I avoid people taking photographs of me altogether or if they do, I request them to not put them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet. It usually works if you ask kindly.
- joezydeco 11y agoSo what happens if you, say, XORed the entire image with 0xA5A5A5A5 and then uploaded it? Seems Flickr doesn't really examine the image, just the extension (.gif, .jpg, etc). I wonder what Google plans to do.
- fenomas 11y agoStupid question: if there exists an unlimited photo storage service and it supports a lossless format, couldn't people use it as universal storage by splitting their files under the size limit and adding whatever header info is necessary to make them into PNGs?
- gruez 11y agoThey can check the amount of "randomness" in each photo to determine whether it's an actual photo or a disguised file.
- yclept 11y agoYou could probably use some steganographic techniques to embed your data in what looks like a real photo prior to uploading though c:
- joefkelley 11y agoGoogle has some serious chops when it comes to image recognition and machine learning. Telling the difference between a photo of a car and a photo of a train is much more difficult that telling the difference between a real photo and some random file encoded as a photo.
- Achshar 11y agoPretty sure it's like one afternoon's work for any google engineer to write some code to figure out when something like this is happening.
- mayli 11y agoI am thinking about turning this into a unlimited cloud storage.
- adam12 11y agoNo thanks. I'm trying to move away from being their product.
- miralabs 11y agoIt would be interesting to know the computation they use to determine the monetary gain on being able to mine/scan all the information from the photos versus the cost of storing them.
- cdnsteve 11y agoLet's hypothesize for a minute, why a technology giant, like Google cares about user photos? Their machine learning systems are unmatched. In order for machine learning to be more effective they need to be given context. What's the missing key for photos? People. What happens when you add in an authenticated Google user, who they already know everything about due to using other G services (mail, search, adwords) to that machine learning with photos? My assumption would be they can simply learn more about you. Personalization is ad money, nothing more.
- assholesRppl2 11y agoYeah -- because when you provide a friendly, personal service for someone, you're doing it for the ad money and nothing else. Look, you have a point, but it's an extraordinarily cynical point. You're connecting the dots to reveal "the truth", that Google strives to make money, but it could honestly be a lot worse. Personalization is more than just ad money. It's friendly and great for business.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWouldn't being friendly and great for business be providing customer support? Something that Google rarely, if ever, does? Google is a product lab that happens to fund itself from its most successful experiment, ads.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- growse 11y agoI've contacted Google for customer support twice in the last couple of years, and both times they were excellent. First time was when I had an issue with my Nexus 5, spoke to a human got it sorted straight away. Second time was when they changed the VAT status on personal Google Apps accounts (here in the UK). I raised a live chat to query this and had a callback from a guy on the west coast within 20 minutes who seemed happy to take the time to walk me through what was happening and what it meant. Maybe I was just lucky. shrug I'm skeptical about this whole "Google doesn't do customer support" thing, especially given the internet's astonishing ability to amplify vocal minorities and some people's desire to jump on anything anti-guy-making-all-the-money.
- wslh 11y agoThen, it is time to convert the whole filesystem to an image file and mount it from Google.
- haberdasher 11y agoThey learned how to recognize a person as they age from an infant to a toddler! That's amazing and should be celebrated.
- Chevalier 11y agoSince the original thread on this vanished, questions (and applause) for any Googlers reading this: - - - - - EXCELLENT. Two questions: 1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive? 2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be upgraded to higher resolution versions?
- kolev 11y agoActually, it's unlimited for "high resolution" versions, not for the originals, which is sad. I guess I will stick with Carousel or Flickr.
- veidr 11y agoI don't know about Flickr, but Dropbox Carousel costs me $100 per year for a 1TB (have about 0.5TB photos in it). You can buy a similar amount of storage from Google for a similar amount, and it will store your originals. So only the free version is limited in this way.
- hillsarealiv3 11y ago16MP limit means it's not much use for most recent DSLRs
- kolev 11y agoWell, to me personally, it doesn't matter what the limit is - I just want to have the originals untouched, i.e. lossless storage.