40
votes
Google Photos will no longer have unlimited free storage after June 1
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- Title
- Updating Google Photos' storage policy to build for the future
- Published
- Nov 11 2020
- Word count
- 309 words
How exactly is an incredibly basic storage service that has zero restrictions on the exporting of your files (so they can easily be taken elsewhere), nearly none of the features of other photo organization and storage services, and is announcing that in 7 months it will begin to count new uploads against an already generous storage limit a "play to get a lot of people hooked"?
I'm in this exact boat and my plan is own cloud. Is there an easier way?
Do you know of any way of making the photos available with a self-hosted app? I didn't do any research yet, but I'd be interested in that.
There is Lychee for a Google Photos-like experience. But also Nextcloud is pretty convenient for photo backups and sharing.
Personally I use Nextcloud. After failing to manage to set it up a few times I found out that the easiest way to set it up is to use Ubuntu server and install the Nextcloud Snap after set up. (It should show up as a recommended Snap after the setup process.)
On my phone I use the respective Nextcloud App to auto-sync my pictures to my server.
The overall process is not completed free from some hidden "gotchas" so feel free to PM if you need some help.
Solid suggestion. I've jumped fully on the nextcloud train after looking at it for a few days and using it for the last three. I've got a regular backup in case it fails but it's good so far. Do you selfhost yours because that's my setup to reduce costs.
I selfhost. Not due to cost but because I prefer having the data lie on my own server instead of someone else's. ^^
It basically amounts to that, but I don't think they plan that far ahead. The planning process is centered around quarterly and yearly OKR's and after that it's pretty hazy.
But Google has been criticized almost from the start for relying too much on advertising and they keep trying other ways to earn money. Recently they seem to be envious of Amazon Prime, and Google One is their way of getting that subscription revenue. Can't get there by giving unlimited storage away for free.
Meanwhile, Amazon describes their offering as "free online photo storage to Prime members."
In fairness, that's basically every strategy employed by every major tech company right now. Amazon and Microsoft in particular are notorious for it.
It's almost as popular as the 'purchase or steal tech from smaller entrant to market and tie closely into your ecosystem to further drag you into that ecosystem.'
I will say, losing Google Photos is gonna hurt a lot less than losing Google Play Music is... Youtube Music is horrid.
And I already got my 80+GB export, and thankfully there's some decent open source options.
80 GB?! Good lord...
Am I the only person who feels that what we actually have are smartcameras with phone attachments?
Honestly, yea. My smartphone takes better pictures than I ever did.
I used to take about 10 photos worth saving a year. Now I take 20 or more a week. Plus videos.
Having a kid changes you.
I just wish that phones would be better at being phones. I have a 12 MP camera that drops words during calls and receives texts erratically. Sometimes as much as two weeks late, but on time about 98% of the time.
Yea, but at least a solid 60% of that is crap carriers.
Further evidence that corporations are terrible at infrastructure and should really be leasing it from the public sector.
That is the funniest (and true for me too) comment that i've seen all week! lol :-D
If anyone's looking for an alternative, I moved out of Google Photos and into Jottacloud about a year ago, and I've been happy with the change. It's not very feature rich, but all I really need it to do is store my photos, which it does just fine.
How was the process of moving over?
It required a bit of legwork, but that's because I had stuff scattered here and there. I ended up doing a Google Takeout for my photos, combining that with the stuff I had saved on my hard drive to get everything under one roof, and then de-duped them to get rid of any overlap. I then used a photo organizer to sort them by year, and then manually uploaded each year to Jottacloud. Now that that's out of the way, I just keep the Jottacloud app on my phone and have it upload any new pictures I take -- pretty much the same way Google Photos would work. The only difference is that Jottacloud doesn't upload in the background -- I have to open the app for it to upload, so I just make sure I do so once a week or so.
What did you use for deduplication?
So, this is an unsatisfying answer, but I genuinely can't remember. At the time I tried out several different photo managers and file de-duplication programs, and I'm not sure where I finally landed. I think I ended up using Shotwell which detected duplicates on import, but I'm not confident in that.
I know this may be optimistic, but do they have a solid search function?
It's not a dealbreaker, but I do find myself making reasonably regular use of the search by location (not horribly hard to implement, but it means they need to map the GPS coordinates to the various words a human might use to describe the place), and by photo subject (more difficult, as they have to run fairly complex image analysis on every upload) in Google Photos.
No search function. It just shows a timeline of your photos and you can manually create albums.
It does seem to auto-create albums based on location data, so when I look at my albums I can see various trips I've taken, but they seem to be incomplete and have less pictures in them than they should.
Ha I recently removed Google Photos in my effort of de-Googling. I just use Syncthing to sync my phone photos to my desktop PC. Obviously not comparable, but it's fine for my purposes, and I'm becoming increasingly OK with not having everything, everywhere, at all times (in the cloud). Just like the old days..
I'd be interested to hear more about your degoogling. Do you have any tips?
I would say checkout sites like privacytools.io and switching.software if you're looking for alternatives.
Google Maps is among the last two (the other being Google Search) that I've yet to pry myself from, simply because the alternatives pale in comparison.
Mobile's hard because unless you're using iOS, Google Play Services is integrated pretty deeply with Android, and many apps will cease to function without it installed. I highly recommend microg, which works seamlessly on my Moto G5 Plus (which I flashed with OmniROM). If your phone is compatible, I'd recommend something like LineageOS for microG. Other than that, I try to only use apps from F-Droid.
Gmail's also difficult to move away from if you insist on the service being free. There are some decent free alternatives, such as Tutanota and Protonmail, but Tutanota doesn't have IMAP support and Protonmail requires
proprietary(EDIT: now open-source) software to create an IMAP "bridge." Personally, I moved to Migadu.com because I wanted to use my own domains, and I pay $19/year for their service. I'd recommend Mailbox.org because they're so damn cheap and the service seems sustainable.Hope this helps.
While it's true that ProtonMail does not support IMAP natively (because of its security model), the bridge has been open sourced recently.
Thanks for the tip. I corrected my above post.
So according to The Verge (I didn't see it in this blog post, but maybe I missed it) this comes with them ending their free storage for Google Docs files (docs, sheets and slides). I was surprised back when I learned that those files took up no space in the first place, and I'm more surprised now that they have gone back on that, since I had concluded that those files must just be trivial to store for Google. Certainly more so for than for photos. I have a lot of Google docs, I have to wonder how much space they will take up in the end?
I also wonder, between that, the photos, starting to enforce deleting things from your Google Drive bin and starting to delete files on old inactive accounts - could Google actually be hurting for storage space? Or is this purely to push Google One subscriptions?
Some of both, I am guessing. There is probably a lot Google can do to conserve space if they need to, but building more data centers does have a cost and their Cloud business could probably use them.
Probably the boom in businesses going digital is pressing on the need for storage. Why give consumers free storage when businesses will pay more?
Unbothered. Two reasons - firstly I have a Pixel so it doesn't apply to me; secondly, was anyone actually treating this as their primary backup? Photos is not how I back up my images. It's a secondary, emergency backup, for my phone pictures only. Like all the various cloud services. An untrusted backup for my backup.
I'm reasonably pro-google by tildes standards, but I wouldn't rely on any "free" backup service from anyone. This was obviously how this was going to end from the very beginning.
Yes, I do. And I feel like a lot of people do because it happened to me sort of by accident; as I upgraded my android phone and as the photo gallery app was changed to Google photos, all my photos just ended up backed up on there anyway, even photos I took before it existed. And then it was very easy and useful to put any other digital images I had on there too. The alternative, of course, was the status quo of having no backups of my photos at all except on an SD card.
So I promise that I don't intend this to sound rude or facetious but I worry it will do.. What made you think a free unlimited storage service would continue to exist indefinitely, and could therefore be trusted as a backup? A few free GB here and there, sure (I have a bunch of not-very-important stuff backed up to Dropbox's free service), but unlimited was always doomed from the start. Even for someone with Google's resources.
There's never been any such thing as a free lunch, and that goes double when it's a Google thing, given their track record with just turning stuff off.
Well I didn't think about it. Which is my point; that's how Google has captured such a large market with Photos. It "just worked" and you didn't need to think about it. That made it very easy for it to collect users, myself included, passively.
I'm not saying it's particularly surprising (to me) that Google is ending their uncharacteristic generosity, but for a lot of people this will be the first time they realise that Google was even being generous in the first place.
I used to use it, but moved off it recently, and I kept regular backups on my harddrive anyway. What I'm mostly concerned about is that it was perfect for my parents, particularly my mother who loves taking photos with her phone, but lacks the patience to learn how to 1. delete photos from her phone and 2. backup photos to a PC. I imagine I'm not alone in having tech-illiterate people that you handle techy stuff for.
What's your backup strategy?
Part of the issue is that Google is familiar. Even for someone who wants to pay, there are many choices and it's hard to know which are reliable or worth the money.
I have an external usb disk and a NAS in my house, plus Backblaze B2 offsite, and a bit of rsync which syncs everything. There's a lot of data, something in the region of 200GB last I looked, and that's just the last few years - older stuff is in cold storage (aka another couple of hard drives, one in my house and one in my parent's safe)
While auto-sync is nice, I have multiple cameras to back up from, not just my phone - so everything needs manually collating before backing up anyway. If I only used my phone I'd probably have a script which pulls from Google Photos regularly.
Not until now did I realize that Amazon provides a similar free service for prime members.
Where will you all be moving your photos?
I'm not planning on moving. I want to figure out a backup plan, but haven't decided which other service to back up to or how it's going to work.
That's a conflict.