I 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 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.
That deal was always time limited, and then was periodically extended for years and years until one day it wasn't. It was clearly never 'sold' as <i>forever</i> though.
I realize google reader was a popular app, especially among the hn crowd. But there's been how many years since reader? Why hasn't anyone duplicated exactly the reader experience?
The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on their ux and their ads.
It's a bit like saying you miss street fighter 2 cabinets. Ok but, there are no arcades left.
Reader was always a pet project by a few engineers who worked on it in their spare time.
When they moved on, nobody else wanted to take on support
in their free time, and no department wanted to pay someone full-time to work on it, so it was killed.
It kept archives of defunct blogs. When Reader went away, they just deleted it all. Also, it's less useful for a smaller site to have social sharing features when we used to have a Google-sized network of readers.
Why not? I mean if there is readership interested in that content, nothing wrong with using the ad impression. Text storage requirements are insignificant
I use TT-RSS (selfhosted) and it gives me everything I used GReader for. GReader closing was the best thing to happen to the RSS ecosystem as it lead to an explosion of new tools, most still up today.
I don’t think GReader led to a closing of feeds. It was simply a thing already happening. And even today the vast majority of sites still offer RSS feeds, I can’t even remember the last time I wanted to follow something, and it didn’t have a feed available.
> you miss the world in which google reader could exist
But what you're not getting is that Google Reader helped make that world. Deleting the largest RSS reader app and replacing it with proprietary news feeds damaged the open web.
There was a social component to reader that was very similar in ways to how people share news on Facebook. It was one of googles only solid social graphs. That they wasted that was a real misstep.
Once upon a time I volunteered on an Eagle Scout project, scanning boxes of old photos to digitize the whole collection.
We thought "Google is a big tech company, this should stick around." Got about 10 years out of it, which strikes me as pretty average for a tech product, but not great for a photo archive. Hell of a lot shorter than "4x6s in a shoebox."
At least that was a desktop app and they still have their data. Hopefully they were able to find a new way to organize them.
But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only good way to store data is in an organized tree of folders, with any management software being a veiwer UI into that structure. App inevitably goes away? Replace it with the next one. Some things just need to have longer lifespans than software projects.
>it's worthwhile to reimplement it and make money.
no it's not, because if you do (and look to be getting significant growth) Google will just start it up again and drive you out of business, run it for a year or two afterwards for free and then kill it.
Google Music shut down on the 24th, and almost took with it my hoard of 2001-2011 mp3s. The iCloud is walled, but back then I took my collection from machine to machine until they offered a service to upload it all to. Fortunately I caught the email on the 24th and pulled 15gb of tracks via Takeout, because I would have lost a lot of personal works that I just knew would be there. It’s been a nostalgic week.
That's different on so many levels. The photos you take are unique. The music you bought are not. They are produced by someone else. I personally have no qualms when Apple replaced my ripped MP3s with a DRM-free version from the iTunes Store.
They surely can. iTunes Match is not marketed as a music backup service. Its raison d'être is to match your own music to music available in the iTunes Store. It's in the name.
Just too bad when it matches the wrong version of an album or song. Happened to me and I already deleted my original mp3. So you need to rip the CD again. But I think it makes sense to match content and only keep the best version on the servers.
If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.
I'm not really looking for archival storage or disaster recovery. After all, the 80MP scans are just low-resolution copies of the originals. I have hard drives for local storage. Yes, if my house burns down I lose the scans and the negatives, but I don't care enough to spend money on it.
The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
It would not be hard maybe a week or two of hacking to make such an interface on top of an object store if you were motivated. A simple php or python app with a time limited key stored in a db of some sort. There though are already open source free apps that do provide user management, etc. If you are looking for an ideal solution, but you have to pay for it with money or time.
It would be a nice exercise but relying on it doesn't make sense to me.
We had to write a text editor in our first semester of our CS undergrad program. I'm not going to use my own text editor in favor of say MS word or Google doc.
Or you can just spin up Nextcloud, point it at your B2 storage and call it a day.
It really is drop dead simple and you also don’t have to host it yourself. Every hosted provider supports external storages so you’re never locked in with them. And since you’re not actually using any of their storage you can stay in their free tier forever.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if you don't access data often, why not just buy an external HDD of say 10TB or such? Yeah, it's possible that data may fail, but is quite unlikely particular if you're not using it often.
Remote storage, redundancy, and portability. At $5/mo/tb. you can still access any of it anytime you want, you just pay for what you actually download.
You're also paying for spatial distance and independence. Redundant backups in the same location can all fail together. See https://youtu.be/OAI8S2houW4?t=285 for one amusing case.
That’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.
That 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.
I 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...
Local copies ftw for sure, and it's not just free or cheap cloud providers you have to worry about
Following hard disk failure last week, I attempted to recover only about 1Gb of data from SpiderOak. Without going in to all the roadblocks, bugs and strange design decisions that exist when recovering data from them, I'm yet to recover anything worth having.
Been a customer for over 8 years. I guess the old maxim is true; an untested backup is worthless.
I managed to recover most data from various local backups I had lying around. That's the direction I'm going to go now, with a physical snapshot off-site every now and again. Not perfect, but much less hassle than what I've just been through, and also cheaper.
Nope. iCloud Drive is a virtual folder on your device.
When you drop a file into this drive, it will start "Uploading". Once it has uploaded, you will see "Remove Download" option which removes the local copy but keeps the copy in the cloud. If you click on such a file whose local copy is not present, it will "Download Now" (you can select and option-click and find this option as well).
They've recently changed it on macOS to allow you to free the hard drive space (file is in the cloud) but the metadata (file name) remains indexed on your computer.
iCloud Photo Library is similar but no compression hijinx - it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space (hilariously, the opposite of Google). You pay for the storage (but you can't get more than 2TB for love nor money).
Now you can, up to 4TB: “ With Apple One, you can choose a subscription plan that includes 50GB, 200GB, or 2TB of iCloud storage. If you need more iCloud storage, you can buy more for a total of up to 4TB. ”
Google offers both options, though? It used to offer free - unlimited "high quality" photos, which they have now stopped (Still available to Pixels (till P4) for 3 years since the respective phone was launched)
You can choose to pay for storage and keep original quality uploads?
For 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?!)
This 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"
The shipped has LONG sinced sailed on my expecting Google to fix Photos in this regard. I've spent literally YEARS dealing with this Photos shortcoming. They have all the information they need.
And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.
Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.
Will 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.
I 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.
I 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.
They 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.
They 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.
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.
That 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.
Just 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.
Be 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...
I'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…
Its 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.
Yup, 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.
I 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.
After 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.
The 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/) to sync originals. That no longer seems to be the case, unfortunately.
My 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:
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.
Updates 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
Certainly 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.
For 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, and OrangePi Zero Setup, https://tinyurl.com/368krs7b
Google 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.
It 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?
That's fine as long as you're all Apple people. Walk outside that garden though and how do you share an album with someone? To contrast, Google photos web app is actually good!
* 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
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.
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.