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Comment by nattaylor | Hacker News Reader

I'm betting that Google Photos will necessarily stick around in order to keep Android competitive with iOS (and perhaps Windows.) I desperately hope they make it a paid service, if needed, rather than shutter it.

I've fully committed and have uploaded 40,932 photos. All of the automation has been amazing.

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I'm not trying to be a dick and am genuinely curious. What are you going to do with those 41 thousand photos? Do you ever go back and look at them? I see lots of people taking a ton of photos, they get stored in the cloud automatically, and then... what? Does anybody ever go back and look at that bad photo of a fish they took at an aquarium five years ago?

I find a nice way to be reminded of some memories is to have random pictures show up as my desktop or phone background once in a while.

I also go back through them and pull out some for use during big lifetime events (10*n birthdays, weddings, retirement, etc).

This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless.

In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them.

To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100 albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I want a trip down memory lane, etc.

As for the other ~36k, I don't have any statistics but:

* On ~10 occasions I've sent emails to friends after getting one of the "this day in YYYY" notifications with a link to the photos

* On a few (~4) occasions, I've used the faces grouping to find old, fun photos of friends

* Yesterday I happened to get a "This day in YYYY" notification that reminded me about an event I photographed at my neighbors house, but had forgotten to send the photos (7 years ago, oops)

* I'd rediscovered some DSLR photos I probably would have missed thanks to the "approx location tagging" (that taps in my phones location history)

* I share photos far more frequently since its free, unlimited and auto-upload

* The auto-animations and auto-panoramas have made me go back and rediscover photos from some old trips

* Just the other day my Mom was interested in a photo she remembered me taking on a trip in 2013. I was able to search the place name and find the photo in seconds

I started down the path of Google Photos because my old workflow of manually merging smartphone and DSLR pics on disk and then not having a good centralized album management system felt clunky.

I'm surprised by how often I find myself going to http://photos.google.com now.

Do you have a local backup of those photos? Every now and then someone's Google Account gets mistakenly shut down by, I presume, some automated risk assessment process and they can have a really tough time contacting anybody to rectify the issue. I'd say you can use Google's services as tools, but not as the basket where you put all your eggs.

Dataloss/lockout is a great concern of mine and I am somewhat exposed. For DSLR photos, I persist them on disk, then upload to Google Photos. For smartphone, I periodically copy the new ones to disk. Then that disk is remotely backed up. However, I am exposed to losing all of my GPhotos meta data (primarily albums and captions) as well was the smartphone photos since my last manual backup.

I have accepted this tradeoff. It would be pretty devastating to loose all that organization, but its recreatable and the value I get out of Google Photos trumps that risk.

The value of Google's automated processing of images can't be understated. Last year I uploaded roughly 50,000 photos to Google, which was every photo I had taken since 2006. Google automatically created albums for every vacation I'd gone on in that time, plus many of the major events. Weddings, concerts, etc, were all identified.

Also the face search is probably the most brilliant piece of it. I began meticulously tagging photos in Lightroom a few years ago, and had probably 15-20% of my photos tagged with location and people in the photo. It was a pain in the ass and took forever to get to that point.

Meanwhile it took less than a week to upload everything to Google Photos, and now I can search through over 10 years of photos by person. You can also search by event, object, location, etc ("coachella," "sailboat," or "haiti" as examples).

I completely agree. In other software labeling (albums, location, faces, tags, etc) is tedious, time consuming and fragile. In Google Photos I barely even think about it.

This is the reason I pretty much stopped taking photos altogether. I realized I almost never go back and look at them.

Photos are like Steam games, maybe when you are in the hospital for a stay you can knock both out in one go, eh?

As an example: I wish so dearly I could have more than a few physical photos of the summer I spent in England 12 years ago. Of the friends I made, the things we did, and the places we visited.

As you say, I barely look at my pictures from 1 or 2 years ago (except for the "this day X years ago" feature, which is awesome). But I'm positive that 10 years from now I'll be glad to have them, for the nostalgia trips.

I have uploaded O(10K) photos to Google photos, with O(1K) albums. I find it immensely valuable. Here are some scenarios where I actually use the uploaded pics:

- family reunion: watching videos of family members taken over the years (nice integration with chromecast to watch on tv)

- meeting friends after a long time: quickly retrieving super old pics (good search abilities with album names and tags/captions)

- casual discussions with friends/family about a specific experience (eg. trips to a particular destination): quickly retrieving pics taken there

Coupled with the fact that there is unlimited storage, ability to share across as many channels as I want (email, FB, WhatsApp...), seamless backup and sync across my various devices, ability to create shared albums with other people - I would say this is one of the rare great products Google has released in the last ~5 years.

p.s. fwiw, I also have a local backup copy in case Google messes with my account.

> I'm betting that Google Photos will necessarily stick around in order to keep Android competitive with iOS (and perhaps Windows.) I desperately hope they make it a paid service, if needed, rather than shutter it.

Photos is a paid service already, with a free tier.

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