Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

I love the term, "digital heirlooms".

Google Photos allows unlimited storage. As long as you elect to store the photos/videos at a slightly lesser quality. Which they still look great when browsing them.

Because of this, I've been able to index over 43,000 photos/videos of our family from the past 10 years. I tracked down every old laptop, phone, and external drive I could find, and grabbed the photos off of them to have them in one consolidated place.

With Facebook, you can even export your photos from FB to Google Photos directly. Here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/dtp/

Births, our wedding, soccer games, Christmas's, it's all there.

I'm hoping that the service lasts longer than my lifetime. :) And that I can pass down the URL to my kids.

P.S. The search for Google Photos is amazing - it recognizes faces, locations, events (e.g. concerts, weddings, etc), and even objects (e.g. red dress). It's everything that iOS Photos should be.

https://photos.google.com/

Google Photos allows unlimited storage

Until it doesn't. Or rather when Google no longer benefits from photos as a training corpus it will no longer have a business rationale for keeping old photos.

While 43,000 photos sounds like a lot and would have substantial heft as physical prints even at 4x6. As digital files they will fit on a $60 external spinning disk with room to spare. Even as RAW files.

But to me, a single print of a child's soccer game is going to have more impact than a thousand digital snapshots. Please, for the sake of the people you want to see your pictures, make some prints and put them in frames and hang them on a wall. They will last. Because physics hasn't changed. Good luck.

I can see the value of a print.

But the amazingness of Google's Photo service is the search.

My wife and I reminisce and say something like "remember that time we went to a Yankees/Red Sox baseball game - so much fun". I search for "Yankees baseball", and boom, there's the photo of my wife, at the stadium, from 2012.

I can't replicate that functionality.

Prints are push rememberance. Google’s pull model costs that. Indeed that’s pretty much true of digital artifacts. They don’t have presence. They can’t come unbidden. A bored dinner guest won’t strike up a conversation. A child cannot ask about it because the it isn’t there. It’s barely even an it.

It's probably just me, but I've never found Google Photo's search functionality to be very useful, and can usually find a particular photo in less than ten seconds manually. This is because I have a really good sense of when something happened, so I can usually scroll to the year and month and it's right there.

Also, I ruthlessly prune my photo collection, because once I clear out all the cruft that I don't care about (photos that are blurry, near duplicate, no longer relevant, etc), I have half as many photos to look through. I only keep 500-1000 photos per year, one folder per year, as well as a synced Camera Roll folder with not-yet-processed photos.

Not only does this make browsing through my photo collection a much more enjoyable experience, it doesn't take up much space. I have my entire photo collection (11000 photos from the last 12 years) stored locally on my phone in full resolution, as well as backed up in various other locations.

I would urge you to maintain a duplicate copy of that service as much as possible. In my earlier years, I participated in a number of online forums that had image hosts who claimed to want to live forever. How many still exist? None that I know of. I'm actually glad that much of my early internet history is lost to the sands of time, but for those of us depending on Google Photos and the like to keep precious memories, I hope we don't experience the same fate.

"High quality" Google photos backups do a reasonable job resizing to 15MP, but they put your metadata into a blender when you try to download via Google Takeout or their API.

While you still have your originals from all those laptops and phones and drives, copy your originals onto storage that you own. If you have a mess of duplicates like I did, you're free to use PhotoStructure to dedup and sweep everything into one neat pile on one big drive. It's free during the beta in exchange for your feedback. https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/

Mind that you actually look at them, and to that end, cull aggressively.

Eventually an unbounded archive grows so large & onerous you'll never really want to look through it again.

(This was one good feature of prints & albums. A minimum level of curation was required)

Woah, didn't you hear that Google is shutting down Photos? But don't worry, you can get all your data from the Google takeout service :)

Source for this? My understanding is that they're shutting down the print service, not the entire app

It's a light joke on the fragility of our overall Google reliance. I rely on Google for everything and I'm constantly terrified that they will shut things down. Sorry I didn't make that more clear, but, humor.

Does the Facebook export tool preserve any metadata? That's the major annoyance I've had with FB photos, years later... none of the dates are correct.

I've done the same as you, importing every family digital photo I can find into iCloud Photos. Flip Phones, Palm, BlackBerry, early digital cameras. $10 data cables from eBay are the way to go.

I've yet to tackle the film photos and slides, but that's next on the list.

I have a big bucket of those old photos as well. I haven't tackled it yet, but I did find this service that will scan 1800 photos for $145. https://www.scanmyphotos.com/services/photo-scanning.html

I've had the same issue with Facebook's export to Google Photo's.

The descriptions exported as "Copy of... #{description}" which is really lame. And cumbersome to clean up.

And then there were a whole host of videos and photos that did not import with the original date/time stamp.

Think about using the takeout service to archive a copy of these a couple times of year. Doesn't take too much space. I have 53000 files currently occupying 132Gig of space.

I run a docker image on one of my local servers that does a sync of anything new in Google Photos each time it is run. Gives me added peace of mind.

Fancy sharing the docker (compose) file? I'd like to see how that works.

all my memories are on G+. oh wait :(

Why is this so downvoted? It seems pretty inoffensive.

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