Google Photos will lock some new features behind a paywall
xda-developers.com
xda-developers.com
It just means that you're paying Google for a service you could easily have gotten for free.
Given Google's history of killing products, especially on the consumer side, why would you ever pay Google for a consumer-focused product?
If you've been living in the Apple ecosystem for a while, where 1 TB on your laptop is precious, realize that both SSD and spinning rust drives have plummeted in cost over the last decade. You can get a 12TB drive on sale for $175. That's $15 per TB. If you want something mobile and convenient, 2.5" external drives are ~$100 for 4TB. If you need speedy disk, a fast, 1TB m2 NVMe SSD can be had for just $100.
Really, for just $200 you can get two external drives (always have a backup) and have the peace of mind that all your photos are 1) safe, and 2) in your possession.
> Photos are the only things I don't have backups for due to their sheer size
The bottleneck here isn't storage space. It's bandwidth and transfer time, given Android's crappy file system interface. (iOS, of course, has none.)
I kept up with Google Photos backups for almost a year. But ain't nobody got time for that.
You would pay way more than that to get them back, if they were lost.
I'd actually pay more for a fixed feature set if it means less instability.
They all support automated backups to storage either that you have at home (say, on a NAS), or someone else's cloud.
Dropbox also makes it easy to back up to a hard drive I have in my possession. When combined with Google Photos, it's N+2 redundancy for ~$12/mo.
Any insights? Which photo services are the best?
Maybe this is a strategic transition to a more consistent, less advertising dependent Google.
As to advertising - why would they give up revenue? If they can both charge and advertise, they will, just like cable tv.
I don't think that's the case at all. Look at the explosion of TV streaming services. Nevermind the fact that we're winding up with a situation worse than cable, people are paying for those.
What people don't pay for is apps that are more expensive than $1. They complain if apps cost more than a cup of coffee because everything else is free.
We have to push out the loss leaders and advertising subsidized garbage, because it puts expectations on the price of our software.
Compare our situation with Steam. People are happy to pay tons of money for games. Often times, they spend money for games they don't even play!
It's good for us if things start costing money and stop being free. Free is something only the giants can afford to offer.
I wholeheartedly agree with your desire here, however nothing that Google is doing is a move in this direction.
The base service is an advertising supported loss leader.
Upcharging on top of that is about capturing more money from those who have already been locked in.
While not always an exact distinction, the cost of cable is to carry the service to your house, and the advertising on cable is to pay for the content being served over the former.
If you want more channels, you pay more, which is the reverse of how it would be if it worked the way you say it did.
In other words, Google wants Android phones to use the Play Store, and free storage on Google Photos is part of the carrot.
Any good way for a family to share/combine most of their photos?
https://goodreports.com/ (This one is actually relatively new)
https://ethical.net/resources/
And, then of course, a classic: https://prism-break.org/en/
Good luck to you!
You're welcome to try out the beta for free, in exchange for your feedback.
PhotoStructure is designed to be simple to install and run. Libraries are uniquely cross-platform, cross-computer, and tested to scale comfortably to 500k+ assets. You can run the windows desktop edition, put your library on an external drive, move the drive to your Mac, automatically import whatever's on that computer, and sweep all your photos (JPEG and RAW) and videos (with auto-transcoding) into one tidy, de-duplicated folder hierarchy.
The UI is web-based and mobile-friendly. The docker image runs happily on NASes and anywhere else docker runs.
Few months ago, I did an export, but also managed to find a harddrive with many of the originals, and the sizes were wildly different.
Then Google broke the market with free apps to do that.
Then it was an incentive to force you using a phone of a manufacturer that paid the Google Play framework racket fees. (The user is thinking that they are free apps compared to competitors but in fact it is the manufacturer that pay for them)
And now that the competitors are rares, paid features and paywall are coming...
Just imagine if at the beginning it was the competitors apps vs paywalled Google apps as they are becoming!
In a same way that drive or photos services were kind of: it's unlimited, no cost, use them for everything!
But every photo that you did put in your drive for example, reduce the storage you have available for receiving emails. So at some points you will have to pay for the extra storage...
Think of it in the same way that AMD survived with difficulty for a dozen years when Intel used anti competitive mesures against them. Ensuring distributors would not let too much AMD powered computer be sold