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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used.

15 gigs of photos is nothing.

> Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.

Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I'm relying on cloud storage.

I'm a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mutual fund, saying they hadn't heard from me in a few years and were going to hand my account over to the government if they didn't hear from me soon.

Two years is nothing when you're my age. I have piles on the floor in my office that need attending to that have been there 5-10 years.

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I can’t tell if this is just hyperbole, but if an account is inactive and unpaid for 2 years, I don’t see why they’d be expected to just sit on that data forever.

I can’t imagine being 5-10 years behind on things that “need attending to”. What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?

My 20 year old self would have agreed with you. But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically.

> What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?

Unopened mail, things I need to organize in case of a tax audit, broken things I was going to fix, things that simply need to be put away, things I can't decide whether to keep or throw away, etc.

My father's sophisticated organizational method was the "chronological sort", aka the most recent stuff was thrown on top of the pile. The bottom slowly gets compressed into a rock-like substance.

I feel like there’s interesting personal opinion in your comments in this thread, but it’s losing potency because you’re surrounding it in this aura of being older and wiser than anyone else in the thread.

Things like “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically” just sound condescending.

There's nothing "older and wiser" about it, it's just (subjectively) true that the years seem to go by faster as you get older.

Like, 15-25 was an eternity compared to 25-35.

I wrote the "trust me" in response to you saying you couldn't imagine it. Didn't mean to be condescending.

> “But you'll have to trust me when I say that as you get older, your perception of time changes drastically”

Perhaps, but it IS exactly the sort of thing a lot of older people say.

> What is a definition of “thing that needs attending to” that can sustain a 5-10 year delay?

Photos. People traditionally want to keep photos so that they can occasionally go back to them and reminisce about old times.

The photo albums that my grandparents lovingly kept weren't out every day, and not even every year.

Escheatment is to protect you.

I'd say Google Photos isn't for you. It's for a different kind of user, like me.

Not to mention, In case you die, your photos will outlive you only 2 years.

These days, 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing. If I go on a trip for a week to take pictures, I can easily shoot 50-100GB of images. (Using my full-frame DSLR, shooting in raw, average image size is over 50MB, meaning < 20 images per GB).

I don't think I'm making too many assumptions when I say RAW photos from a DSLR being uploaded to Google Photos is not anywhere near the intended use-case.

However I still agree that 15GB of photos is pretty close to nothing these days.

Well... their own marketing does say:

"A home for all your photos and videos"

and they have a blog post titled:

"Easy Wi-Fi backup from your Canon camera to Google Photos"

in which they say

"you can choose to automatically transfer original quality photos to Google Photos"

Interesting, I didn't know there was a camera that could do it directly. I always did want that for my Sony a6000. But for jpeg, not raw. After sitting in front of Lightroom for hours upon tedious hours adjusting vacation pics, I will never shoot in raw again.

You should use compression to not use so much space.

These photos are compressed.

The uncompressed raw files (or TIFF) are much bigger.

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