Google Photos is the latest “Unlimited” plan to impose hard limits | Hacker News Reader

Google Photos is the latest “Unlimited” plan to impose hard limits

arstechnica.com

9 pointsevo_97 comments

>Finally, Pixel smartphone users also get an out—High Quality media uploaded from Pixel phones, first through fifth generation, will continue to enjoy free unlimited storage even after June 2021.

I don't know about y'all, but this seems mighty anticompetitive to me. How is this different from bundling a browser and an OS? The net effect is the same: vendor lock-in.

Well it's because one of the selling points of Pixel phones was to be able to upload unlimited full quality photos to Google Photos. All other Android phones only got unlimited compressed backups.

I originally was not on the de-google bandwagon. But with this and the other changes recently I am beginning to see the writing on the wall and will start making steps to look for alternatives for as many google services I can. Just what the hell happened to the google of a decade ago? Did that many corp shills inject themselves ?

Any good tools to evacuate all my photos and videos from Google Photos?

Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com/

Although there is an official API, your photos and videos pulled via the API will have most of their metadata stripped, including GPS location tags.

The best way is via Google Takeout.

If you have a large library, your archive may fail to be generated by Google: you may have to resort to creating several large albums, and restricting your Google Takeout to one album, and creating several Takeouts.

You can only create 3 Takeouts at any given time.

Yes, it's a pain. I'm sure they know.

Know that "high quality" photos and videos frequently have garbled tags, as well. If you've kept backups of your original photos and videos, they'll be much better than what you'll get from Takeout.

(Source: me doing research to support reading Google Takeout metadata sidecars that are then imported by PhotoStructure).

yea I am also interested in this

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