Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users
forbes.com
forbes.com
I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the deal and that storage went away.
I use iCloud now.
I wish I had just gone with Apple.
As long as you don't use it to store music...
Basically same story, different file type:
We shouldn't tolerate this business from any megacorp.
The cloud is too... cloudy.
That said, play music was replaced by youtube music. My collection of 10k uploaded songs was moved into the new app without issue. Playlists and all.
The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
We had to write a text editor in our first semester of our CS undergrad program. I'm not going to use my own text editor in favor of say MS word or Google doc.
Depending on contracts with an employer, there might be legal hassles as well.
It really is drop dead simple and you also don’t have to host it yourself. Every hosted provider supports external storages so you’re never locked in with them. And since you’re not actually using any of their storage you can stay in their free tier forever.
I self-host on DO and it works amazingly well.
This is the sort of thing that really makes me regret getting a pixel
I wish I realized how anti-ergonomic Google's services were before I experienced it first hand.
You can choose to pay for storage and keep original quality uploads?
Google offers both options, though? It used to offer free - unlimited "high quality" photos, which they have now stopped.
If you pay for storage, you can choose to store original quality images in the first place, and delete them from device
That deal was always time limited, and then was periodically extended for years and years until one day it wasn't. It was clearly never 'sold' as <i>forever</i> though.
I mean, if people really miss Picasa (and I personally know several) -- it's worthwhile to reimplement it and make money.
no it's not, because if you do (and look to be getting significant growth) Google will just start it up again and drive you out of business, run it for a year or two afterwards for free and then kill it.
The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on their ux and their ads.
It's a bit like saying you miss street fighter 2 cabinets. Ok but, there are no arcades left.
RSS still exists, you know!
Excellent. But what Google took away was the culture of blog-RSSing.
It gave an enormous advantage to Facebook and Instagram. Which are competitors to Google. What a bad move from Google.
When they moved on, nobody else wanted to take on support in their free time, and no department wanted to pay someone full-time to work on it, so it was killed.
I don’t think GReader led to a closing of feeds. It was simply a thing already happening. And even today the vast majority of sites still offer RSS feeds, I can’t even remember the last time I wanted to follow something, and it didn’t have a feed available.
Huh? I use a self-hosted CommaFeed instance and it still works great.
But what you're not getting is that Google Reader helped make that world. Deleting the largest RSS reader app and replacing it with proprietary news feeds damaged the open web.
We thought "Google is a big tech company, this should stick around." Got about 10 years out of it, which strikes me as pretty average for a tech product, but not great for a photo archive. Hell of a lot shorter than "4x6s in a shoebox."
At least that was a desktop app and they still have their data. Hopefully they were able to find a new way to organize them.
But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only good way to store data is in an organized tree of folders, with any management software being a veiwer UI into that structure. App inevitably goes away? Replace it with the next one. Some things just need to have longer lifespans than software projects.
Point it at a folder, that’s your photo library. Dev could stop development tomorrow and your photos would be right where you left them.
Pray they don't alter it further.
When you drop a file into this drive, it will start "Uploading". Once it has uploaded, you will see "Remove Download" option which removes the local copy but keeps the copy in the cloud. If you click on such a file whose local copy is not present, it will "Download Now" (you can select and option-click and find this option as well).
All cloud storage should be treated as ephemeral (some more than others, particularly google). It will change terms or go away at some point.
Only local storage owned by you is actually, well, owned by you. If it is something that matters, keep it locally.
I only buy non-DRM content. Ideally, DVDs or CDs I'll rip myself (then the physical media is a second layer of backup).
Most of my storage volume is my own photography though. RAW files take a lot of space.
Following hard disk failure last week, I attempted to recover only about 1Gb of data from SpiderOak. Without going in to all the roadblocks, bugs and strange design decisions that exist when recovering data from them, I'm yet to recover anything worth having.
Been a customer for over 8 years. I guess the old maxim is true; an untested backup is worthless.
I managed to recover most data from various local backups I had lying around. That's the direction I'm going to go now, with a physical snapshot off-site every now and again. Not perfect, but much less hassle than what I've just been through, and also cheaper.
Didn't learn your lesson then, I see.
If you can’t see the actual JPG/MP4/FLAC files, you can’t be sure they’re actually there and eventually you’ll be burned.
Use cheap online storage for an offsite backup, and use any cloud (Apple, Google) in parallel for convenience.
I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.
I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One.
(seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!)
Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!
1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue"
2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting
Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.
And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.
Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.
I would have gladly given Google my money over Dropbox, but Google has become an untrustworthy and unreliable brand in my eyes recently. Plus I still have control over my Dropbox data via hard drive syncing.
Oh and Picasa for local face tagging is still an option! That gem of a software still works. Although in all honesty, I haven't run it in a while so my tag database is extremely out of date.
+ cancelled stadia game studio
+ cancelled free unlimited google photos
+ closed Chromium APIs for derived browsers
+ closed Google Music (replaced with YT Music)
+ froze hiring
+ cancelled new office leases
Doesn't mean I'd be a good fit over there; anyway, I've had enough experience with huge companies; don't want to do that again.
Appreciate it.
See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22175150/google-return-o...
We are WFH till September for sure, and they will be testing flex hours after that. Though, they are still office focused, so you need to live near the office/team you work for.
Note that there are a few special cases where they let an individual be remote, but they tend to be very very outstanding developers. I've only worked with 1 of those in the last 5 years here.
It’s what they do.
Cancelling new office leases may have to do with WFH and a pandemic.
I'm a bit out of the loop. How limited is the list of charities to choose from? Is it a small list, or essentially free for all?
(For charity, I usually just pick whatever GiveWell suggests at the moment. Everything else feels like an insult to humanity to me.)
I have 2 NAS (one a old custom build running freenas, the other a QNAP) in 2 different continents. I use resilio sync to sync between them, and to automatically download photos from my phones to the two NAS (when the phones are charging and connected to wifi).
The two NAS also expose a network volume with all pictures, that is mounted on the PCs I use lightroom on. This is also how pictures from regular cameras can be ingested. Lightroom database backups also end up on that network volume.
Each one of the two NAS takes hourly snapshot of their FS (to protect against accidental deletion/overwrites). As data is rarely updated, these snapshots can be kept for years while using negligible space.
In addition, the qnap NAS backs everything up, encrypted, to glacier, just in case everything else fails.
Finally, the phones also sync to google photo in "high" quality, just as a convenience. If I don't care about quality, i can share from google photo. Otherwise I can share via the qnap NAS in original quality.
1. OneDrive also backs up my photos on my Android device in original quality.
2. I have Google Takeout backup to OneDrive quarterly.
The files were not necessarily touched (they're often from archived projects), I haven't been able to spot a pattern yet. (it may have to do with fast-moving changes + a mix of OS's perhaps)
There are topics in their support forums about this but no serious responses, it's a vague problem but I was shocked that it wasn't a red alert moment for them.
We're switching as soon as possible, but yeah, keep an eye on your recycle bin...
(Edited for clarity.)
Keep local backups.
There are a few tools out there but they all seem to have bit rotted to the point where they don't work reliably on modern Android.
It's a little confusing to set up the first time, but I've had it on this phone for 3 years and not needed to fiddle with it.
(It uses its own protocol.)
Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage services out there that offer good price per GB.
Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search brings up FolderSync which looks decent.
I haven’t found a way to get all my google photos out though.
Could we expect the same to happen to Gmail? It also has a 15GB free quota.
I'm guessing the "original" is much higher resolution than 16MP. Google Photos' "high quality" being always limited to 16MP, my guess is that the comparison shot is between what I'm guessing at least 60MP or even 100MP image vs (downsampled) 16MP.
For more sane comparison of what "high quality" does, I find:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Photos-High-quality-v...
i.e. unless you have a camera with substantially higher resolution than 16MP or you're a professional photograph (or equivalent amateur who cares about subtle pixel level details), high quality is good enough for all casual photographers , which is basically 99% of us including myself.
[1] https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/pixel-pixel-xl-continu...
Consider using the BSL license!
Thanks for the suggestion of BSL: I'll look into that.
PhotoStructure runs pretty much anywhere Node.js runs (Windows, macOS, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, and any x64 docker host). You can certainly compile it on ARM: https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-node/
How exactly do you encode a photo at a bitrate? Do you mean videos?
* Google kills projects at an increasing rate, the warning may be days
* Google has in the past destroyed quality images in their care
* If you don't pay you have only yourself to blameThe email this article is talking about is for users of the Google One subscription only. Of course they'd like their users to know that they can upload full quality photos to Google Photos - that's one of the main reasons I bought the subscription too!
Disclosure: I work at Google, but had bought the subscription before joining.