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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Google Photos made a similar promise. They said "as long as you let us optimize your photos, the service will be free and unlimited". I started syncing my photos and I think 12 months later they announced the end of the policy.

I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.

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Was it a particularly fast (or even complete) about-face?

They offered it for over 6 years, beginning in May of 2015[0] and ending in June of 2021, with previously-uploaded photos remaining free still today, and they gave ~7 months of warning before changing things[1].

0: https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/google-photos-breaks-free-...

1: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...

To be fair, they only made that change for new photos being uploaded. All of the ones uploaded prior are still free.

Which is awesome because I have way more than my drive quota in there.

The bitterest irony about photos or similar is it's quite unlikely they really deleted (or will delete) the photos. I mean. What an amazing walled garden data set for image models. Literally the fuel for Meta or twitter's AI. So here they are sitting on your data, taking advantage, training models, etc.. oh but you want to access the data? Oh no, you didn't pay every month, can't help you.

However it does make me wonder if california's consumer privacy act would cover the right to retrieve photographic data such as this.

Alternately they could have decided to "optimize" your photos down to 320p.

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