Hacker News Reader

Comment by debugnik | Hacker News Reader

> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached

How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.

View on HN

FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.

Disabled in the sense that you can no longer receive email (which for many is the primary purpose for a Google account), not that you can’t login.

Same thing happened to me and it did not default to lossy. Days later I got the "you will stop receiving email soon" warning in Gmail.

It's not just the photos that you take going forward, but all the photos you already have stored on the device.

I know, but that's still thousands of photos at original quality, let alone with the default compression, for each member of their extended family present, not just some of them. I barely know a couple people stockpiling more photos than that, let alone an entire family.

It's 2026, year of decent cameras.

70 seconds long 4K video is 2GB.

Fair enough, I was thinking actual photos. Still, the whole extended family present had that much stockpiled on their phones? Still sounds unbelievable to me IDK.

I don't have strong opinion here, I just had this happen for all my immediate family members (dark pattern turning on the backup filling the Drive with the photos and videos from they nearly full phones).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com