Google Will Launch Google Photos, a Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I've started not to trust Google as a cloud offering because of their continued shedding of services. Look at AWS - they add things they know will fill a need, often because that need is present at Amazon, and as such I can't recall them retiring any of their portfolio.
Google instead take a scattergun approach, which would be fine if they actually interated and improved these services, but look at the mess they made of Google Code - great at first, then no massive new features after a while and they left it to languish.
The big difference is that it has real revenue from customers whereas "free" services are a lot more prone to corporate fashion
Their machine learning systems are unmatched. In order for machine learning to be more effective they need to be given context. What's the missing key for photos? People. What happens when you add in an authenticated Google user, who they already know everything about due to using other G services (mail, search, adwords) to that machine learning with photos?
My assumption would be they can simply learn more about you. Personalization is ad money, nothing more.
Google is a product lab that happens to fund itself from its most successful experiment, ads.
Maybe I was just lucky. shrug
I'm skeptical about this whole "Google doesn't do customer support" thing, especially given the internet's astonishing ability to amplify vocal minorities and some people's desire to jump on anything anti-guy-making-all-the-money.
* Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, ...
Obviously, machine learning will benefit Google. But it will also benefit all the users of this service, by improving the automated assistance of managing your photos (some of which is already pretty neat, like the automatic photo albums Google will sometimes make for you).
If you are not a photographer, and say, you have kids, you definitely don't have time to do that much curation of your photo archive. You might set aside some time time make a share a photo album after a major event like a birthday party or something, but you will never have enough time to manually derive all the enjoyment our of your photos that you could be getting. This problem needs smarter machines to solve it.
Relevant quote:
Q: You use artificial intelligence to surface photos on a given
theme, or find specific people in the photostream. What’s the
percentage of getting it right?
A: It’s good enough. It’s not perfect, in the same way that voice
transcription five years ago was not perfect. The key to getting
that last percentage which tips it over will come now, when we deploy
it at scale. Getting all that data will create a virtuous cycle of
getting better and better.
If this same product was released by a company you had never heard of, would you use it? Would you honestly believe it to have a greater chance of survival?
My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
Sorry, you must understand that there are now enough people out there who have been on the receiving end of Google's careless approach to their end-users (note, I intentionally did not refer to us as customers).
Announcements like this used to excite me. Not anymore. I hope one day things will be different.
[Edit: downvoted as expected. Feel free. Just come back and upvote when it's your turn to get on the Google support rollercoaster].
Amazon has my loyalty for the very specific reason that they don't release half-assed products and then pull them even when they have millions of users.
rsync.net has been around since 2001 and, if you care about openness and interoperability[1], is an even better place for "anything you want to stick around".
Yes, more expensive, but the "HN readers discount" for new customers is currently 8 cents (vs. S3 @ 3 cents). Email us.
[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
>My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.
Maybe RMS was right and the answer is to stop using cloud services?
I'm afraid there are more factors than this at play. Reader was both popular, and it produced value (to me and many others). I was never even given the option to pay for it. For whatever reason, Reader didn't fit Google's strategic vision... so it got axed.
Yep, just what I want to hear when I'm uploading my 1000s of photos to that product...
People have a common tendency to extrapolate from low-N or even single events to produce an inaccurate picture of future possibilities. I'm quite happy with GMail, Drive, Android and so on, and don't expect them to vanish any time soon.
I'm still using GMail and Android, but I'm not happy with how their UI change, and with how the latter puts Google everywhere (it's a bit better with Cyanogen, but still).
Maybe I'm extrapolating, maybe not. The only thing I'm sure of, is that when trust has been lost, it's very hard to get it back.
You don't trust them to keep the Photos service operational in the future? But if the worst comes to the worst, in this theoretical scenario, at least they would surely provide you a way to transfer your files first. So why does it bother you so much?
Or you don't trust them to keep Photos independent of Google+? Surely they would never say "from now on you can't access your photos unless you sign up for Google+". Photos are very personal and important to people. This would cause an unprecedented outrage.
I trust them even less to not put Google+ inside this, which for me is more or less the same thing as shutting the service down, since I really don't want to use Google+ (I mean, really), and I don't want people I share photos with to be forced to use it (I mean, really). You seem to be sure they wouldn't do this, I think the exact opposite. Well, future will tell us.
Now, you're right in that they have a excellent history of allowing their users to get their files back. This is something I definitely trust them and thank them for a million times. Now, a photo service isn't relevant without a sharing feature, and if the service is shutting down, no backup that I can think of backs the sharing up.
Why do people harp on this for Google? /SMH
And as for "really don't want to use Google+", that's very much like saying "I really don't want to log in to Hacker News."
Yes. You have an account at Google that enables social interaction. That's all it is. Why people imbue it with some awful emotional connotations is really beyond me. It's a tool that has multiple uses, some of which you don't want to use... Got it. But some of which you might want to use.
Keep in mind that photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count toward your storage limit.
I never trusted photo backup from my phone to a public-only profile page. I understand that google respects privacy and tests their code well and doesn't auto-share photos, but the reality is I will never be comfortable with a public-only profile page directly connected to my cellphones camera with auto-upload.
I may be that tiny, tiny minority but I'm very psyched I'll be able to finally use some of the great tools without having to worry about the fact that my phone is being dumped into a public-only social network that "should" protect my privacy.
In what sense is G+ a "public-only social network"?
You can then subsequently lock down features ON that page, such as hiding work information, hiding photos, hiding this, hiding that, (in fact, each of the dozens and dozens of options must be individually hidden), but the net result of that work is a public page with very little info on it.
By proxy, I can set my Facebook page to "visible to friends only" and even if you have a hardlink, you'll receieve a "page does not exist" error when you view it without logged-in whitelist (friend list) approval to even know the page exists.
I was never OK with the idea that, essentially, my android device had a public web page. A direct link between my data and a public profile page that I had no ability to remove access to.
As evidence of this I made a dummy G+ for a mostly unused Google account I have. Even though I turned off all features and hid all sections and turned on all privacy settings, and have added 0 content, 0 customization, 0 demographic settings (completely and totally blank G+ profile, no posts, nothing), the G+ dummy profile has "715 views" in the past year.
I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. It's forced-public, searchable, etc. The best you can do is have a public profile page that you mark "do not search" (but which will still be crawled because search engines often crawl then hide instead of ignore).
You can never have privacy on G+ like Facebook, where you have a private page that does not even resolve as an address to non-friends.
> I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me.
You didn't say what information was revealed on the profile. If it was completely blank, then how is that a privacy issue?
I do not want the existence of a profile to be known. I do not want social networks, search engines, and government organizations crawling and recording information from a profile page connected directly to my cellphone.
I explained this: on Facebook, if you click a link to my profile it will say "sorry this link is invalid".
If you click it on Google, despite my best attempts, it will say "Hey, this user exists, here is their full name, oh, they don't share anything else with you".
That's an invasion of my privacy, to me, to have a public page that resolves and identifies me against my will.
The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you without your permission or knowledge. What do you think those 700 clicks are? People hitting a blank profile? They're bots, and they're data harvesters. The existence of a profile is great information to help build more complete profiles of me, my devices and accounts, and ultimately my browsing history, locations, purchasing histories, advertising history, etc.
> The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you without your permission or knowledge.
"blank profile" ... "personal information" -- this isn't even coherent.
> without your permission
They implicitly have my permission to crawl anything I allow to be public. That's what making something public means!
Yes, privacy is being lost.
I broke it down very simply: a public facing, crawlable webpage with a real-name is different than a NON-EXISTENT LINK.
Do you understand the difference between a "This Page Does Not Exist" error, and a "Hey, this is the public profile for Real Name" page? Do you understand the difference between say "Google.com" and "lkskldjfklsdjsdf.com"? One being a public page, the other being a non-existent webpage that returns an error?
I am shocked that your view of privacy is so broken that you cannot see the difference between publically posting a page on the public internet, accessible to literally every human on earth, and a whitelisted access page that has a total of about 300 human beings who can see it.
Do you understand why accessible to 5,000,000,000 is different than 300?
Then you can begin to understand privacy.
[0] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1
I still use it to this day.
It is even complete with a "New!" sidebar referencing a blog post from 2011... ;-)
- - - - -
EXCELLENT. Two questions:
1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive?
2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be upgraded to higher resolution versions?
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-wort...
that's one of the selling points of the new google photos app.
This is why my data gets stored in S3, and not Google's nearline storage. I know S3 is going to be around several year from now. I have no such assurances from Google about any of the services they have "in beta".
"Fool me once..."
Seems Flickr doesn't really examine the image, just the extension (.gif, .jpg, etc). I wonder what Google plans to do.
You can buy a similar amount of storage from Google for a similar amount, and it will store your originals. So only the free version is limited in this way.
Google already does this for educational customers.
Dropbox's business model will get blown up when this happens.
So yes.. I've spent the day deleting years of emails that I didn't intend to... thanks Google..
The default for new accounts is 15GB. I've had my gmail account since 2004 and I "only" have 17GB (15GB + 2GB extra I got at some point for some kind of security bonus; perhaps enabling 2FA).
I'll be glad when they set Photos free from Google+. I hope they do something with Hangouts too.