Picture this: A fresh approach to Photos | Hacker News Reader

Picture this: A fresh approach to Photos

googleblog.blogspot.com

28 pointscleverjake12 comments

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free.

In Google parlance, a (free product) lifetime is somewhere between 2 - 7 years.

Looks like the unlimited free storage is for high quality, but not original, versions of the images and videos. Original quality is subject to storage limits/pricing:

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?p=storage&r...

With some sort of revenue, maybe this product will be sustainable.

I believe that page is outdated as of today. Until now, G+ stored pictures up to 2000px for free. As of today, photos of up to 16 megapixels may be stored for free.

But they can recompress it according to the help pages. If you want to store the originals, it's counted towards your space.

I've been waiting for this with not a little paranoia, given Google's propensity to dump products.

I have over 2k pictures taken since the birth of my daughter in January, 99% of them with my Android phone and uploaded automatically to G+ or Google Photos or whatever this is now called. In order to ensure that they are not just in this one space (which used to be Google Drive and Picasa before that, I believe), I periodically download through Google Takeout, save on a separate hard drive, and also upload to an S3 bucket through Arc so I have redundancy. Then I print the best ones physically through Snapfish.

I would love to stop doing all of this b.s. and just leave them where they lay on Google, but Google has given me no guarantee that my photos are safe. What a nightmare preserving memories is in 2015.

I also became more careful with photos since our daughter was born last year, but take a different approach. I store the photos on Dropbox, since it makes it trivial to backup (locally in time machine and remotely with Arq). The Carousel app is pretty great these days and it's great that its backed by regular Dropbox storage.

Another reason that we didn't choose for Google is their terms of service and privacy policy. We both have Google Apps for Work accounts, but Google+ photos is not one of the apps covered and uses the normal terms. The terms say that your data can be used for promoting Google service and that Google can keep the data as long as they wish. Not something I want to put something as personal as our daughter's photos on.

Is RAW format supported? This is key for higher-end users.

Also, the branding is potentially confusing: "high quality" and "original" to me implies the former is the "better" option, whereas in reality, it limits to 16 MP.

I get that "original" means original quality, but maybe "best quality" or something non-ambiguous.

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?

Where can I find more small print!

If a photo is < 16MP is it still uploaded as 'original' - ie if I did google takeout would I get my originals back or their 'high quality' edits?

Am I the only one who thought it was kind of weird that they used an iphone 6 in one of those shots?

Why is it weird? The app is launching on Android, web and iOS - why wouldn't all three platforms be shown?

How are your photos as a baby group with your 40 something photos of yourself ?

google = mercurial

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