Well, well what a fucking shock. From an email I received. article - Pixel owners also get shafted, but in a different way. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-unlimited-cap-free-uploads-15gb-ending
'Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap.' Woo hoo!
I have no idea what they are thinking, the paid option is a huge rip off. Anyone with a modern phone will run out of space very quickly. My 108MP images can be around 40mb each while my 8k video takes up 600mb a minute. While Google was compressing these on the free tier, I'm not going pay and not upload in original quality. I don't see why they don't just sell an unlimited package. This will mean I'll just have to set up my own nextcloud or something, I already use SFTP to automatically backup photos/videos over my VPN when on holidays etc.
All that free storage costs them an absolute packet. If you need so much of it then stop being a tightarse and pay for what you use. I'm surprised they ran the free option for this long tbh. I think they likely just used it to harvest images to train their AI which is now quite mature, so they're not seeing any benefit from offering free storage anymore.
nah it's just a classic bait and switch. Here have a free thing, get used to it - you comfortable and don't want to change now? Good, now it costs $$$.
I don't really see the point of these sorts of posts. This is an enthusiast forum about computers, and the majority of discussions here are about wants and not needs. We can have sensible discussions about things other than the basic human needs of air, shelter and food, which includes how we deal with vendors changing the terms of their services. I'm moving to an automated system where Google Photos is just a temporary storage location for the last week's photos, and everything else will be transferred to BackBlaze for long term backup. What's annoying about that, however, is Google's AI, while scary, is highly useful. I don't have to organise anything, just throw all my photos up online, and use search to find people, places, times and things trivially. That is absolutely Google Photos power, and will be something I will miss when migrating away from using it as a long-term store. Is that just cloud storage, or is it a more application-specific like Google Photos?
But who takes photos but not videos? I was looking at nextcloud today as a possible alternative, but its very basic for photo use, its basically a glorified file manager with photo previews. Surely someone has a self hosted photo system that has some features as well...
Looks like a nice improvement but still way too lightweight on features. I'd love to have something that reads and displays EXIF data and some sort of integration with that GPS data to organise/search/display your photos. It will be hard to live without google photo features. I also just realised that its not going to play motion photos as it appears this is stored inside the JPG itself, which is a shame. Maybe there is an external viewer for it. Edit: looks like someone made a tool to extract it, which will have to do for now. Looks like people have been discussing it on nextcloud's github with some easy examples for implementation.
I have the business storage account with about 15TB of data on it for about $15 a month, can't remember the actual cost.
I heard good things about SmugMug a while back. They also had quite an impressive tech blog for a while, contributing to a lot of major open source projects. https://www.smugmug.com/plans Dunno what they're like these days. Aimed more at photographers who want to create portfolios and share work, however I think they could work for home users given their "unlimited data" approach. But as above, all the Google AI smarts are still missing.
