[HN Gopher] Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google...
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Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users
Author : anupamchugh
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-02-27 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| josteink wrote:
| Free unlimited full quality pictures "for life", Google Edition.
|
| [1] https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/pixel-pixel-xl-
| continu...
| bennettfeely wrote:
| I'm stunned by the image showing the difference between original
| and what Google apparently considers "high quality"
| wccrawford wrote:
| I think that image is faked. The caption says the difference
| will exist, but "not by this much". It's a fake.
| philips wrote:
| I have started to use Microsoft OneDrive along side Google Photos
| for two reasons.
|
| 1. OneDrive also backs up my photos on my Android device in
| original quality.
|
| 2. I have Google Takeout backup to OneDrive quarterly.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Be careful using OneDrive for important storage, I've been
| using OneDrive with my band to share musical projects for a
| while and we discovered there is a bug that is somehow moving
| random files to the windows recycle bin.
|
| The files were not necessarily touched (they're often from
| archived projects), I haven't been able to spot a pattern yet.
| (it may have to do with fast-moving changes + a mix of OS's
| perhaps)
|
| There are topics in their support forums about this but no
| serious responses, it's a vague problem but I was shocked that
| it wasn't a red alert moment for them.
|
| We're switching as soon as possible, but yeah, keep an eye on
| your recycle bin...
|
| (Edited for clarity.)
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Just like a Google account, your Microsoft account can be
| blocked for any reason and you will have no way to retrieve
| your files.
|
| Keep local backups.
| jrockway wrote:
| I got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my
| library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day,
| they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were
| converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful.
|
| I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free
| storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was
| some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal
| account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the
| deal and that storage went away.
|
| I use iCloud now.
| noAnswer wrote:
| > I use iCloud now.
|
| As long as you don't use it to store music...
|
| Basically same story, different file type:
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250315803
| nitrogen wrote:
| I guess that's one solution to piracy and competition...
| mrfusion wrote:
| How to do it on iCloud? Like a backup?
| federona wrote:
| If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or
| nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or
| later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much
| longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this
| stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.
| angrais wrote:
| Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if you don't access
| data often, why not just buy an external HDD of say 10TB or
| such? Yeah, it's possible that data may fail, but is quite
| unlikely particular if you're not using it often.
| federona wrote:
| Remote storage, redundancy, and portability. At $5/mo/tb.
| you can still access any of it anytime you want, you just
| pay for what you actually download.
| jrockway wrote:
| I'm not really looking for archival storage or disaster
| recovery. After all, the 80MP scans are just low-resolution
| copies of the originals. I have hard drives for local
| storage. Yes, if my house burns down I lose the scans and the
| negatives, but I don't care enough to spend money on it.
|
| The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I
| could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all
| the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do
| per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user
| interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not
| photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive
| than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
| federona wrote:
| It would not be hard maybe a week or two of hacking to make
| such an interface on top of an object store if you were
| motivated. A simple php or python app with a time limited
| key stored in a db of some sort. There though are already
| open source free apps that do provide user management, etc.
| If you are looking for an ideal solution, but you have to
| pay for it with money or time.
| [deleted]
| prox wrote:
| That's bad. Using any Google product will be the same
| experience, simply because you are not the client, advertisers
| are. I am sure there are fine people working on the ship called
| Google, but I don't like where it is heading.
| mountainb wrote:
| They don't treat advertisers well either, so you know.
| dontblink wrote:
| Advertisers have nothing to do with a paid product. GSuite
| (or whatever it is called now) can be paid for. Just an fyi
| as you seem to be misinformed.
| prox wrote:
| That really doesn't change the outcome of what kind of
| company Google is, on the whole, and where they get their
| value extraction from. Gsuite is only 5% of their revenue.
| Photos is also not part of Gsuite afaik.
| coolspot wrote:
| Google seems to be in some "cut all expenses" mode recently:
|
| + cancelled stadia game studio
|
| + cancelled free unlimited google photos
|
| + closed Chromium APIs for derived browsers
|
| + closed Google Music (replaced with YT Music)
|
| + froze hiring
|
| + cancelled new office leases
| smueller1234 wrote:
| Google is hiring just fine. (Source: I'm hiring. I work for
| Google. Also careers.google.com.)
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| Do yall have any remote positions?
| kyrra wrote:
| (googler, opinions are my own).
|
| See: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22175150/google-
| return-o...
|
| We are WFH till September for sure, and they will be
| testing flex hours after that. Though, they are still
| office focused, so you need to live near the office/team
| you work for.
|
| Note that there are a few special cases where they let an
| individual be remote, but they tend to be very very
| outstanding developers. I've only worked with 1 of those in
| the last 5 years here.
| junon wrote:
| Haven't received my semi-yearly Google recruiting email this
| year, I was starting to get worried! I'm itching to decline
| for the fifth time! :)
| vinger wrote:
| 4 declines and you are out.
| toast0 wrote:
| They finally stopped emailing me after I figured out they
| were looking for someone else with my name. They dropped a
| hint that they were excited about my compiler work at
| Microsoft; but I've never done compiler work or been
| employed by Microsoft.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Their loss, toast0! You're one of the most thoughtful,
| insightful, skillful participant on this little orange
| site :)
| TLightful wrote:
| Tell your boss that Google jumped the shark 15 years ago. Get
| him/her to tell their boss, and so on.
|
| Appreciate it.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Google cancelling products is as common as the sun setting in
| the west.
|
| It's what they do.
|
| Cancelling new office leases may have to do with WFH and a
| pandemic.
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Hiring froze??
| wooptoo wrote:
| I think none of us is surprised that the free lunch is now over
| and that this could not last ad infinitum.
|
| Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a
| minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage
| services out there that offer good price per GB.
|
| Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or
| Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to
| these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search
| brings up FolderSync which looks decent.
| verytrivial wrote:
| For a few years it seemed to me that updates to Photos on Android
| would silently flip the quality setting down from Original to
| "High" as in "compressed", so I was never sure if the images I
| wanted to backup in original actually _were_ backed up or not. I
| never set it to "High" but it kept flipping back to that.
|
| I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the
| support forums to get the Photos GUI to report _somewhere_
| whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It
| went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.
|
| I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do
| all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the
| metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google
| One.
|
| (seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the
| engineering team?!)
|
| Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| Google photos is the best photos product out there for simple
| sharing with family (and partner share), so of course they're
| going to destroy it with mismanagement. Time to start looking for
| alternatives.
| coolspot wrote:
| Check out Photoprism
|
| https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
| oflannabhra wrote:
| iCloud shared albums has served our family well for over five
| years, all for free.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Explain
| sahila wrote:
| That's fine as long as you're all Apple people. Walk outside
| that garden though and how do you share an album with
| someone? To contrast, Google photos web app is actually good!
| oarsinsync wrote:
| You can do a read-only web share from iCloud. Definitely
| not ideal, but in some circumstances, good enough.
| mceachen wrote:
| I'm building a self-hosted, cross-platform one that you're
| welcome to try! https://photostructure.com/faq/why-
| photostructure/
| hedora wrote:
| It looks great, but lack of open source is a deal breaker. I
| wouldn't mind paying for it, but what if I want to run it
| outside of docker (and not on Ubuntu?), let alone on an ARM
| or BSD machine?
|
| Consider using the BSL license!
| kumarharsh wrote:
| This article reads like senseless hate-mongering.
|
| The email this article is talking about is for users of the
| Google One subscription only. Of course they'd like their users
| to know that they can upload full quality photos to Google Photos
| - that's one of the main reasons I bought the subscription too!
|
| Disclosure: I work at Google, but had bought the subscription
| before joining.
| vinger wrote:
| So you drank the cool-aid before making it?
|
| Bring back picasa
| craftinator wrote:
| > So you drank the cool-aid before making it?
|
| Ballsy move, kumarharsh. Is it weird working there now? Sort
| of feels like working for the Empire, but you all have fruity
| little sweaters instead of stormtrooper armor?
| almog wrote:
| I stopped using Google Photos after a bug I experienced few years
| ago when I configured my phone to upload everything to Photos and
| remove local copies: I knew photos are not exact copy and will be
| kept up to a certain resolution, yet some photos, due to network
| fault I believe, appeared on Photos as a tiny pixelated copy of
| the original copy. The pixelated images were probably a result of
| a interlaced progressive compression. The main problem for me was
| that client removed the local copy thus costing me few dozens
| photos forever lost.
| IshKebab wrote:
| High Quality is not just limited to 16 megapixels, the photos are
| also re-encoded at a lower bitrate.
| thevagrant wrote:
| I remember setting original quality on purpose as I didn't want
| downgraded images. I paid for extra storage... Only to find
| multiple times Google Photos app would randomly reset my
| preference and use their "high quality" setting. I made sure to
| stop using Google Photos (except as a low quality backup) and
| used other storage providers. My early experiences with Google
| Drive were also negative to the point that I would rather use
| Dropbox, One Drive or another solution.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It sounds like Kugel is running out of storage space
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