Come June 1, All of Your New Photos Will Count Against Your Free Google Storage (techcrunch.com) 63
Come June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policies for free accounts -- and not for the better. Basically, if you're on a free account and a semi-regular Google Photos user, get ready to pay up next year and subscribe to Google One. From a report: Currently, every free Google Account comes with 15 GB of online storage for all your Gmail, Drive and Photos needs. Email and the files you store in Drive already counted against those 15 GB, but come June 1, all Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms or Jamboard files will count against the free storage as well. Those tend to be small files, but what's maybe most important here, virtually all of your Photos uploads will now count against those 15 GB as well. That's a bid deal because today, Google Photos lets you store unlimited images (and unlimited video, if it's in HD) for free as long as they are under 16MP in resolution or you opt to have Google degrade the quality. Come June of 2021, any new photo or video uploaded in high quality, which currently wouldn't count against your allocation, will count against those free 15 GB. [...] In addition to these storage updates, there's a few additional changes worth knowing about. If your account is inactive in Gmail, Drive or Photos for more than two years, Google 'may' delete the content in that product.
Countdown... (Score:2)
Countdown to "Facebook Photos" or similar, offering unlimited storage for your photos, forever.
Re:Countdown... (Score:5, Insightful)
as in, the small print defines forever as "we will until we won't."
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the small print defines forever as "we will until we won't."
Yes, it is outrageous that they don't offer an ironclad guarantee of free service for eternity to people that have paid nothing.
Maybe you should stomp your feet and threaten to take your business elsewhere. That will show them.
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But did we pay nothing? My cellphone which needs a google account to be functional cost a lot more than nothing. The one running Android that does everything in it's power to make it easy to upload to photos and hard to keep photos local only and then back them up to my PC.
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LOL...Facebook photo quality is utter shit, so good luck with that.
Re: Countdown... (Score:2)
Well, Amazon offers exactly that to prime members. You will need to decide on the lesser evil of course. I'll just say it is better to not use one basket for all your eggs and leave it at that.
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I would simply say "keep your eggs in a basket you own".
Big SD cards are really cheap these days. Slap in a 128g card and go wild.
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Except you can expect that SD card to be missing chunks of data in as little as 5 years, as the charge leaks out of the memory cells.
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You do not get why. The data mining advertising model is coming to an end and that income needs to be replaced. Google is planning ahead and saying nothing to existing investors about how really bad it is for them.
They are now being seen as hypocritical cunts for targeted mass marketing driving over consumption, during a climate crisis where they claim to be so 'GREEN', when the lying fuckers sell the exact opposite, no fucks given about the carbon generated by over consumption, hypocritical as fuck.
Then yo
A Bid Deal (Score:1)
Those tend to be small files, but what's maybe most important here, virtually all of your Photos uploads will now count against those 15 GB as well. That's a bid deal because today, Google Photos lets you store unlimited images (and unlimited video, if it's in HD) for free as long as they are under 16MP in resolution or you opt to have Google degrade the quality.
I hate bid deals
subjects are important to apease the spam filters. (Score:1)
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That was advertised as a feature with specific details, so they legally have to honor it. That's not a big deal for them because that term will be up eventually, so you either start paying for new photos or you buy another new google phone. Even the first gen pixel owners, whose free upload period was unlimited, will only be a concern for as long as the phone doesn't stop working, so they're a shrinking minority.
Saw this one coming... (Score:3)
If you consider how large photos are getting from smart phones, it makes sense. The latest Samsung flag ship phones sport a 108 mp camera. I think the average photo is around 30-35 MB from a sensor of that size.
Re:Saw this one coming... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Saw this one coming... (Score:2)
Suddenly HEIC and HEVC looks so much more appealing. This cut my iPhone storage requirements in half and increased the quality of the images.
Yep, they are stupidily large (Score:2)
That's something I have to deal with in my mail filtering. The cameras in phones don't even make it easy to select a reasonable file size. They default to a resolution appropriate for making a photo billboard and you can't easily make the photos smaller (other than resizing then in a separate program, if you know that you should).
So constantly have emails with four pics attached, each 10-12 MB.
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The gphoto uploading automatically resizes the photos it uploads if you select that option (which you have to do if you want the free storage).
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Doesn't matter because (as TFS even says) free storage was for 16MP or less.
BTW it's $2 for 100 GB (Score:4, Informative)
For anyone wondering, another 100 GB is $2/month or $20/year.
$3 for 200 GB. Two terabytes is $10/month.
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You can get an Office 365 Subscription which comes with 1 TB of storage for $7 a month and it includes MSOffice. This is the solution that I have gone with, Even better if you get the family plan. You get 6x1TB of storage for $10 a month.
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To be clear, because if we identify a problem we should actually *identify* it accurately:
Google *analyzes* data about you in order to sell *ads*.
What has made Google so successful is that unlike the previous generation of marketing data brokers, Google does *not* sell the golden goose, they do *not* resale the data. They keep the data as secret as they possibly can because it's worth billions of dollars to them, because they can keep selling ads every month if they are the only ones who have the data.
Some
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Rights This license allows Google to: host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it sublicense these rights to: other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people you choose our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purpose section below
Fuck them
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Wow really? I'm shocked. Let's break that down and look at all the crazy shit they can do.
"to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go"
Wow, if you have them store it for you, they can store it for you. Geez. That *is* fucked up.
"Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if youâ(TM)ve made it visible to others"
Whoa, so if I post a video on YouTube, YouTube can show it to people?! That's outrageous!
"enabling you to share photos with people you choo
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How to know used space? (Score:2)
Most of the pictures in my library are in the free "high quality" format. They do not count in my data usage. How to tell how much it will cost if I want to keep the same service?
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The space that you have already (and use for the next 7 months too) wouldn't count. If you want to compare for the future like how far 15 or 100 or 1000 GBs would go assuming you want to re-upload everything or how many years of pics you'll get assuming same usage/device/compression/etc. you can do a takeout and see how many archives you get (you can pick the size of individual files between 1-50GBs).
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that was not my question.
Let say I put a 10 MB picture in my library. I share it with two people who add it to their own library. After 1 year I delete the file on my side.
How much space does it use in the other two people's quota?
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It's probably relatively easy to test with an empty account, but based on the fact that you can "add to your drive" also in drive stuff that's (clearly) many times the regular 15GB I would guess it doesn't count. Also there's something EXTREMELY weird with the shared pics, google won't let you upload your own pictures that are matching whatever metadata you have from the pictures already shared by somebody and added to your library. You could drag&drop or upload via backup&sync (the only ways now po
How to move Android off Google? (Score:2)
Can I have my Android device save photos some place other than Google, if it's going to start charging me monthly fees to have enough storage to use the damn thing?
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Of course. On Android you can back you photos up anywhere you like. Pick the app of your choice, the location of your choice.
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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full
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Can I have my Android device save photos some place other than Google?
I don't have a Google account. My phone saves its photos to my SD card.
Now that google has so many hooked... (Score:3)
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It's still free, just not unlimited any more. 15GB is a lot of mail and photos and you can always delete old stuff.
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It's still free, just not unlimited any more. 15GB is a lot of mail and photos and you can always delete old stuff.
I use small (by today's standards) 16GB cards for my camera. That's just over 300 photos at 24 MB (RAW files) each. If you change to jpeg with a smaller size you can get a few thousand for the same size, but then you have your mail to consider with its attachments (mainly pictures).
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Sure, it's mostly designed for phone use, JPEGs.
I doubt it (Score:2)
I also copy my photos to Amazon, iCloud and Dropbox, so I'm good.
TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
How do they count data usage? (Score:2)
Let say I take a 10 MB picture and upload it to my Google Photo library. My wife adds it to her library as well. Does it count as 10 MB on each of our accounts? Or only in mine? What if I delete the picture on my side, does it reduce the available space in my wife's account by 10 MB?
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All photos are uploaded to main (no album) area. A copy is not added/created when adding photo to albums, simple a tag. It does not matter how many albums a single photo is added to, it still is only 1 photo. Even if you then 'archive' the photo, that just cleans up what is displayed in main (no album) area.
Each account is separate.
If you upload to your account and add photo to album shared with your wife, that only counts against your quota.
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I'm not talking about a shared album. What if my wife save that picture into her library, does it counts against her quota? And if it doesn't, what if I delete the picture on my side because I want to free some space. Can it reduce the free space in my wife's account?
Time to "sunset" some services again (Score:2)
In addition to this news today, Google is also giving away Stadia hardware and a three-month subscription to anyone with a YouTube Premium account. It sounds like someone in middle management took a look at the books and decided it was time to start cleaning things up again, so Stadia is being given a last chance to prove itself and free storage tiers are being trimmed back to pinch some pennies. Expect more sunsetting to follow in the coming months.
Google: What have you done for me lately? (Score:2)
I'm guessing Google is now finished with whatever picture analysis / AI training they were using all those photos for. With no need to encourage a flood of pictures as a data stream, they turn to monetizing it instead.
Your photos are no longer needed.... (Score:2)
If you don't use their free crap (Score:2)
Big Tech Social Media is a prison for the mind.
As typical, double standards. (Score:1)
Everyone is complaining about this and calling google all kind of names. (mostly other sites)
Yet, they have offered for a long time 15 GB of free space and this unlimited photos thing.
Yet nobody seems to be bothered by the paltry 5 gb that apple gives.
Lovely double standards...
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime (Score:2)
Google is Evil (Score:2)
Name of the week (Score:2)
So it's "Google One" now? What's the name for next week?
Don't pay Google to host your photos (Score:2)
Rights This license allows Google to: host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it sublicense these rights to: other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people you choose our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purpose section below
These photos no longer belong to you. At least don't pay them for this "service".