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Cloud Google Businesses Data Storage

Come June 1, All of Your New Photos Will Count Against Your Free Google Storage (techcrunch.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
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.
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Come June 1, All of Your New Photos Will Count Against Your Free Google Storage More

Come June 1, All of Your New Photos Will Count Against Your Free Google Storage

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  • Countdown to "Facebook Photos" or similar, offering unlimited storage for your photos, forever.

    • Re:Countdown... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:20PM (#60712180)
      If by forever you mean forever*

      as in, the small print defines forever as "we will until we won't."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GoTeam ( 5042081 )
        To prevent the spread of covid-19, we need a "shelter offline" order from the government. Small side-effects may include lower blood pressure, having more REAL friends, much more extra time that can be filled with constructive projects, or spending your time with the people you care most about.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          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.

    • LOL...Facebook photo quality is utter shit, so good luck with that.

    • 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.

      • 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.

        • 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.

      • Amazon will also see you a decently large drive (or 2 or 3) for when Amazon no longer offers free storage. Tip: Back up the "free storage" to the decently large drive as you go, so you don't have to worry about downloading terabytes of photos when it happens...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • I wonder how that compares to the 'free photo storage for life if you by a pixel' they told me just last year. Probably just another case of whatever big brother corporation says, goes because they are bigger, meaner, and mom and dad aren't around.

    • 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)

    by sizzlinkitty ( 1199479 ) on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:24PM (#60712198)

    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.

  • BTW it's $2 for 100 GB (Score:4, Informative)

    by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:40PM (#60712268) Journal

    For anyone wondering, another 100 GB is $2/month or $20/year.

    $3 for 200 GB. Two terabytes is $10/month.

    • 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.

    • Just to funny ;) pay google to store your data for their resale

      • 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

        • No it doesn't just "sell *ads*" it steals your content:

          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

          • 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

            • You missed "for example" -- a small yet critical part. This means all these nice things PLUS "allows Google to... distribute, use your content... [and the same permissions apply to] our contractors". Given this is an improvement from a few years back when they outright transferred ownership to themselves. Still this is designed for a "free as a beer" service, not something you want to pay for.
    • That's what I did. It was around $20 a year for 100GB. I don't use much space at all but that's dirt cheap for not having to worry about running out of room.

  • 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?

    • 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).

      • 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?

        • 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

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Of course. On Android you can back you photos up anywhere you like. Pick the app of your choice, the location of your choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      I use "rsync wrapper" to backup to my own storage server.
    • I run a local NextCloud server and all of our photos are synced to it....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jomcty ( 806483 )
      Sure, I use this fantastic app:
      https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full

    • 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)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @03:04PM (#60712340)
    ... on free services, the inevitable price increases will begin.
    • It has already started for some. Here where I live, many schools are closed because of coronavirus restrictions. During the first wave of the pandemic Google "graciously" offered free GSuite pro plans to all schools, and many used GSuite for their distance teaching; but the offer ended in October, and now they have to reach for the wallet to keep the same tools.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's still free, just not unlimited any more. 15GB is a lot of mail and photos and you can always delete old stuff.

      • If the unlimited is no longer free, then there has been a price increase.

      • 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).

  • I also copy my photos to Amazon, iCloud and Dropbox, so I'm good.

  • TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Big Bipper ( 1120937 ) on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @03:19PM (#60712396)
    You don't get what you don't pay for. I suspect the price they can get for selling your ultra high definition photos versus high definition doesn't pay for their increased storage costs. You have to kick in the difference.

  • 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?

    • Most likely the count is per physical upload. They may do deduplication in the back end, but most likely not for counting user data usage.

    • 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.

      • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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 we already have a good training set for ML models, thank you!
  • They can't lock you in by switching free to pay big.
    Big Tech Social Media is a prison for the mind.

  • 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...

  • Prime Photos gives you unlimited storage of photos, any resolution, and including most common raw formats. They only give you 5 GB of video storage though.
  • They should not have given up on their motto, or they will have an additional problem when they have a competitor, people will want them to fail.

  • So it's "Google One" now? What's the name for next week?

  • They appropriate ownership of all photos you post: https://policies.google.com/te... [google.com]

    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".

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