Google Photos – Bait, meet Switch
Nov 24, 2020
Thomas Hawk
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In case you missed it recently, Google Photos has decided to end their free unlimited photo hosting service. Beginning in June of next year users will be limited to 15GB of space before being asked to pay for more storage. How much you’ll have to pay will depend on how much storage you use. Unfortunately for me, I have more photos than fit their top tier $100/year plan, so even if I wanted to pay I’d be capped out of the service.
While I don’t begrudge Google, a trillion-dollar company that makes billions of dollars a year, from wanting to make even MORE money, I am offended by the bait and switch approach that they took with Google Photos. Offering a user the first hit for free is classic dealer marketing. A lot of time and energy goes into organizing your photos on ANY photo-sharing site and when someone spends hundreds or even thousands of hours organizing their photos at a site only to be priced out of the site, those are countless hours that you will never get back.
Fortunately for me I’ve spent a lot less time using Google Photos for the past few years. Google’s consistent bad faith across photo hosting/sharing products has left me very skeptical of anything they do anymore.
Some of you may remember Picasa (Google killed it). I was a user of that. I also was a big user of Google Buzz (they killed that too). Then I put hundreds of hours into my photography on Google+ (once again RIP). We used to do photo walks and hangouts and lots of other fun things around photography with Google+. Here’s my old Google+ URL.
Initially, I was super excited about Google Photos, but that changed over time. I was disappointed that one of their early features, photo facial recognition, didn’t really work for me. It limited the service to 200 faces and unfortunately for me when the service launched it grabbed a bunch of faces of musicians I’d photographed performing at Coachella and chose those as the ones to tag. There was no way to delete those and have it choose people who were actually my family, friends, neighbors, etc.
I was also disappointed that the hours and hours and hours I’d spent keywording all my photos in Adobe Lightroom were stripped out of my uploads to Google Photos. I’m not sure why Google would want to remove one of the best ways for me to search my photos from their service but for whatever reason they strip this data.
Still, Google Photos was free (even though it downsized my photos). It’s hard to complain about free — until they locked my gmail. Last year I received a rather ominous message from Google threatening that unless I paid them for more storage they were going to turn my gmail off.
It turns out that even though Google Photos claimed to be able to convert my photos to high quality JPEGs with free unlimited storage, that TIFF files generated by the software program Analog Efex Pro (ironically a former Google owned product before they jettisoned that as well) were not being converted by Google Photos and were sucking up my gmail storage which was then demanding payment from me. They actually locked my gmail and I missed several important emails that were blocked during this fiasco.
By this point I was about ready to delete my Google Photos account — except I could not find ANY way to delete my Google Photos account. That’s right you can’t just delete Google Photos. You have to delete your entire Google account including your Gmail!
While this is my unhappy story and experience with Google Photos, many, many users were duped into signing up for a free service that they thought would protect, as Google put it, their “lifetime of memories.” Now Google is demanding money from these users.
To me it seems wrong (even evil — remember their old motto “don’t be evil” that they also abandoned?) that Google would bait and switch so many users on this product. You can’t/won’t get the many hours that you spent organizing your photos on Google Photos back. Some will just begrudgingly pay up. What I see is one of the world’s largest companies who used a classic monopolistic tactic to grab market share by pricing out and hurting smaller competitors and now wants to profit from their move.
Once burned shame on you. Twice, three times, four times, five times, six times burned, shame on me. I will never trust Google with another product again.
Thankfully there is an alternative to Google Photos, good old trustworthy Flickr. Here is a thoughtful analysis that was done by Jeremy Zero comparing Google Photos and Flickr.
I’ve been using Flickr since 2004 and for as long as I can remember, my Flickr Pro account has remained unlimited. Flickr/SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill even recently re-iterated Flickr’s commitment to honoring their unlimited service. While Flickr may not be a trillion-dollar company or make billions of dollars every year as Google does, they are a small company that cares about photographers and your photography. They also do a great job storing and sharing your full high-res, uncompressed, high-quality images (and they even retain your photo keywords when you upload them there). I feel much better supporting an ethical small business than a trillion-dollar company using monopolistic bait and switch tactics to try to drive the smaller guy out of business.
You can find me on Flickr here. If you are an American Photographer come join the American Photographer Group I administer on Flickr and say hello.
About the Author
When Thomas Hawk isn’t taking pictures, he’s thinking about pictures and trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 processed and finished photos before he dies. You can find out more about Thomas on his website, and follow his work on SmugMug and, naturally, Flickr. This article was also published here and shared with permission.
We love it when our readers get in touch with us to share their stories. This article was contributed to DIYP by a member of our community. If you would like to contribute an article, please contact us here.
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161 responses to “Google Photos – Bait, meet Switch”
I hate google photos
Let’s not forget how Flickr, under Yahoo! promised a terabyte of storage, and then Smugmug came in and not only did away with that, but said it would permanently delete excess photos in any free user’s account. That is why I don’t rely on these guys to store my photos.
Flickr definitely did it worse for that
Picasa was such a wonderful program. It’s a damn shame that google acquired it and screwed it up.
Erik Fox I still use it actually.
https://media2.giphy.com/media/l4HodBpDmoMA5p9bG/giphy.gif https://media4.giphy.com/media/l2YWCPLrCIaNc9QT6/giphy.gif
I’m pretty mad at Google and I agree with the author’s “bait and switch” description. I suspect Google had a user profile in mind and then lost control to a minority of users taking a enormous amount of storage space. Instead of doing the work to root out these space hogs (not the rock band), Google just gave everyone the middle finger. You know, Google, being lazy and breaking promises probably counts as evil?
Not so much as bait and switch but cost. Can you imagine the amount of data they’re collecting, processing and storing? Cost of business such as that tends to always go up regardless of their Ad revenue they still have to turn a profit.
Cry more it might help you.
But seriously. Learn to read, Photos has always been about compressing your files from day one.
And since it automatically backs your photos up how is it that people have invested so much time into it? It’s not like you can tag pictures in Photos. It’s a very limited service from my point of view and is only really great as serving as an emergency copy of my photos in case all else goes to hell.
I’m sad I’m losing that but hey, it seems like my multiple TB worth of already backed up data will be fine.
You might have missed the superb search facility in Photos. Using Google’s AI, you can search for all sorts of things in your photos.
For example, I can search for all photos containing a specific face (my father, for example), or a place, or anything with dancing, a halloween theme, monkeys, beaches, landscapes, birthdays, bicycles, and so on.
That’s something that I would miss were I to move to a different provider.
Sir, I realize you can do Search in Photos. I also realize that you can now actually tag faces for when Photos makes a mistake.
But my comment is in relation to Bin Chicken decrying the hours of time people have invested into the service and how Photos tricked people into downgrading the image quality is evil…which is patently false.
But they are hardly perfect at it. So look at a bunch of pictures you took relatively close by to each other that are geo-tagged. Now do a search in Google Photos. Does it bring back ALL results that are geo-tagged to the same location? No, it does not. Again, considering this is all done with AI it does a REMARKABLE job! But it is hardly perfect (hey it’s free and you don’t have to spend time on it) but it’s usually hit or miss on what I actually wanted to see. But it works well enough as I can see the date other pictures were taken and then I can do a search by date which seems to always bring back what i need, especially once I extend the results.
In the end I LOVE Google Photos. As I stated in my comment I have TBs worth of data stored on it! I will continue to keep that for all my older photos that I have up to the switch over date as I LOVE features that like you mention are done automatically! I especially would miss the Memories feature…I honestly can’t imagine how people haven’t talked about that more as it does what is most important…make you remember those memories! Why else do we take pictures for? Anyway thanks for the discussion, be safe my friend.
So where are you going after the switch date if you don’t mind me asking?
Sure. That’s a great question!
I currently have a NAS housing made by Synology. It’s a 4 bay unit which allows for RAID 10. It’s populated with 4 4TB Ironwolf NAS drives by Seagate.
That unit serves as my main backup but I also use 2 8TB external HD that Costco puts on sale from time to time for about 120 bucks each. Those are attached only when I backup data and generally have very little up time so they should last a long time.
I’m still sad as heck though as Photos did everything for me and I didn’t have to think about it. I guess I’m just lazy about to and now I have to make sure I press a button lol.
Yes you can tag pictures with Albums. A photo can be in multiple albums. You can also type descriptions for photos, and add sections to albums.
That organization AFAIK is very hard (if possible at all) to automatically reproduce if you were to migrate to another service
You are correct sir. As you describe you can tag photos but as you state they must first be in an album. And then the “tagging” process itself is tedious to say the least as you must do so for each picture….unless the algorithm decides to include other pictures with it which is a problem itself.
So test it out. “Tag” a random picture in your album. Use a unique description you never have used before. Then do a search and see if you get your uniquely tagged picture. You most definitely will, but almost as certain you will get other pictures along with it. AND it’s not a choice…like result is your unique tag and then a…show me related results. It just does it like that by default.
Besides this isn’t even a problem as all your photos prior to June 2021 will remain and not cost you a cent to keep so you can keep them all as you created it for free. Now if you want all your pictures with albums kept on one service then you have a problem but honestly this same problem can crop it’s head up for ANY service.
The only real solution is to invest in your own NAS and run RAID 1 or better for redundancy. Personally I use a Synology NAS in RAID 10 with 4 TB drives. Cost was around $700 and i’m probably golden for the next 5 years minimum…probably longer since I don’t actually run it 24/7. Then use a program that is almost bullet proof in that it will not go away. Like Lightroom is probably never going away or will be compatible with whatever comes next from Adobe.
Yes, Photos only allows for very basic organization. No nested albums for example. Not sure what’s so hard about that, fotki.com had nested albums back in 2006.
Having control over your photos with a Synology is nice. How do you two-way sync them with your phone?
I currently use an app called Foldersynch for Android (I am unsure if it is available on iOS). While you can use a free version the adds are annoying and it’s worth the $5 to just get it and support the dev.
It’s pretty powerful with lots of options when synching…however these synchs must be manually initiated. I’ve heard you can use a program called Tasker but I have so far been happy enough to just do the synch manually. Especially since I already have Google Photos doing the backups for me :). Once that goes away I might look into getting Tasker so that it can be automated…or at least that’s what I have read.
I would assume you could also go old school and set up FTP but I’m too lazy to try that and gave my 5 bucks away lol.
Holy smokes we are both wrong for tagging. It’s not the easiest thing to do and must be done on a per picture basis but if you click into a picture in app, then swipe up. You can “Add description…” which is essentially tagging it!
I asked my friend about it as she uses Photos a bunch more than I do and she was like “DUH” LOL. Ah, nothing like conversation to learn things. Just thought I would share, have a good one my friend.
They’ve offered this since 2012 or 2011 I wouldn’t say 8 or 9 years is bait and switch.
Was hulu bait and switch After they stopped offering free access after five or six years?
I don’t believe Photos has been out that long. Are you thinking of another program?
Google fucked up our everything. I to once thought this is an unlimited photo storage service. But now they ditched us
Unless you have a pixel 1 it was never promised to be an unlimited original photos for life service.
No its also for google one devices till 1 june 2021. Do proper homework before replying buddy.
You don’t read very well either do you son?
I said unlimited original quality FOR LIFE
Only the pixel 1 has ever made THAT claim
Your ignorant response about Google one devices having it til June 1st 2021 has literally NOTHING to do with what I mentioned.
It’s free for life and orignal quality until they announced paid service after 1 june 2021. If they hadn’t said, it was also free for google one devices for free.
Please read his comment again and then the announcement from Google. They are not rescinding the offers to PIXEL phones. Either the Original picture quality for OG Pixel or unlimited High Quality for Pixel 2 to 5.
But don’t take my word on it. Research it.
Other than the photographers or editors I don’t think the normal user would be much miffed by this. It takes years for me to fill up the 15 gb storage anyway.
Solution for videos ?
If you don’t mind compressed video (which is basically what you had if you used Photos) you can currently upload and keep the videos Private in YouTube. The maximum amount of videos is currently unlimited.
Would I use it as a secondary source to upload videos? Sure. Just realize it’s compressed and that the terms can change. Personally I don’t see this changing since YouTube needs uploaders to create content to generate views which generates ad revenue. They might change it for private videos though…who knows.
Remember when gmail had the storage counter that just kept going up and up?
Very early days… I still remember the day my friend at work mentioned he had gotten in to Gmail and could invite me we did it right there on the cash register in circuit city.
I think it was like a couple weeks old maybe at that time.
The 1gb (and counting) storage was MASSIVE compared to the likes of Hotmail or yahoo.
People want to complain about Google but they really have been giving us a significant chunk of what would otherwise cost quite a bit without ever asking more from us than some adverts and tracking.
To see that it took 15 years for them to reach a point where they start charging for (some) of their services, of which many have and will remain paid services elsewhere In some cases, I don’t have a problem throwing them 100 bucks a year to keep them happy.
Just a note for the author – Google does let you delete just your Google Photos account. You do not need to delete your Gmail and entire Google Account.
But yes, your grievance is legitimate :(
Also, people like me with 5 TB of photos + videos backed up on Google Photos are probably the reason they are going away with the free storage for new uploads… ?
Why do you have 5TB of photos if it’s not for a business? No one needs that many pictures of their cat ;)
Photographers…I have 2 8tb wd red drives full.? The a7riii raw file size is about 82mb per photo.
Wouldn’t the free offer not even matter then considering it compresses the photos? I’m assuming you need all the photo data from the RAW file…
Sure, but from a Pixel device it doesn’t do any compression (what I do). You can buy an original Pixel for like $50 with 128GB storage and it gives you unlimited uploads to Google Photos through the phone forever – according to Google.
Hey! I’ve backed up every single photo since 1981! That’s a lot of photos. In glad i did it before the limit comes into play!
Lol it’s mainly video that takes up space. Have about 100K photos from travel + family since 1990, but 4K60 takes up hella storage. Literally like 45 GB/hr (and I have a Pixel, so it’s all original quality and still will be after June)
Most of those videos are drone footage (typically 30 min of straight footage per flight) and action camera footage. It all adds up if you never delete anything, as I do.
Obviously you don’t know my GF who randomly takes dozens of pictures and videos of her cats daily. When we go on trips it’s game over lol. I swear it’s people like my GF who made Google change the policy. I apologize to everyone for ruining it all.
Any photos already uploaded in “high” resolution before the change will continue to be free, and won’t count towards the quota. So, as long as you don’t delete and re-upload your 5TB of photos, they’re still fine.
Yes, Google might change its mind later. But as for trusting Google? Come on, it’s just a company, not someone with whom I’m having a romantic relationship. I’m hardly going to feel offended and get all emotional over a business decision!
Surely, I can’t complain that Google no longer wants to give me even more huge amounts of storage for free. No other company has come anywhere close to its generosity. Google gives me facilities free of charge (which I make very, very good use of), in exchange for being able to advertise to me. As long it serves me, I’ll use it, and when it ceases to serve me, I won’t. That’s just business.
I use paid backup facilities (not Google btw) for all my important data, including my photos, while I also use Google Photos for the convenience of accessing my photos on my phone.
If you don’t like Google’s decision, move elsewhere. I will move, if it ever comes to that point for me — each person’s decision depends on their unique circumstances.
… until Google will decide otherwise :)
Yes, well, if that happens, you need to decide whether you’ll stick with Google at its prices and features or go with a competitor at their prices and features. It’ll be a personal decision based on your own needs.
not going to give Google another chance… Moving now. Google has a very long trend with discontinuing product/services.
By the way, never considered Google Photos as a backup or storage – only sharing and collaboration space. For me their collaboration album was a killer feature… this will be missed.
Yep. And it doesn’t affect me anyways, since I have a Pixel device (except I won’t be able to upload from the computer anymore)
You do realize that all the photos you upload till June 2021 are still free and won’t be counted against the quota
True. But, by acknowledgement of that there wouldn’t be much of a article where you can complain. So, he’s ignoring that part.
I think everything you have so far will remain free.
It’s just photos and videos from June 2021 will count towards your quota.
You won’t lose what you already have on Google Photos
That’s right. They where pretty clear about that. But, this whole article seems a bit biased against Google and their offerings. So, I guess he’s not in Google’s demographic and he seems upset about it.
GOOGLE does have a bad track record of ending services that people actually liked.
Yes this whole article comes off as a scorned lover or someone who’s recently left one for a new and it’s all about trying to drag them through the mud aa hard as they can while bragging about why their better off now.
Google has never once said unlimited would be around forever or free and with the fact that they already cut off the unlimited full res sometime ago its only pretty obvious that there are time limits on these type of things.
Many many many new services find ways to entice customers to them that will eventually be turned off or for a fee. It’s very much common practice.
If Google went and told you after the fact that now they’ll start charging for every photo you ever uploaded over the 15gb then I would say yes u have a valid complaint, but to get so bent out of shape because Google wants a business model that’s got SOME potential to make a profit is just irrational.
Flickr is a completely different service to the ones Google offers and what Google is asking you to pay for stretches well beyond what you can buy with Flickr.
If all you care about is photos then maybe Flickr is a good fit but if you’re like me and wanting a cloud backup service that’s not just for photos but anything you want and you also want it tied intrinsically to your phone pc email etc then Google offer a decent value.
There are cheaper services or ones that promise “unlimited” storage but most come with caveats and not nearly as reliable as something running on Google hardware.
Next time you want to write an article like this maybe just stick to the facts and compare the services instead of throwing around an obvioauoy bias opinion and cherry picking “facts”.
Chill out dude, Google doesn’t need another fan boy. Try dealing with their customer service once or twice and yiu might see things a bit differently. We don’t all have rosy experiences with the company. Some people dislike them and have pretty good reasons why. Google photos being just one. Get some rest.
I mean I’ve dealt with google customer service several times over the last decade (seeing how every phone I’ve owned since 2011 was one of theirs) and I can honestly say I’ve never dealt with a better cell phone manufacturer who went above and beyond with helping me and replaced my phone SEVERAL times with ones significantly newer than the one I owned.
Not to mention multiple times they did this when I was completely outside of the warranty period that came with my phone.
They didn’t just do this for me either atleast half a dozen or so of my friends and family have had phones with them over the Kat decade and many of them as well have had Google offer them replacement phones well outside of warranty.
I know everyone’s experience is their own but within my circles those of us who have worked with google have had very little negative to say.
Sure they may kill a product you like and that may sting but it ain’t like they have directly slighted you or something.
There a tech company always looking it grow and expand projects are going to come and go.
Do you think I’m THAT mad that instead of a g+ page being my main contact for social media it is instead relying on something as God awful as Facebook or Twitter?
I wish Google could have nailed that but they didn’t I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
Late response but I did just see your reply I have been dealing with their Cloud Platform Billing “Team” as a victim of identity theft. What you have dealt with is a forward facing CS geared for the retail customer. We all expect them to be halfway decent. Personally, I have found that the CS Go Daddy operates is the best I have experienced, the worst being Vorizon. and then there is Google… It seems that Somebody who develops apps on this their cloud platform decided it best to pay his bill with money stolen from my bank account via debit card credentials. Convincing Google, who gave me erroneous information, didn’t read the facts of the case, killed the case 3 times in the period of 30 days, refused to even acknowledge questions I had asked multiple times, communicate in a very odd dialect, and then told me they solved everything for me only to find they only did half of what I told them needed to be done from the beginning. It’s going on two months and the issue isn’t fixed and this is ALL without speaking to a Google employee a single time. I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone but for Trump and a handful of his enablers.
We all have our own pathology’s that shape our current and future experiences, Karma.
You won’t lose what you already have on Google Photos until Google will decide otherwise :)
And how is that not true for ANY company?
True. It’s just there is a reoccurring pattern with Google discontinuing products…
What they seem to not understand is that Google photos is the pixels photo app. It is not going to be discontinued.
Google Play Music is, sorry, was the Pixel’s music app. Hangouts also comes built into Pixel.
It’s tough. What company offers the products Google offers, even at a price, that isn’t arguably just as evil? Apple is the only ecosystem that comes close for products and, um, no, their closed proprietary attitude makes that a nonstarter. Microsoft has some options, and I don’t hate them the way some do but I also don’t find them particularly trustworthy. That means I can rather spread my data, accounts, and services over a smattering of specialist companies with questionable intentions and futures… and still struggle on the email and maps front… or suck it up and let Google be a part of my life.
By the way, before you say that I (or the OP) are not part of Google’s demo, consider that we got in on lots of exciting tech back in the day, knowing (we thought) that it would get ironed out and become another great service from an innovative company with the actual resources to do something different and better. Unlike the author, I didn’t feel burned when a lot of the shorter lived projects didn’t work out, but the last few years have brought a halt to innovation and the increasing demise of several services that weren’t trial run projects but core services. A decade ago or even five years ago, I would absolutely have beat the drum for Stadia, or been trying to figure out how to get my kids on Google for Education, but now I am trying to figure out where to go when Gmail gets the ax (or becomes a paid service without a working option for me). Leaving Google isn’t an issue of revenge or necessarily anger, just of being prepared.
This is a well thought out answer. Kudos to you sir.
I also grew up with Google and love their services. i mean anyone who was first around when something we take for granted like Google Earth or Streeview came out was probably floored…not to mention just how good Google is for search. I remember using Copernic to do meta searches back in the day before Google was soon better than that by several factors.
But yes, their luster has dimmed quite a bit of recent and I wasn’t even moved by Stadia and just assumed it would be a soon to be DOA device. It’s also why I never bothered to get into Play Music or Hangouts. (I use PowerAmp and Textra) and why I don’t even use their launcher anymore (I use Nova). I tried YouTube Music and well, it’s terrible.
For me, I suck it up and let Google be part of my life. Maps, Drive, Gmail all still work very well for me and honestly…as long as I continue to use Google for search how much can I leave it out of my life anyway?
I didn’t realize they were discontinuing Photos.
They are. In June 2021 – it won’t be the same and noone will use it.
That is patently false.
Google will change from unlimited to 15 GB for any NEW data after June 2021.
Google Photos will continue on with paid tiers that range between 100GB to 30TB if I recall correctly.
As far as “nobody will use it” who cares? I have no vested interest in Alphabet/Google. I own Apple stock.
If you have an opinion that’s perfectly fine. Just don’t give false information. There are people on here who were legit worried about losing their pictures because people like you and the author of this article do not use facts.
Ok, will you continue using Google photos?
Yes, I have over a TB of data stored on there. I’ll use it until I get close to using up all my storage. Just as I’ve done the same with Google Drive and Gmail.
People pay to use cloud storage. I have lots of friends who are in the Apple ecosystem who pay for storage. So I’m sure there will be people who do the same with Photos.
I mean have you seen Apples photo app? As much as I’ve stated that Photos is kind of bare bones it looks like a fully featured app compared to the Apple equivalent.
But also like I’ve stated before. Get a NAS. More data and more private than any cloud service. Use RAID 1 or better. Use an External HD and have redundancy and you’ll never have to worry about paying one of these companies.
And to whoever down voted me. Let’s debate as to what about my previous comment is false. Or do you just dislike reality…if that’s the case don’t respond cause that’s your right.
Thank you for response.
Sure, people pay for cloud storage – no debate there (myself – Onedrive and backblaze b2). Local backups and storage infrastructure/solutions are also irrelevant for this discussion.
The application/service in question is “Google Photos”.
I agree, Google Photos is probably the best photo sharing platform today. I doubt they will stay in this position after June 2020. The whole point was “free lifetime storage for ALL YOUR PHOTOS AND VIDEOS in good enough quality” – this was their killer feature. Not anymore.
HI Rina,
I would agree that the “killer feature” for Photos was that unlimited high quality backup and I admit it will hurt once it’s gone because it was a reliable, easy way to ensure everything I took on my phone and camera got backed up nice and easy and sorted without me having to do any real work. It’s a huge loss for someone as lazy as I am lol.
Yep, same boat here. Sadly there is no real alternative (user base – everyone has gmail, ai indexing, easiness, collaboration albums) :( hopefully the demand will produce supply.
It’s only $1.99/month for 100 gig. You are not going to find any company that will give away a free resource forever. Especially as that resource gets more popular. II don’t think the cost is unreasonable.
I’ll continue to use Google Photos, because the search facility is so good. Although I have a full backup of all my photos on my computer and my other backups, only Google can let me search by just about any term.
Well it isn’t like they said it would be free forever.
The top tier storage isn’t $100. It’s $149.99 and it’s 30 Terabytes of storage. That’s an absolute fuck ton. No average use would need that much. It’s very reasonable.
$149.99 per month, not yearly…
I have 100 HD movies, not including 10,000 hq pics, music docs, and only used 700+ GB of my 2 TB for $10 a month
Just to be clear, it was my impression that already uploaded photos as of June 2021, uploaded in “high quality” (as opposed to original quality), would still not count towards your 15gb of free storage. So, it’s not like you will have to pay for your currently uploaded photos after they turn of the “unlimited” part. Only new pics and vids uploaded after the end date.
I was also burned by the loss of picasa, it was great, but most the issues OP has with Google photos are not typical for average users. I think the facial recognition has been working great, and readily identifies my tagged family members. This works great for live albums that the nest home hun can automatically cycle through.
Going forward, I’ll probably stop backing up videos through Google photos, and just do stills to stretch out my Google cloud storage capacity. Considering that each photo, uploaded in high quality, is about 1MB. And each second of 1080p video is 1mb, I can continue to get a nice rotation of family Photos on my nest home hub, and find a different back yo solution for video back ups. Probably backblaze.
100$/yer is by far not the top tier plan. I recently upgraded to exactly this one, for having 2TB of storage (for uncompressed photos of course), but there are also higher tiers. I would agree with the author, that 2TB might not be enough even for personal (excessive) use, but you can upgrade to 10TB, 20TB, 30TB whenever you want.
If they can keep their prices competitive I see no problem with using the then again I mostly upload JPG and use Adobe for some some RAW and TFF. After that SSD are very affordable these days for 4 terabytes
Why bother with ssd? You can get an multiple external 6 to 8 TB drives for the price of one 4 TB SSD.
Heck you could almost set up a NAS with WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf drives configured in RAID 1 or even better if you’re ultra paranoid about things.
If you go to their promoted page where they sell you storage it does not show any plan over 2TB. If in fact they offer one it’s not indicated on this page. https://one.google.com/about#upgrade
When I go to your link, I get offers for 10, 20 and 30TB. Maybe it’s because I already have the 2TB plan, so you can only see the bigger ones when you have that.
This is what I see when I go to the link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawkblog/50645943071/in/dateposted/ If I have to pay first to see the higher tier plans that’s confusing for the user. Even if I wanted to pay though I would not. What’s to say Google will not just pull the plug on Google photos entirely like they did with Picasa, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google+, etc? Google’s track record has not been good in this regard. I’m not really interested in putting money, time and energy into something that may not be here next year at all.
See where you go when Flickr gets bought out by insta/Facebook and just folds up as part of the blob.
Google has what you asked for Google also DOESN’T do what you say “hold your photos for ransom”.
The fact is you want to be on Flickr and that’s fine but I see the chance of a no Flickr world long before a no Google one…
And don’t come at me with google axing programs they are a company always trying to innovate and there will be many dead ends but the core services the ones that have the most use and the most ability to monitize aren’t going anywhere.
The fact is your signing up for drive when you do this akey backbone to all their services storage needs and there’s no way it’s going anywhere unless the company basically died as it is.
Your Google photos aren’t going anywhere and if you choose not to pay they’ll live on just fine like Google said they would. You’re burned cause Google stopped being a free place to dump an excessive amount of photos for you and now you want as close to that as possible cause you certainly wouldn’t want to have to pay for the insane amount of data you’re going to burden your provider with.
Not sure where my post went…it says pending. Anyway I put a link to a screen cap but I can just as well just tell you how to see the other tiers for Google One.
First off the Google One site is terrible and it does NOT show all the tiers available for whatever silly reason. Too see the all the available tiers you need to look in the app (at least it works for Android). In the app you will see tiers for 10, 20 and 30 TB at 49.99, 99.99 and 149.99 a month accordingly. If you peruse the comments on here there are people who are afraid that they are going to LOSE their pictures or that Google doesn’t have enough storage for them. Please correct your article to make it accurate to the facts. Nobody is (currently) going to lose any photos uploaded prior to June 2021…if you express your opinion that Google has a poor track record and recommend not using it that’s great. But have the facts in there and then express your opinion instead of making people worry. Do the right thing sir.
And if you want to be ethical about it you should disclaimer your article that you have friends that work at both SmugMug and Flickr. Otherwise known as direct competitors to Google Photos.
Yeah wtf. You can get up to 30 terabytes, at least in Sweden.
Wait a few years and Google will buy Flickr and “integrate it into their ecosystem for better user experience” (translated as they will kill it and charge you again) :-)
Remember my words, guys :-)
Don’t worry Flickr will probably sell out first to insta / Facebook long before that can happen.
Ironically, Google advertised Google photos with unlimited storage at the highest quality for all Nokia phones (since Pixels aren’t sold in our region)
Perhaps the author of this article should take a minute to reflect on how amazing it is that we can take and store photos digitally so easily and in such great quantities, rather than whining about where to store them and how much it costs in such an entitled, first world problems kind of way. If it’s data you really value you should be using a combination of cloud and your own physical storage across locations anyway.
What a lousy rant article that is biased and ill-informed.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph, due to the entire premise of the article being based on idiocy, with not the slightest knowledge of the terms of the changeover.
Nicely written piece, well done. I was in a similar situation, my personal Google email account (used for business) was getting close to 15TB. Luckily I’m self-employed so I got the 1TB of storage via Google and it’s a 100% TAX deductible. Still, doesn’t help with convenient photo viewing so I storage the majority of my photographs on Plex, hosting on a FreeNAS server.
Maybe if people curated their own photos to keep only the true “memories” rather than having their phones auto-backup every burst shot of their toddler and every rejected insta selfie, and then never looking at them again, Google wouldn’t be observing a massive revenue opportunity. People basically are doing the equivalent of hoarding their junk mail, and cloud storage ain’t free for the cloud provider. I work with the major cloud providers regularly and their revenue model is based on two things: data crossing their boundary, and compute resource time. The high paying customers need storage to support massive computing tasks, and even Google with its vast data centers is filling up its storage with blurry pics of Baby that you never bothered to delete before they got sucked into the Cloud.
Guilty as charged, BTW.
That’s an excellent point. I turned off my automatic backups. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I examine every single photo that I take, and keep only the very best, which I then upload to Google Photos. The rest are binned.
This is a very solid point! I tried to do just that but I know people out there that have thousands of pictures of nothing. You make a strong point
With Amazon prime you get unlimited full quality photo storage. Even stores RAW
I honestly believe this is the best storage solution if you just want pictures backed up. This is especially so if you actually use Amazon a fair bit as it’s current annual fee is $119. Granted, that fee has gone up in the past and most likely will in the future but it isn’t just unlimited storage as it also includes Prime shipping and perks such as video streaming.
Unfortunately I don’t use Amazon much and when I last did I didn’t care for the interface for the uploaded images…it may have improved as I haven’t been a Prime member in years so apologies if that is no longer the case.
I use amazon photo storage as a backup to my home NAS setup. It’s interface isn’t very good, but it’s excellent for a backup storage to a primary (local) storage.
Has all the albums, face recognition, editing etc. that google has. The annual fee is around 80$
Do you remember a couple of years ago, when Microsoft got into the free storage offering? It didn’t take them long at all to revoke it! Google has been extraordinary in keeping it available for so many years. I guess that it was only a matter of time before it had to come to an end, but at least it affects only new data, not old.
How long did you expect “free” to last?
“And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos you can now back up and store an unlimited, HQ photos and videos for free”
So based on Google’s words I would expect it to last “a lifetime”.
You’re reading too much into that my 86 year old great grandma who passed away 5 years ago uploaded all her photos (or a lifetime of memories).
It said you can backup a “lifetime of memories” not backup photos for your lifetime.
I like how when you say how wonderful Flickr is you conveniently ignore the fact that Flickr used to offer 1 terabyte of free storage (which is basically unlimited for the average user) and then reduced this to 1000 photos. Also remember when you wrote an article claiming how it was a fantastic move by Flickr, no faux outrage or talk of bait and switching then, despite the fact that Flickr announced that they would be deleting people’s photos that exceeded their new 1000 photo limit, something that Google have chosen not to do.
I’m trying out the Nikon Image Space as I get 20 GB for buying a camera (Coolpix P950, limited budget), but I might be better off setting up galleries under my own web hosting. I also started a picfair store, used a few photos and my calligraphy to offer cards on cafepress. I remember using photobucket before they changed.
I’ve been telling people not to trust cloud storage exclusively ever since MegaUpload, one of the largest file storage services on the Internet, closed overnight for no reason back in 2013. Google Photos, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive are great secondary backups, but not anything I’d rely on as the only place where my files are stored. This has come up time and time again. The Google Photos fiasco wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Never, ever, rely on a single backup for your data. For safety, have at least three separate and independent locations. I use two separate cloud storage providers (including Google Photos) and four separate offline units.
That sir is awesome. I tip my hat to you as I don’t bother with that many locations.
I use G-Drive
NAS
External HDD
But the NAS and External HDD are in the same physical location so if I have a fire I’m up the creek. Sadly I have no other secure location to keep my physical drives.
Can we not upload the pictures to our Google drive or does that count towards photo storage?
The free 15Gb storage is shared between Gmail, Drive, Photos, Keep, etc. So, they all count. The only times when storage isn’t counted are:
• Photos and videos loaded to photos in “High quality” prior to 31st May 2020.
• Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep — apart from uploaded material contained within, e.g. images.
Everything else counts, including your Gmail.
So you talk shit about Google for asking money to store your photos, and your better solution is to pay another company.
Why do you even spend time writing articles?
First, they messed up YouTube. It is getting worse and worse after every change. Next thing is Photos.
That is reason, why a lot of people now hates Google
I agree that YouTube is going downhill but that’s because it was leaps and bounds better than anything else out there and honestly, still is. That’ doesn’t excuse it going downhill just pointing out that it’s still generally the best option.
Google Photos is not for power users or even serious enthusiasts but it is great for what it is. Also I believe there is factually incorrect info that you provided though:
Sorting methods: By default photos are sorted by date/time taken. You can refine this using the search tool. The search tool allows you to sort by type of photo, face, location, date, day of week, key word, etc. While not 100% accurate the AI does a pretty decent job of it all.
Correcting wrongly recognized faces: If Photos incorrectly tags a face you can simply long press the picture than hit the three dots and select “Remove from results”. Again, this is from the Search section of the app
Adding non-Recognized faces: This can also be done. From the search feature the top will have People & Pets, click on the View all on the right hand side. Click on the three dots and select “Hide & show people” It will pull all faces that are in Photos. Now granted it may miss someone if their face isn’t very clear but if you know someone well enough that you want to search by their face…let’s be realistic…you have multiple clear pictures of their face. Anyway just click on the eye that is crossed over and now that face will be shown.
Correcting location: This is yes and no. It’s very tedious to do and must be done in a certain order. First off it can only be done in Chrome or perhaps a full browser not the app. You must find the photo in the Places album. Then you can click on it and select the three dots and choose “Edit Location”.
So most of your points about Photos and it’s features are incorrect or at least partially incorrect. Could the interface be better? SURE! but that’s not the same as “doesn’t have”. Also the one that you did get correct “folder structure” really isn’t very important for Photos. I get it, I am used to having my pictures in folders by year > Location/trip. And it was difficult for me not to have those folders in Photos but I got used to it very quickly. Of course that is my experience and your may differ.
Youtube premium is absolutely worth it have a family plan split between 6 people we all have our unlimited music that works great without google/nest smart speakers and Android phones as well as the fact that I haven’t seen an ad that wasnt a part of the actual filmed video by the creator in years.
.
Each of us gives the one main holder like 20 a year and never think about either of those things again.
People always want things to be free AND not be ad-ridden but the cold hard fact is someone’s gotta pay for this s*** and it’s one way or the other.
I agree with you. Youtube doesn’t have to be free service, but Google has become too greedy.
They will disable your Gmail service, if you fill storage with Google photos. You won’t receive any emails, and they will be lost. That is so stupid. Drive storage should have reserved storage space for mails, that has higher priority than other services.
You forgot to mention that you can keep all the photos already added and would have to pay for storage of any new photos or videos that are added after the date that this change takes effect, and that there are higher tier memory plans then what were indicated.. good job click bait article on not providing all details ?
..and you forgot to mention that Google includes mail & drive storage in the same bucket as photos now. So if somebody sends a large attachment to your gmail account, guess what? You’ve just lost space for some photos.
I mean last time I checked Gmail has a file limit of 25MB so… What large files are you receiving there buddy?
Well kiddo, some of us have had Gmail for a long while, so stuff accumulates over time. Right now “Google One” is telling me I am using 2GB of storage for Drive, 7GB for Gmail and 5GB for Photos.
Sir, may i strongly suggest you just create another google account.
It’s supper easy to do and Gmail can show all your G accounts inbox at once. Or separately if you wish. I have several so that I don’t have to use my main account for everything. I have one that is a “throw away account” that I use for things to sign-up for that I’m not sure about. I have another that I forward messages to for archive. I have another that I use solely for business communication.
And all those accounts also mean they have their own associated Drive and Photos account. It’s great once you get used to switching between accounts and honestly I almost never have to.
Now your making me want to go and check how much storage I have accumulated in the last 14+ years
You should have done better research. It’s clear you don’t like Google but Google one offers 30TB of storage for $149.99. so this entire article is based on something you were apparently to stupid to do the research on.
Could just get an OG Pixel, move your photos and videos to it, then upload to Photos. AFAIK, the original Pixel phone has lifetime unlimited full-res photo & video backup and any Pixel will still allow high-quality backups for free.
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en&oco=1
There is no good reason to trust anyone with your photos.
Those “free” sites should be used on a temporary basis only.
Remember when something is free, YOU are the product.
Just use Google One. Then you can get up to 30 terabytes I believe. If you’re willing to pay of course.
That’s correct. The highest tier on Google One is 30TB, but it’s a whopping £1440/annum (in the UK; I don’t know what it costs in the US). Their lowest non-free tier is 100GB, more than enough for most people I would imagine, at £16/annum.
Please send me how to get a free unlimited flicr account.
Thomas, also consider my predicament; the original pixel xl came with free unlimited videos 4k and full quality (not recompensed jpg) to Google photos. FOREVER when uploaded from that phone. I’d LOVE this to turn into a shitshow for Google and those consumers like me when this hits the fan. I’ll never buy a pixel again. I’ve already received money for a class action lawsuit from them just for this phone.
For me I’m stay light room classic
You are not paying $100 to Google for storage.
I pay 9.99 a month for 2 terabytes. It used to be 1 TB, but Google through in a 2nd for same price.
10 a month for 2 TB to store your movies, music, pics, docs, is the best deal out there.
… I still have 13 GB to go on my lifetime photo storage before I go – and I’m a LOT closer to that than when I signed up for my Google account back in the day.
I tried to read your article but I couldn’t finish it with the text constantly jumping around due to all the ads resizing on their own constantly.
The one thing I can say is you can delete faces from Google Photos. I do it all the time. You have to look it up to figure it out, but that does exist if you take the time to actually find out instead of just rant.
Thank God for ad guard dns on my router… I haven’t felt annoyed by ads on web pages in so long I almost forget that the very worst sites (like this) still plaster them everywhere.
Sounds whiny. On your existing phone, you’ll never lose the unlimited storage. So nothing was baited and switched. Except for your click bait title.
You are of course entitled to your own opinion.
However I have no idea what you are talking about with in regards to Gmail and the storage limits on it. It’s been part of the 15GB of a space for quite some time now.
As for the ads they serve up. That’s also been the case since…oh day 1.
A solution for those of you who like Gmail but are worried about your space:
– Just make another gmail account. The Gmail app can display ALL inbox emails or one at a time. Make as many accounts as you want…15GBs a pop. It’s also a GOOD idea to have multiple gmail accounts. I have different ones to do different things…like sign up for programs where it can be difficult to get yourself removed even when you click the unsubscribed think multiple times.
For those worried about your privacy when using Google Products.
– Look up the privacy policy of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They are mostly pretty good now because of certain new laws passed. I haven’t done an in depth look at them since those new laws were put in place earlier this year. But based on previous reviews I have done you’d be surprised with how it turned out. Especially based off the marketing one of the companies uses.
Google will eventually sunset your photos. They have gotten what they wanted from them. They have used all of our photos to create a massive database for facial recognition software. Check out a podcast we did about this earlier this week. Now is the time to buy your own HD. 5TB Hard drives are $95 on Amazon and Best Buy this weekend. These companies are just not dependable like the article says. @tooclevermafia https://anchor.fm/tooclevermafia/episodes/Google-Photos-Dead–No-More-Free-Unlimited-Storage–Full-Episode-Ep-1310-emqn7r/a>
Please be more specific when recommending back up storage. There are so many people who will go out and buy ONE hard drive and call it a day. That is a waiting for disaster!
Also do your research on the type of drive you are getting. SSD drives are more stable and have no moving parts. While they generally are safer than things with rotating parts they can and do fail.
All disk based HDD are also not created equally. Be wary of any drive utilizing Shingled Magentic Recording (SMR) it allows for greater storage capacity but also means the storage is generally slower and more dense. It’s also a newer technology so I prefer sticking with the more time tested recording method.
Also- If you’re going to buy yourself a HDD then consider how durable that drive is…not just cost. Check to see what their MTBF(mean time between failure) rating is. This can vary greatly depending on the what the drive you are buying is built for. Generally speaking it’s going to be Desktop < NAS < Enterprise. The cost for each drive will also go up for each type of drive assuming the same capacity. But thing is certain, always ensure your HD is properly cooled as heat is the main enemy of any component.
SSD’s fail, and all hard drive will fail eventually no matter what brand or type. I wasn’t getting into the rules of redundancy, or recommending anything particular, but simply pointing out you can’t trust cloud companies. Get a hard drive, back up your stuff, save money and your privacy.
And thank you that Too Clevermafia. But it doesn’t take too much work to point out very quickly the pros of certain media and the VERY important fact that too many people just have ONE backup…and uh…even more people don’t even have that.
Besides everything you just mentioned I covered in my comment regarding SSD and Hard Drives and that they will fail (hence once again for everyone…redundancy is king!)
But to add to your train of thought about simply point out you can’t trust cloud companies. I was simply pointing out that you cant just trust hard ware as well. Hence redundancy and research into what kind of hardware you are using. If you took that as an attack on your comment I do apologize as that was not the intent. I just want to make sure people don’t lose their data.
It’s cool I know how to download a backup and can easily move them someplace else or as you suggested keep them myself.
No ones expecting Google photos to out last the heat death of the universe.
Services come and services go.
I’m with you. They locked mugmail on me as well. My situation is I never signed up so to speak it was included in my android phone. With that in mind if you since to your Google account every picture you take, EVERY PICTURE, is auto uploaded to Google photos. So when my email was locked I was pissed to find out it was because of photos I never approved to be on a service I never signed up for. Now I have countless amount of work going through photos that i shouldn’t have to be doing. Oh and that goes to include any effing thumbnails any of your other apps store. Look out people, Google is putting your shit out there n you might not even know.
Google Photos is off by default and needs to be turned on…however if you used a Android device previously and had synch turned on for that device prior to your current phone then when you log into your new phone the synch will be on by default. It is also set so that backups only occur while on wifi and at the high quality setting so no pictures or videos you backup will count towards your storage unless you changed the default settings.
Search for Google Takeout. With that you can download ALL your photos in Google Photos in one go.
By default Photos only backs up your devices camera folder. If you want/need to check on that from the App > Click on your account (top right side)> Photos settings > Back up & synch > Back up device folders > From here all device folders other than the camera folder will show and have a toggle next to them.
Hope that helps.
Author, I have the 49.99/ 10TB a month plan. Do you not see that option? Google just got me on it a few months ago now they want me to do 99.99/mo for 20TB. Author, your website is terrible that you made a website and don’t even have the data right to complain properly. Unless maybe Google hasn’t shown you any other storage off because you live in an area with slow internet? Hmmmm
On June 2 2021, millions of people will get their Gmail account locked by Google due to storage limits… Google is acting like drug dealer…
You misunderstand the change. All photos prior to 1st June will continue to count as free unlimited storage — they won’t count towards the total. Only new uploads from that date will count. So, no one will suddenly find their account locked.
I’ll give you an example.
There are 2.5 billion active Android devices, some of them are already using 10-14GB storage in Google drive/gmail etc.
Video is one of these high-potential data-generating applications.
So, how many android devices will generate enough video data to through the storage over 15GB? Again keep in mind we are talking about population of 2.5 billion!
And I bet, not a 1% of them aware of this change.
I’ve already had an email from Google announcing its change. I’d be shocked if fewer than 1% of Google’s users would be aware of this change. Presumably, the vast majority can read.
ok probably more than 1% – the average email open rate is 17.8%(https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks) , so this is the potential maximum number of informed users… the other 82.2% or 1.6 BILLION people ignored this email – non of reader of this site or us commenting here are in this group of course – but they represent the majority of Google “customers”. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes for Google on June 2021.
My prediction, in the end (2022-3-4) they will sunset Google Photos altogether – they don’t need our pictures anymore.
I hope that you’re wrong about sunsetting the photos, because Google has the best search facility. If you’re right, well, we’ll just have to go with a different provider. Maybe, in time, AI for photo search will be sufficiently commonplace that most providers will offer it — or we can have it on our own devices.
agree, there is no real alternative to Google Photos now (free or paid). That’s why this announcement caused such an energetic discussion :)
and yes, I’m sure the demand will create alternative service…. The only constant is change…
Completely justified review! Have walked through similar lines of photo storage and publishing. Google has got this wicked intent of squeezing even high quality photos. They forgot all our free contributions to enrich Google maps, Google AI and Machine learning. Happily some big hat in Google has decided to milch money from Google photos. This has surely proved everyone to doubt Google’s goodwill in everything they do, for unseen ulterior motives, beginning user dependencies and then squeezing out revenue through their nose. Hope Google waked up reversing this mistake before mailing their own coffin!
This is exactly why I chose not to use this when it came out years back. I saw this coming a mile away! You can call it a bait and switch. I just call it a Google and switch. Google enjoys creating applications, getting its user base completely entrenched and then shit canning it or changing it drastically. G+, Google Music, Aleo, Hangouts, Inbox and the list goes on. What a joke.
I’ll just keep transferring all my 4K videos and 50 Megapixel photos to my OG Pixel and backing them up in original quality ? … I’m using about 13TB of yummy Google server space thus far ?
Maybe I’ve missed it, but, there doesnt seem to be any discussion on whether Google Photos was ever truly… Free.
Google has, for years enjoyed free refinement of.its.facial recognition algorithms thru all of us wanting to make sure we can search for dear and close ones just by name.. the facial recognition is crazy freaky good… And we all paid for it, brought in by the promise of free storage.
I will take the advice here and actually invest in a NAS, but, there is always the fear of HDD dying, getting lost,.or, just simply dropping it hard.to the floor!!! Cloud just makes it so.much.more secure…but, to.me, obnoxious behaviour like this by google simply means it will at some point go the same way as.companies like Nokia and Yahoo..once titans, now, not even a footnote…and therefore better to stay clear.from getting invested even more in their ecosystem.
Hit up takeout.google.com and pull your photos out.
They stopped because they are done with collecting enough photos for their face recognition app.. now they have all the data that matters to them.. it is like chew and through
This article……Yeesh.
Says you can’t delete photos account? Why would you need to. If you don’t need the photos you have stored in your photos account and you need storage, delete the photos. No need to delete the account. You’re splitting hairs here.
Then you go on to say you’ve used Flickr for years? So which is it…do you use Flickr or do you use Google photos?
I don’t like the change to Google photos either but what do you expect. Google has literally 1 billion users…storage demands add up.
I feel like this article is only trying to cast shade because it’s a popular topic and guaranteed to get eyeballs.
Google is trash. I always choose the alternative to their services now. As they discountinue and change their products for the worse.
I would have liked a little more lead time, but I never expected that this would stay free in perpetuity. As I understand it, everything that you have free up to a particular date will stay free. It is only new things that will cost you. Seems fair to me.
Clearly you’ve read something wrong as the top tier is 30TB at £120/month – so you really have more than 30TB of photos?
Actually, all your pics and videos upto the June 2021 deadline stay free, only media uploaded afterwards will start counting towards the 15 GB limit and require storage subscription.
Google, EA, Microsoft and other companies are all evil! If I ever run for President, I would force companies to serve their customers right or get shut down. #CorporationsSuckAss
Take a look at this project:
https://dev.to/fx/google-photos-open-source-alternative-with-react-native-80c