Only tangentially related but I just checked the Google Photos iOS app to see if any of mine are corrupted, and it won't even allow me to view my cloud photos without giving it full permission to all current photos on my device?! Isn't this against the app store policy? You can't deny me access to one feature just because I refuse to grant permissions to a different feature.<p>But because it's Google I'm sure they can break whatever rules they want as long as it doesn't involve trying to avoid Apple's 30% fees.
Nothing a little Stable Diffusion can't fix. Soon, digital memories will be just like real ones — slightly different every time we look back, but with no way of knowing what's changed
Once a year I select about 100 of my favourite pictures from my phone and have them printed and bound to a book. I suspect this is likely to be the only way my descendants will be able to see them.
I'm mostly curious in what compression algorithm results in artifacts like these, and assume somebody here on HN recognizes them? But we're 225 comments in (so far) and not a single answer.<p>They're absolutely nothing like block-based JPEG, that's for sure. When I inspect the images Google Photos serves me in my browser, it is serving up JPEG (from the response headers). But is this an artifact that shows up in AVIF or WebP? I wonder if mobile clients are getting a different encoding.<p>The only objective thing I notice is that the artifact lines tend to track a line of constant <i>brightness</i>, so you seem them appearing perpendicular to gradients of light and shade. And that each artifact line is black/dark on one side and white/light on the other -- and that the white edge seems to be in the direction of darkening, while the black is in the direction of lightening.<p>Someone here who works with modern image codecs must be able to hypothesize what part of encoding/decoding must be bugging out here?
My first thought was that Google as recompressed everyone's images to save space and corrupted them in the the process. Hopefully everyone gets their images restored.
I've been long considering switching my Google Photos library fully over to ente [0], of course alongside my existing monthly backups to local HDDs and an annual backup to a cloud server via borgbackup.<p>With every passing week, every Google fuck up like this and with ente's great pace of development, I draw myself nearer and nearer to the precipice of full switchover. I will soon be having my last Google Takeout.<p>[0]: <a href="https://ente.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/</a>
You know how the mantra in the crypto community is "not your wallet, not your coins?" This applies to this situation. Once you trust Google with your bits, don't be surprised when they modify them without telling you.
This is an indication that Google underestimates the value of data stored by users.<p>E.g. if this was about storing monetary data, this would never have happened.
I had noticed one of the images in my Google Photos account seemingly not showing up. It was very noticeable because it was one of the "People" images in my Photos account. It's a bit concerning that a photo storage service seemingly can't maintain the integrity of their data. Makes me wonder about what other data issues there are, lurking in the depths of Google Drive...
For context, I know this is a display issue and not a storage issue and you can get your originals out via Takeout.<p>That being said my photos are the only digital files I really care about not losing. My photos and videos from my phone get backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive and Amazon’s photo storage that comes with Prime.<p>My videos get backed up to all of the above except Amazon’s storage.
I find the idea of old photo/data degradation strangely comforting. Even digital data seems to be unable to escape the law of entropy (don't mention the black holes).
On another note; if corrupting data/photos was a wide occurrence now wouldn't we have heard about it in a big way?
Yikes, this is kind of scary. Google Photos is the only place to find some of my older photos. What’s the easiest way to download my entire library for backup on a physical drive?
Has there been any progress on self hosted alternatives to Google Photos in the past couple of years? Last time I checked there was great systems for individuals, but the main reason why I use Google Photos is so I can have shared albums with family & friends where anyone can add their photos.
IMO the best place to put photos, at least the master copies is in AWS S3. It is both reliable and redundant, and they don’t mess with your data. They charge you every month for storing it, and again for accessing it, but that is it.<p>Use anything else you want for day to day usage - Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, Google Drive, etc. whatever fits your budget and needs. But sleep safe knowing your data has a backup.<p>Same thing with YouTube - you never know when Google might decide to wipe out your channel, and if they do you’ll never know why they did it, and you’ll have no recourse after they have done it. There are plenty of stories on HN where this has happened. So the master copy of all your videos should be in AWS so you can start again if you need to. IMO.
I keep intending to launch a service that downloads cloud data and sends it to you on an SD card.<p>I hope to fix up my prototype and launch it next year.<p><a href="https://www.clonecamel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.clonecamel.com/</a><p>If anyone knows of a quality source of bulk SD cards or flash drives in high capacity please let me know.
Well this is why I've finally gotten a Synology NAS.<p>It's been great so far although I do need to figure out why it powers on all the time (probably SMB shenanigans).<p>But the main thing I got it for is to set up freezing folders full of RAWs I've taken to back-up to Glacier.
One of the best ways to deal with Google customer service is to simply send in a support case and immediately dispute the credit card charge. I’ve done this with Youtube TV several times (wrong recording, live the doesn’t work, their location check locked me out) and got free months of service.<p>Don’t bother getting all frustrated in a big support thread. The engineers who caused these bugs DO NOT care about you. They are way way too busy solving dynamic programming problems. Chargebacks are the most effective tool here.
If you don't hold it yourself, you <i>DO NOT OWN IT</i>.<p>I had a disaster when using DropBox way back around 2011. Ever since then I have been responsible for storing and backing up my own files. <i>Nobody</i> else gets to have them in their 'safe'-keeping.
This is normal. I found out that Google Photos has limited reliability. My 2007 photo was garbaged into a lower resolution. I have since recovered from the original drive. Back then Google Photos gave an option to store in lower res but still sufficient high quality or original quality. Don't trust either. Lesson: backup to your media you own or print it.