Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this.<p>This is not the usual &quot;Google kills product&quot;, it&#x27;s the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for (&quot;Just give me something that does A B C and doesn&#x27;t show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!&quot;, well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).<p>Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the &quot;free shit&quot; product model for two reasons—<p>[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it&#x27;s more likely to be killed if it doesn&#x27;t get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.<p>[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.

Time to dust off my side project, Timeliner [1] which downloads your Google Photos (and other content from various services) and indexes them in a local SQLite DB.<p>Then after backing them up locally, I won&#x27;t feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you&#x27;re interested!<p>(One major &quot;oof&quot; is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There&#x27;s discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mholt&#x2F;timeliner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mholt&#x2F;timeliner</a>

I pay for Google Photos and you should too if you care about your photos.<p>I&#x27;ve used Dropbox, Apple Photos and Google Photos.<p>Google Photos is hands down the best photo application for individuals. Mostly because its face&#x2F;object&#x2F;place&#x2F;whatever recognition is the best of its kind.<p>Dropbox: they are ignoring the photos needs from users. They focus on &quot;enterprise cloud storage&quot; and &quot;workplace sharing&quot;.<p>Apple: I love the privacy features of Apple, but what I&#x27;ve come to realize is that, with a very big photo library, no iPhone or Macbook can analyze them all and share the results with all my devices. Only a server can analyze 10,000+ pictures, identify faces, organize by date. All in a slick and fast UI.<p>There&#x27;s definitely space for Google Photos competitors. Build a product that automatically triage photos, using and sometimes guessing the exif data. With face identification, location identification, automatically creating albums from photos batches (like if you take 40 photos in 2 days).<p>Managing our online pictures will be extremely important in the future (it is now), because we take more and more of them.

Sad as I am to see &quot;unlimited&quot; go away, this is probably the best way to do it:<p>* Grandfathering existing photos means I don&#x27;t have to worry about going back and deleting objects or getting an sudden bump in cost.<p>* 15 GB is pretty generous... iCloud includes 5GB for free.<p>* $2&#x2F;month isn&#x27;t a huge jump to the next level of storage.

&gt; If you have a Pixel 1-5, photos uploaded from that device won’t be impacted. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality from that device will continue to be exempt from this change, even after June 1, 2021.<p>All good things come to an end, but at least they still honor the promise they made with the Pixel phones.

I guess the free lunch is finally over.<p>For ~15 years (since the launch of GMail) Google has differentiated itself on storage. Both in terms of products offerings and in terms of company image.<p>To me it signifies a change in the market. They don&#x27;t feel like they currently need to compete with Apple or Microsoft on any of these fronts right now. The market is pretty stable and there are more battlefields ahead. So time to apply some levers at the points where everyone else is charging (iCloud) and get ready for the next big consumer adoption battle.<p>It makes sense right now but changes the playing field enough that some (old) disruption opportunities might start to open themselves up (again). I guess Google doesn&#x27;t feel like those are a threat any more or right now tho&#x27;.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what happens next. Bandwidth between handsets&#x2F;eyeballs and datacenters is possibly one of the next most important costs and Google has a good story there. Lots of peering, a good network, and control of the software on both ends, so they are well positioned to make the most cost-effective use of that bandwidth.

Has anyone found a good family friendly alternative? In particular I would really like to:<p>- Pay for the service (sustainable&#x2F;trustworthy business model)<p>- Be able to very tightly control access to albums as I really don&#x27;t want kid photos ending up on facebook or similar due to crazy aunt kathy (in google photos anyone with access can add anyone else and until recently there was no way to remove people)<p>- Ability to require a full&#x2F;proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security)<p>- Confirmed and well-tested backup as a feature (sha1 of the backup matches my local, original copy, no stripping of the geo data!)<p>- Decent ios and android clients that can auto backup all photos on the device

&gt; Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded.<p>I found this snippet pretty amazing to think about, it&#x27;s a scale I&#x27;ve never operated at or planned for. And probably most of us never will.<p>I wonder what kind of infrastructure, software, bandwidth, and cost considerations (aside from this blog post) they have to contend with.

Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad &quot;Backup and Sync&quot; program for MacOS, which over the years has added <i>thousands</i> of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I&#x27;m happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.

I am actually very much in favor of paying for what I use.<p>Truth is that upfront payment for storage and convenience is a much more sustainable model than subsidizing this through spyware and other services. Also given the amount of storage needed his seems pretty inevitable.

I have Google One for $20&#x2F;yr and iCloud for $12&#x2F;yr and they provide sufficient value. Google Photos is the best photo app there is. It really takes advantage of Google&#x27;s skill with hard CS problems and their platform advantage.<p>The search is unparalleled. The Google Location History integration is beautiful.<p>Just today I used it to find a dish I ate in a place years ago by finding the place in Location History and clicking through to the photo of the dish that was <i>integrated</i> into the view. Jesus Christ. This was the promise of AI assistants. It is here.

&gt; Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used.<p>15 gigs of photos is nothing.<p>&gt; Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.<p>Gak. Randomly deleting your photos. No way I&#x27;m relying on cloud storage.<p>I&#x27;m a very long term investor. I received a letter a few months ago from a mutual fund, saying they hadn&#x27;t heard from me in a few years and were going to hand my account over to the government if they didn&#x27;t hear from me soon.<p>Two years is nothing when you&#x27;re my age. I have piles on the floor in my office that need attending to that have been there 5-10 years.

I think Google is missing a clear opportunity to compete with Instagram and the like. Google Photos is nearly default on just about every new and recent android phone in the world and its &quot;partner&quot; sharing feature (limited to just 1 partner) resembles a private IG-like share experience.<p>Imagine having that breadth of user base already active in your app but not simply adding a public network around it (with adequate privacy controls). Add a few ads here and there and it could pay for itself...

Google is 100% running out of space.<p>Google Photos no longer unlimited - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;21560810&#x2F;google-photos-unlimited-cap-free-uploads-15gb-ending" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;21560810&#x2F;google-photos-u...</a><p>GSuite no longer unlimited - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-workspace-drive-storage-limits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-workspace-drive-sto...</a><p>Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days. Before, it stored till you perma deleted - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;drive-trash-auto-delete-30-days.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;drive-trash-aut...</a><p>Google Docs to be counted as storage space. it was unlimited for all before - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;photos&#x2F;storage-policy-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;photos&#x2F;storage-policy-update&#x2F;</a><p>Guess the cloud&#x27;s gonna start filling up soon eh.

Well, luckily Google One is quite cheap. You can get 100 GB for 20 euro per year to get started and even the 2 TB plan is cheaper than for example Dropbox and iCloud when paid annually.

Personally I like this new direction Google is going. I am someone who much prefers to pay a few bucks a month over having my data used for ad targeting. Ideally I&#x27;d like to see them make all Google platforms ad-free for Google One subscribers.

I wonder if they will ever fix the problem when you actually do upgrade to google one, there is no way to make your old photos go from &quot;high quality&quot; to &quot;full res&quot; without bringing them on to a desktop device, uploading them a second time, and often getting duplicates.<p>I&#x27;m a paying customer and I can&#x27;t even back up my old photos in full res that are on my device without a TON of work.

I don&#x27;t think this change is so bad in isolation, but one thing I&#x27;m beginning to feel is that Google are removing things &amp; changing propositions so much that at any point in my life, I&#x27;m trying to adapt to their newest whim on at least one of their products.<p>I had purchased a bit of music through Google Music and it was nice. I kept it downloaded on my device, played it whenever I wanted, and it integrated nicely with Google Assistant, as promised. This year, Google decided to migrate all that into YouTube Music. I thought that wouldn&#x27;t be a problem; just a new name and change of UI, surely? Well, YouTube Music is incessant about nagging you to subscribe. Unless you subscribe it doesn&#x27;t work well with assistant and won&#x27;t play without the app open. I only wanted to listen to the music I had already purchased on the same terms on which I had purchased it, though. Luckily, it was just a handful or so of music and they&#x27;ve agreed to refund it. But now I&#x27;m still in the situation where I will be looking for something to replace the gap. This is just one example.<p>At some point, I&#x27;m not going to be bothering with Google products anymore. I already feel a moderate bias against using their stuff. I&#x27;m switching from Google Cloud to Vercel, for example. I just hope Vercel doesn&#x27;t get acquired by Google.<p>I haven&#x27;t yet done anything about Gmail, Drive, or Photos, but I feel a bit insecure about such important stuff currently being in Google&#x27;s hands.

I&#x27;ve found Microsoft Office to be the best deal for online storage. $70&#x2F;year gets you a bunch of useful apps and 1TB of storage, or $100 year provides 1TB for up to 6 accounts. Nothing else seems to come close.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Nice of them to announce so far in advance and let existing content stay free for now, and that should help them avoid an abrupt exodus.<p>This seems like a big win for Apple though, especially with their new focus on services. As with other apps like maps, they’ve by now basically caught up with Google who had started off with a huge lead. When Google photos first launched with facial and object recognition and ability to search photos without ever tagging them, it was pretty incredible but now that’s basically table stakes.<p>For any iPhone and Mac users who haven’t been paying specifically for cloud photo storage and will now need to, I don’t really see much reason to stick with google photos over the native solution using iCloud or Apple One. I’m sure that’s what I’ll do eventually.

Pretty upset about this. I added the app to my mothers phone as it auto backs up everything at high enough quality for her at no cost. Trying to explain to a 65 year old woman with no computing skill how to set up a recurring subscription for online photo storage is going to be a tough ask.

We are altering the deal. Pray we don&#x27;t alter it any further.

Is there another photo hosting service, which has such a great face recognition (including videos), and flexible search by time, location, people in photos, etc.? I made Google Photos my primary, because we accumulate thousands and thousands of photos, so, no other service I know offers such quality search. But maybe I&#x27;m wrong.

Google Photos still feels like the safest way to keep an archive of thousands of images across my family, agnostic to devices. I’d rather have High Quality backups than losing the originals on some outdated hard drives.<p>The ONLY thing I can’t believe Google Photos doesn’t have is duplicate detection. Even a poor one would do wonders.

The search function in Google photos is really the main factor why I&#x27;d want to continue using it. I wish there were a photo search index I could run on my own hdd.

Just thinking about Google&#x27;s claims that it may [for which I read &quot;will&quot;] also start deleting data from inactive accounts:<p>I would assume that, as well as their &#x27;live&#x27; storage of user data in their data centres full of hard drives, with whatever RAID type redundancy they use there, Google also has longer term archived backups which I again assume would probably be tape based. So, would the data from a dormant account actually be deleted? I can hardly see Google digging through their tape archives to delete cold-stored data from dead accounts. It would be so much hassle and be more costly than just leaving it as is.<p>It could very well be the same situation with actual &#x27;live&#x27; data in data centre, belonging to dormant accounts.<p>Say you have a multi-TB hard drive in a data centre somewhere and, on that multi-TB drive, you have one or two users whose accounts are deemed to be now dormant. Would it really be worth Google&#x27;s while to delete those one or two users&#x27; &#x27;stuff&#x27;?<p>OK. the data savings would add up with thousands of inactive accounts, spread across data centres. But if all that freed up space is in relatively tiny amounts, dotted around thousands of hard drives, it would be a nightmare to manage and keep track of. Unless Google has some kind of system in place which is constantly shuffling data around to effectively &#x27;de-frag&#x27; entire data centres?

I am what you would describe as a “privacy conscious person” so over time I’ve been moving out of Google products.<p>Instead of making me pay for additional storage [1], I wish I could pay for the ability to use all of Google’s products with increased privacy (no tracking, no reading my emails, ability to turn off YouTube recommendations etc.). I would pay for that because the products themselves are great.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about</a>

My main issue with going from a free service to paying for storage isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s not free anymore. It&#x27;s that, at some point in the future, I would run out of storage and I&#x27;d need to pay more per month. I&#x27;m only good at estimating how many GBs of photos I produce per month. Also, what if I accumulate more than 2TB of photos? I don&#x27;t even see an option to upgrade past that.<p>It&#x27;s very hard for me (and many other people) to estimate how many GBs of photos I would produce total because (1) I don&#x27;t know what camera technology would be like in a few years and (2) I don&#x27;t know how many years I will be alive and producing photos for.<p>I know that they can&#x27;t just our old uploads free forever, but I&#x27;d like the product framing to adapt to my mental model rather than the other way around. They can still price it such that it&#x27;s profitable for them.<p>Another issue I have is vendor lock-in. Sure, I can take my data out of Google Photos, but I can&#x27;t take my data out for 5 years, and at some later point decide to use it again, and have it be in exactly the same state as it was before. A lot of metadata (edits, social interactions like comments&#x2F;shared album data) would be lost. To me, these &quot;non-exportable features&quot; almost feel like ads, since they entice people to modify their content in ways that can only be shown to them in the future if they continuously pay for the service.<p>I think the Facebook&#x2F;Google Data Transfer project would help this second issue to some extent. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.fb.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;security&#x2F;data-transfer-project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.fb.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;security&#x2F;data-transfer...</a>

Googler here but opinions are (obviously) my own.<p>I&#x27;ve got a few issues with this but my biggest one is the combination of Drive&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;Gmail storage with my Photos quota.<p>I have 18GB of that stuff ... so I&#x27;m done before I take a single photo. If I had a 15GB runway starting on June 2021 that&#x27;s plenty of time to consider my options. Now I have no runway, gotta start researching how to move a decade of photos.

Reading the comments, I realize many seem to think that the Unlimited High-Res was their original photos. It is a high-res version but not your original photo resolution. I always shoot at the highest available resolution where I can (along with RAW, when possible).<p>For those, worrying about Google banning your account and losing your photos, here is how I do mine. Still not the best but hope to inspire others.<p>1. Our family shoots mostly with iPhone, and DSLRs and the first point of consumption are Apple Photos.<p>2. I have Google Drive Backup to back up the &quot;original&quot; resolution photos to Google Photos. This helps to share with friends, families, and others who are pretty much not on the Apple Ecosystem. This also serves as my second backup and I like the cute things that the Google Photos team does to the photos. A lot of fun moments for the family.<p>3. Besides the digital house-keeping that I quickly do every Month, I do a checklist of Backups, trimming, minimizing, etc, every year (usually in JAN). Here the Photos from Apple Photos are exported to the yearly folder but I&#x27;m not happy that the exported photos pretty much have scrambled metadata. I&#x27;m fine for now, as this is my last resort if the above two sources kinda die.<p>This is not yet something that I&#x27;m happy about and will continue to look for something in the lines of every tool (such as Apple Photos, Google Photos, and others) being just clients to a primary source available on my local NAS and somewhere online (with backup replicas -- cloud such as AWS, Wasabi + elsewhere).<p>On a personal note, I do skip lunches once a while each month to cover up for the 2TB Google One and Apple One Family plans, which I&#x27;m fast running out too. That lunch-skipping is good for health and pays for the monthly plans.

They don&#x27;t actually want peoples data for free any longer so they are failing at capitalising it which could mean a bump on the road for big data but maybe it&#x27;s the real deal and they are saturated with what they can deal with and hence more data becomes a cost to them going forward.<p>Could also mean that the big G has reached it&#x27;s max market valuation in abstract terms..!

Didn’t Dropbox do something similar but at the time (2011) I believe, it was 2gb but unlimited.<p>Still, to this day in 2020, I receive quarterly emails of them threatening to close my account (next month they say)...and not provide access, which is fine because... I went over their limit with half .mic 4K movie blob of Avatar (or blue ray or whatever), since my ps3 ran out of space.

I wonder how much typical account uses free storage. I was recently helping a family member troubleshoot their over quota Google Photo backup, originally setup for full quality, since I thought 15GB was enough for life time. Was surprised to find they shot close to 60GB worth random shit in the last few years after putting them on my One family circle. I guess explosion in camera sensors and high res recording is making a lot of croft.<p>I think Google should start throwing some deduplication photos in Google Feeds everyday, help them clear up some space and help users clear up their gallery which is often filled with so much useless shit that it&#x27;s hard to use. There&#x27;s something about physical film where each shot was precious and developing photo came with it&#x27;s own sorting &#x2F; curation process. Online photo are pretty tedious viewing experience compared to physical albums, I know a lot of people who practice inbox zero but virtually no one who keeps their online photos kempt.

I would be happy to pay up if I could be sure that my account is safe at Google. I am mentioning this because of multiple reports of people who saw their account being closed because of an unnamed TOS violation, and no way to get it back.<p>The people working at Google might not be able&#x2F;allowed to comment on this, although I would appreciate their view on this issue.

Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?

Can&#x27;t complain for the end of free service.<p>Now, am i the only one who wished that, rather than just catalogue and organized bazillion photos, photo storage services would actually help us curate our own photos?<p>At some point I wish there was a service that would help me narrow my 30K+ photos down to maybe 1000 o so.

For those who are considering or already self-hosting, I&#x27;m genuinely curious whether it&#x27;s worth the time&#x2F;effort vs privacy comfort of mind? Google One prices seem reasonable (except the lack of middle tiers). Even the price aside, they also claim to not use data for ad targeting, and I personally haven&#x27;t seen ads based on my media content (but obviously I&#x27;m just one anecdote).<p>I feel like the only real concern around Google is accidentally violating some obscure policy, and getting perma-locked out. Then why not stay on Google Photos in addition to duplicating it somewhere else, instead or moving away completely. Haven&#x27;t really looked elsewhere in depth, but nothing else seems to offer even close to the polish and especially search functionality.

If you&#x27;re interested in self hosting and willing to put in a bit of work to collect data from your online presence for archival, take a look at Perkeep (previously known as Calimstore) [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;</a>

I only use them because it&#x27;s free. Sure, the creations are cute (especially the kids ones). But if I&#x27;m going to have to start paying <i>someone</i>, I&#x27;m afraid it won&#x27;t be them. I suspect I&#x27;m not the only one making that calculation either.

I&#x27;m happy to see business models for services I&#x27;ve come to rely on emerge from the shadows, notably with Google, Spotify, and various news sources. I would like assurances that direct payments imply a reasonable expectation of data privacy however.

Looking at the talk about various ways to downlod Google Photos,I use this for regular backups <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gilesknap&#x2F;gphotos-sync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gilesknap&#x2F;gphotos-sync</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-02-04&#x2F;alphabet-profit-margins-slide-as-google-costs-march-upwards" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-02-04&#x2F;alphabet-...</a> probably has something to do with decreasing profit margins, or they are projecting a bad recession where firms will expend less on advertising. Also they don&#x27;t actually need to buy the good will of us with free bytes (we are just clicking on adds &amp; feeding the machine with data). They own the market, so why should they?

I read that as: &quot;Our database for learning any AI model we&#x27;d like to have has grown big enough, so we no longer have use for you being the product. Pay us to be able to grow dataset.&quot; ;-)

Pay Google for privilege to have your data harvested? No thanks, I left Google Photos years ago when I could understand they provided something &quot;for free&quot; in exchange for your data, but even pay them for this? What a joke.<p>I am sure there will pop up companies happy to harvest your data for free.<p>Personally I just do multiple physical backups, it ain&#x27;t so convenient, but I have control over my data.<p>Btw. there is Yandex Disk for people who don&#x27;t wanna pay for OneDrive or Amazon Photos. For cold storage is maybe cheapest Backblaze.

Any open source software for displaying and organizing photos as albums?<p>I already take care of the uploading (I have a big nextcloud server with multiple copies), however there is no affordance provided for collecting albums and sharing them.<p>And just to clarify, an album to me it&#x27;s just a list of paths to photos and the ability to generate password protected links that I can share with family members. Oh, right, the photos shared through this way should hide all exif tags to prevent leakage.

Someone at Google gave me a gmail invite many years before it was public and that was the start, for me, of using their services.<p>I find paid for Google services much better. Google WorkGroups&#x2F;GSuite provides CloudSearch. Buying books and movies is easy and avoids having everything in one Amazon account. It is easy enough to control how much information they collect.<p>I would like it if Twitter and other services I use offered paid accounts with some privacy guarantees and no advertising.

I wonder if this is antitrust related? Offering services for free just because you have excess cash certainly prevents competitors whose only business is photo-related.

Wow. What a disappointment.<p>I started saving my photos with Google for two reasons: - I’m an iPhone user and didn’t want a single company to have access to all my assets, - it was free and this compensated for the discomfort of using a non-native app.<p>Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers. Since Apple tries to rebrand itself this way, I would expect more former customers to go there.

This is going to be a problem in the future.<p>Cameras keep getting better outputting bigger and bigger video and photo files.<p>Big percentage of the population has Google Photos as their single point of backup.<p>I don&#x27;t like Googles threat of login each 2 years or we nuke everything.<p>People could be in coma, prison, religious sects etc for longer than 2 years without internet connection.<p>Lot&#x27;s of people living in exotic areas don&#x27;t have regular internet connection as well.

What really pisses me about google is that they&#x27;re a company where the user is the product AND they pretend to have users pay them.<p>If a company puts their users first, I can understand why they&#x27;d charge them; that&#x27;s their business model.<p>But for a company with interests so orthogonal to their users, it just amazes me that they decide to charge -- and also, that their users would be willing to pay.

I hit that limit a few years ago. With kids you take a lot more photos. It cost me something like $2.99 a month for 100GB on Google

If I need to pay to upload new photos, I would choose a cloud service based on the features it provides.<p>Of course I can keep the old photos in Google Photo and upload new photos to other cloud service, but I would lose the ability to search &quot;all&quot; photo in a single place.<p>Now, I just want to have a function to download all photos from Google Photo and consider switching to others.

I think it is OK. The problem is how they did not predict they would not be able to keep the product as is. So a lot of people created a dependency on it. The app itself will need to change. It is now the official photo backup app. Now it will have to come by default disabled or it will incur costs. Also, it should be tied to better Google One offerings.

&quot;... more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded&quot;<p>So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m &#x2F; month in storage and a mere $140k &#x2F; month growth. (And Google&#x27;s internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2... the discounts they offer to public Google Cloud customers per petabyte are pretty big).<p>In comparison, Facebook is getting hit with more than 10PB of photos per month. YouTube surely dwarfs all of that. (Google Photos may be harder to monetize, but traffic is also way way lower).<p>Surely Google is being exceptionally stingy with this move to charging for Google Photos. Google Cloud itself has many many contracts that are north of $20m per month. This move is likely less of &quot;the gains to ad targeting from private photos fell short even during the pandemic ad surge&quot; and more of &quot;the YouTube price hike went swimmingly, how can we gouge more for services now that the pandemic has shown people will pay?&quot; Also probably with a sprinkle of &quot;we&#x27;re starting to have high employee turnover, how can we make sure the product doesn&#x27;t become a zombie risk in 5 years?&quot;

I&#x27;m confused.. it was unlimited before? I received an email saying my google drive quota (16.5 of 17gb) was reaching its limits and I needed to buy google one to go over that. It looked like Photos was taking up the most space and I assumed that was included in the google drive cap. Did they just get me to sign up earlier than I needed to?

Hell, I guess this was doomed to happen, but I did not think of it when I transitioned to Google Photos. Dropbox has been pretty bad for syncing photos from my device, so I started using both, now I&#x27;m thinking that maybe I should just use some Apple service for it since I only own Apple devices. What do people use to sync their photos?

I&#x27;m the cofounder of Lomorage, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lomorage.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lomorage.com</a>, we believe the digital assets should be taken care by ourselves, store locally, backup locally, that is the primary, and cloud backup is the tertiary backup, a good complementary, the price of existing cloud storage is too high, and some of the companies(Shoebox, Canon Irista) doing the business gradually shutdown the services, this is a money losing business, it’s not the efficient way to manage huge amount of assets centralized (flicker CEO’s open letter sent last year confirmed this), they have to either make it more expensive, or make you the product. Cloud service is convenient for the user, people don’t need to buy expensive hardware, don’t need to be the professionals to maintain that, don’t need to worry about the energy fee to keep it run 24x7, but things are changing, single board computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more energy efficient, storage are getting cheaper with larger capacity, software are getting more intelligent, people are having more and more concerns about the privacy, it’s now viable to host the Photo service, your private cloud, at your own place.

Do they extract data from your photos (meta + image recognition) for your user ad targeting profile (and probably the other people in your photos). I always assumed that was the tradeoff in using them to store photos for &#x27;free&#x27;. If they do extract data, I wouldn&#x27;t expect them to stop once they start charging either.

Flickr pro is $5 a month (billed annually) for unlimited original quality storage.<p>Google photos is $3 for 200GB...$10 a month for 2 TB. So if you have more than 200GB, Flickr is the way to go.<p>Additionally, I don&#x27;t see any mention of Google privacy, but I&#x27;m pretty confident Flickr doesn&#x27;t mine my data for advertisers.

Im fine for paying for Google photos IF: Google signs an agreement stating they will not use or share my photos in any way. They agree that I can migrate all my account data if they want to disable&#x2F;lock my account. *In other words, keep the control for the user&#x2F;customer.

I hope that they can handle all those deletes on their spinning hard drives. Append-only is easy, since you&#x27;re never deleting and there&#x27;s no chance for fragmentation. Once you get deletes, you&#x27;re going to get fragmentation and performance goes to hell.

Whatever... I just wish they actually let you manage your own content. I guess I could just download it all, but I certainly can&#x27;t sort by size or really do just about anything useful in staying under the limits, so I feel really strong-armed into paying.

Funny how Google pushes the automatic syncing between partner accounts. These automatically imported images go against the storage cap, and most don&#x27;t realize it.<p>There should be an option to filter those imported images for easier deletion. I haven&#x27;t seen one.

I do pay for some storage and I bought phones that said unlimited for life. Because of the second I feel a bit burned and am likely to avoid products from google in the future.<p>I always knew they&#x27;d do this so I&#x27;ve been backing up all my photos locally.

<i>Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.</i><p>A little bit of good news, IMO. Next, they need to do like Reddit and start making &quot;dead&quot; account names available for re-use. (Something Reddit does for sub-reddits and which Google seems to not do for, say, BlogSpot.)<p>Edit: I say this as someone with old, dead google accounts I will never recover and I would rather the data be deleted than fall into the hands of nefarious third parties. Also, we bellyache about the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin as an environmental hazard, but we think Google should keep abandoned accounts intact indefinitely? Why?<p>All systems need some means to clean out the cruft and recycle stuff and not just permanently freeze it for people who may be dead, who may have forgotten they made that account while high that one night, etc.

Did it ever take off? Last I looked the res spec didn&#x27;t even allow me to upload my decided entry tier DSLR content never mind RAW images<p>I&#x27;d imagine modern cellphones and their 40gpixel res crush that multiple times over

That&#x27;s too bad, I guess the ROI of freely hosting images in exchange that they continuously feed it all to their Machine Learning to train it over time isn&#x27;t worth the cost of permanent storage.

Interesting to keep photos uploaded from Pixels exempt from this new policy.

I recently ran out of storage (i was using the &quot;original image size&quot;) So I setup my phone to auto-Backup to my home server.<p>Best choice I made. Looks like I&#x27;ll now need to turn off photo backup from Google.

Could these pictures be stored in a youtube video with sufficient quality?

I pay pCloud for 500 GB of storage and while it is nowhere close to &quot;Unlimited&quot;, it is far greater than the 15 GB Google gives me if I want to save my photos in their original resolution.

See also: predatory pricing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Predatory_pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Predatory_pricing</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io&#x2F;</a> is a privacy focused alternative to Google Photos, and came up in HN a while ago.

Timely. I just got my closet server on the internet with WebDAV behind auth and SSL. Also installed PhotoSync on my phone. I do miss the image GP browser though (a little).

Are there other services providing unlimited ( for now ) photo storage?<p>The only other company I can think of is Amazon which provides unlimited storage if you pay for Amazon Prime.

You can get Lots-O-Terabytes drives for cheap. Just store them there, and don&#x27;t worry about your cloud storage going dark. Get two drives and make a backup.

I&#x27;m hearing Nelson from the Simpsons go &quot;Haahaaa&quot; in my head, because we all knew this would happen. Gmail is next.<p>This is why people need to host their own data.

Damn, and I set this up on my parents phones as an easy way for them to back up all the photos they take that &#x27;just works&#x27;<p>Looks like I have some bad news for them...

For those of us that already pay for personal GSuite, does anyone know if we ALSO need a Google One subscription now? Or if the GSuite space will be enough?

For anyone with a technical inclination, we knew this day would come eventually, thus Google did as well. But for the layman or casual user, one would assume the unlimited space would remain free forever. Companies really need to be upfront about the sustainability of their free options and the forecasting of when those things will change. Google had to have known that they couldn&#x27;t sustain an unlimited free plan forever and should have stated such from the beginning.<p>I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.

Explanation of the change from an email I received from them:<p>&quot;In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future&quot;<p>This is just gross.

Unfortunate. I guess I will have to start to pay for the extra storage eventually. I really like the service and wouldn&#x27;t like to drop it.

I ve been waiting fr this. I am going to build my cloud storage product. Only difference will be in pricing and bucket size.<p>Here is how it ll go Steps of 10 Gb - 20 rs&#x2F;month no fixed plans like google or apple. This will save users some money. mc-mu(u+1)*1.69&#x2F;2 this is the cost equation, basically this will give u the amount of money you will lose by going with a fixed plan say 100GB over my suggested 10GB steps. eg. if u only generate 1GB per month you ll lose ~4400rs due to unused space if you go with 100GB plan.

Where&#x27;s that Google Photos superbowl ad that makes fun of icloud storage and says that it has unlimited storage for life?

Having mixed feelings about subscribing to Google One last month, now it seems that space is going to fill up really fast.

Shit ... now how do I get my photos out ???. And please don&#x27;t tell me to use rclone - never got it working properly.

Isn&#x27;t the social contract being we get tracked and get free stuff? no wonder some are throwing their toys a bit...

One free alternative is Snapchat app. I am using it as a camera app as well as a camera roll (Memories).

ML Models trained, okay then. See ya!

I never understood why people used this service. I&#x27;m not a professional photographer but I care about image quality. Google&#x27;s &quot;high quality&quot; option really means &quot;16 Megapixels or less&quot; which is lower quality than most modern cameras can capture, so by taking advantage of unlimited storage, you&#x27;re sacrificing image quality.

In light of multiple companies attempting to redefine what the words &quot;free&quot; and &quot;unlimited&quot; mean, I would like to propose the following update-for-the-21st-century definitions:<p>Free: A product or service that is entirely without cost to the end-user until after it has already been purchased.<p>Unlimited: A reasonable amount that should in no way exceed average consumption.

Guess the face detection AI has become good enough. It was already way too creepy.

Google One is pretty cheap, but wish Picasa was still around for offline backup.

Photos is the most annoying thing I didn&#x27;t want to migrate over when trying to de-google myself. It&#x27;s handy to share the kids&#x27; photos with relatives. I guess this will make it easier.<p>An instance of NextCloud can do wonders and there is even an app that does face recognition.

Anyone know why the strange tiers on Google One? There is a 2TB ($100&#x2F;yr) and 10TB ($600&#x2F;yr).<p>- Usually prices scale log, but here, there is a storage premium going from 2TB to 10TB.<p>- Does anyone else think 2TB is a bit low for a moderately savvy family plan? Why isnt there a middle tier like 5TB?

it&#x27;s a shame, google photos is a really good product. but not that good that I&#x27;d pay extra - I already have 1 TB of storage from Microsft 365. I guess it&#x27;s time to move on in June.

ente[1] is an E2EE alternative to Google Photos I’ve been building. Please sign up for the beta program if you’re interested.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io</a>

can someone recommend an easy way to migrate Google Photos straight into Dropbox? (without having to download the Google Takeout exports locally (I&#x27;ve got like 400 GB of photos...))

Just FYI Amazon Photos has unlimited photo storage for prime users.

move them to Amazon. before Amazon discontinues unlimited storage, download everything to a portable storage.<p>at the end of the day, you will realize that only yourself can be trusted.

Now I see why Google phones don&#x27;t have SD card slots.

I would never &quot;pay&quot; for Google products. I&#x27;m 101% sure they would still harvest my data for their advertising business even if I pay them. Then why should I pay for giving off my data?<p>At least I should get free shit.

Storage isn&#x27;t free and is finite, therefore it was never unlimited. Nothing that is offered for free but has an underlying cost and finite is ever really unlimited.<p>This is a welcome step towards realistic marketing.

Great time for FLOSS federated project pixelfeld: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-federation.info&#x2F;pixelfed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-federation.info&#x2F;pixelfed</a>

They got enough free training data, so...

Really really really sad that the internet now no longer has a free way to store photos for eternity. This was such a wonderful service for us all.

&quot;We already have too many photos for our ML pipelines.&quot; Thank you very much.<p>Now you must pay.

Tldr: low quality but unlimited storage is expensive, so it will go away in June. However everything uploaded before will not use space for some time. High quality storage has never been unlimited so no changes.<p>A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.

we&#x27;re trapped!

Photo storage is worth paying for. But just not at Google.<p>www.smugmug.com<p>Feel free to suggest others.

TLDR: unlimited high quality photos going away. Will start counting against your storage quota.

Wonderful. So now they also want people to pay for getting their life data-mined. It&#x27;s like cable TV - started without ads, now has more ads than content, and nobody seems to mind enough to cancel.

I guess Google thinks they have enough training data, and can this stop offering free storage. Or maybe they think it is sticky enough to start charging and not lose clients. Either way, I wish them luck.

This is a good thing. I&#x27;ve been having trouble weaning myself off this service, one of few Google services I still use, but now I have just over six months notice to find something different.<p>I&#x27;m happy to pay someone for storage, but not Google. So now I&#x27;ll get on that.

While I instinctively knew Google is not to trust with the word &quot;free&quot;, especially since &quot;you&#x27;re the product&quot; isn&#x27;t applicable as easily here as with other products, I still decided to thoroughly test Photos for a long while to see if they&#x27;d introduce some limits. They are a corporate entity out to make money (and externally pressured to make more quarter by quarter), so I fully get it. But for Photos, it almost seemed like it could be a long play for them. A fantastic place to upsell users into all the other Google products. One that could just possibly stay free, forever. So, the fool I am, I started recommending it to just about anyone. Helped onboard relatives, many friends and so forth.<p>And now, this. We&#x27;re at the next step of a funnel they could&#x27;ve (and should&#x27;ve) been more transparent on from the start: they&#x27;re starting to apply force to add &quot;a form of payment&quot;. After which, naturally, they&#x27;ll be able to keep on raising those prices freely with such an impressively solid lock-in at hand. The more data stored inside Google Photos, the harder it&#x27;ll be to migrate it away.<p>I am, once again, contemplating to give up entirely on the &quot;cloud&quot; and figure out something else. The issue isn&#x27;t paying for services, but I do have a problem with intransparent funnels. It&#x27;s not about paying a buck or two a month, it&#x27;s about them now being able to raise prices without mercy, regardless of actual storage pricing going down!<p>To migrate away will be quite the effort once we&#x27;re storing past 100 GB+. Frustrating. Fully to be expected, but still. Google is acting so desperate, their struggle with milking the good ole&#x27; advertising cow is becoming more obvious by the minute. I wonder how long Chrome (not Chromium) is going to survive until it&#x27;ll end up in a monetisation funnel.