I got burned by this. I take 4x5 film photos and stored my library in Google Photos as 80 megapixel TIFF scans. One day, they told me I was out of storage, and that all the files were converted to phone-quality jpegs. They look awful.
I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the deal and that storage went away.
>I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the deal and that storage went away.
That deal was always time limited, and then was periodically extended for years and years until one day it wasn't. It was clearly never 'sold' as <i>forever</i> though.
Google Music shut down on the 24th, and almost took with it my hoard of 2001-2011 mp3s. The iCloud is walled, but back then I took my collection from machine to machine until they offered a service to upload it all to. Fortunately I caught the email on the 24th and pulled 15gb of tracks via Takeout, because I would have lost a lot of personal works that I just knew would be there. It’s been a nostalgic week.
That's different on so many levels. The photos you take are unique. The music you bought are not. They are produced by someone else. I personally have no qualms when Apple replaced my ripped MP3s with a DRM-free version from the iTunes Store.
If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.
I'm not really looking for archival storage or disaster recovery. After all, the 80MP scans are just low-resolution copies of the originals. I have hard drives for local storage. Yes, if my house burns down I lose the scans and the negatives, but I don't care enough to spend money on it.
The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if you don't access data often, why not just buy an external HDD of say 10TB or such? Yeah, it's possible that data may fail, but is quite unlikely particular if you're not using it often.
That’s bad. Using any Google product will be the same experience, simply because you are not the client, advertisers are. I am sure there are fine people working on the ship called Google, but I don’t like where it is heading.
Local copies ftw for sure, and it's not just free or cheap cloud providers you have to worry about
Following hard disk failure last week, I attempted to recover only about 1Gb of data from SpiderOak. Without going in to all the roadblocks, bugs and strange design decisions that exist when recovering data from them, I'm yet to recover anything worth having.
Been a customer for over 8 years. I guess the old maxim is true; an untested backup is worthless.
I managed to recover most data from various local backups I had lying around. That's the direction I'm going to go now, with a physical snapshot off-site every now and again. Not perfect, but much less hassle than what I've just been through, and also cheaper.
Nope. iCloud Drive is a virtual folder on your device.
When you drop a file into this drive, it will start "Uploading". Once it has uploaded, you will see "Remove Download" option which removes the local copy but keeps the copy in the cloud. If you click on such a file whose local copy is not present, it will "Download Now" (you can select and option-click and find this option as well).
They've recently changed it on macOS to allow you to free the hard drive space (file is in the cloud) but the metadata (file name) remains indexed on your computer.
iCloud Photo Library is similar but no compression hijinx - it's always original quality in the cloud and you can choose to store only "high quality" locally on your device to save device space (hilariously, the opposite of Google). You pay for the storage (but you can't get more than 2TB for love nor money).
For a few years it seemed to me that updates to Photos on Android would silently flip the quality setting down from Original to "High" as in "compressed", so I was never sure if the images I wanted to backup in original actually were backed up or not. I never set it to "High" but it kept flipping back to that.
I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.
I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One.
(seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!)
This definitely sounds like a bug worth tracking down. If you're interested in using your account as example, it would be helpful to file in-app feedback including at least the following two things:
1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue"
The shipped has LONG sinced sailed on my expecting Google to fix Photos in this regard. I've spent literally YEARS dealing with this Photos shortcoming. They have all the information they need.
And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.
Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.
Will this result in the problem getting addressed?
Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.
I expected shennigans to occur with Google Photos over time, which is why I've been using Dropbox to backup phone photos now. Dropbox immediately syncs to my hard drives at original quality. And while I'm at it, I still backup with Google Photos at a lower quality. Not as a failsafe, but just for that fast ML searching of subjects like, "dog" or whatever. And if I ever lose that search functionality, no big loss.
I would have gladly given Google my money over Dropbox, but Google has become an untrustworthy and unreliable brand in my eyes recently. Plus I still have control over my Dropbox data via hard drive syncing.
Oh and Picasa for local face tagging is still an option! That gem of a software still works. Although in all honesty, I haven't run it in a while so my tag database is extremely out of date.
I remember setting original quality on purpose as I didn't want downgraded images. I paid for extra storage... Only to find multiple times Google Photos app would randomly reset my preference and use their "high quality" setting. I made sure to stop using Google Photos (except as a low quality backup) and used other storage providers. My early experiences with Google Drive were also negative to the point that I would rather use Dropbox, One Drive or another solution.
Just for sharing: my setup is something like the following exactly because, even though I like google photo, I always felt it was too good to last.
I have 2 NAS (one a old custom build running freenas, the other a QNAP) in 2 different continents. I use resilio sync to sync between them, and to automatically download photos from my phones to the two NAS (when the phones are charging and connected to wifi).
The two NAS also expose a network volume with all pictures, that is mounted on the PCs I use lightroom on. This is also how pictures from regular cameras can be ingested. Lightroom database backups also end up on that network volume.
Each one of the two NAS takes hourly snapshot of their FS (to protect against accidental deletion/overwrites). As data is rarely updated, these snapshots can be kept for years while using negligible space.
In addition, the qnap NAS backs everything up, encrypted, to glacier, just in case everything else fails.
Finally, the phones also sync to google photo in "high" quality, just as a convenience. If I don't care about quality, i can share from google photo. Otherwise I can share via the qnap NAS in original quality.
Be careful using OneDrive for important storage, I've been using OneDrive with my band to share musical projects for a while and we discovered there is a bug that is somehow moving random files to the windows recycle bin.
The files were not necessarily touched (they're often from archived projects), I haven't been able to spot a pattern yet. (it may have to do with fast-moving changes + a mix of OS's perhaps)
There are topics in their support forums about this but no serious responses, it's a vague problem but I was shocked that it wasn't a red alert moment for them.
We're switching as soon as possible, but yeah, keep an eye on your recycle bin...
I've never needed to reach out to either for support, but I've heard only negative things about Google's customer service. To the point where I would expect to at least be able to reach someone at Microsoft but have zero hope of ever resolving a problem with my Google account…
Its really frustrating that there's no good, opensource, Android media backup tool. I just want a simple app that will auto upload photos and videos to an https endpoint (or an S3 bucket).
There are a few tools out there but they all seem to have bit rotted to the point where they don't work reliably on modern Android.
Yup, after years of trying to make nextcloud, syncthing, etc work for my workflow (copy from flat photos folder on device -> flat photos staging folder on backup server, then a cron job organizes it into folders by year/month), I finally resorted to something manual. Termux + rsync on android. Every few days, I run the termux shortcut to rsync a folder, and delete what's copied over from my device. It just works.
Readit News
I got into this situation because I had a few terabytes of free storage that I accumulated while working at Google; there was some deal like "fill out this survey and we'll give your personal account unlimited free storage forever"... but they altered the deal and that storage went away.
I use iCloud now.
That deal was always time limited, and then was periodically extended for years and years until one day it wasn't. It was clearly never 'sold' as <i>forever</i> though.
As long as you don't use it to store music...
Basically same story, different file type:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250315803
The cloud is too... cloudy.
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The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
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Pray they don't alter it further.
All cloud storage should be treated as ephemeral (some more than others, particularly google). It will change terms or go away at some point.
Only local storage owned by you is actually, well, owned by you. If it is something that matters, keep it locally.
Following hard disk failure last week, I attempted to recover only about 1Gb of data from SpiderOak. Without going in to all the roadblocks, bugs and strange design decisions that exist when recovering data from them, I'm yet to recover anything worth having.
Been a customer for over 8 years. I guess the old maxim is true; an untested backup is worthless.
I managed to recover most data from various local backups I had lying around. That's the direction I'm going to go now, with a physical snapshot off-site every now and again. Not perfect, but much less hassle than what I've just been through, and also cheaper.
Didn't learn your lesson then, I see.
If you can’t see the actual JPG/MP4/FLAC files, you can’t be sure they’re actually there and eventually you’ll be burned.
Use cheap online storage for an offsite backup, and use any cloud (Apple, Google) in parallel for convenience.
When you drop a file into this drive, it will start "Uploading". Once it has uploaded, you will see "Remove Download" option which removes the local copy but keeps the copy in the cloud. If you click on such a file whose local copy is not present, it will "Download Now" (you can select and option-click and find this option as well).
I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.
I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One.
(seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!)
Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!
1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue"
2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting
And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.
Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.
Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.
I would have gladly given Google my money over Dropbox, but Google has become an untrustworthy and unreliable brand in my eyes recently. Plus I still have control over my Dropbox data via hard drive syncing.
Oh and Picasa for local face tagging is still an option! That gem of a software still works. Although in all honesty, I haven't run it in a while so my tag database is extremely out of date.
+ cancelled stadia game studio
+ cancelled free unlimited google photos
+ closed Chromium APIs for derived browsers
+ closed Google Music (replaced with YT Music)
+ froze hiring
+ cancelled new office leases
It’s what they do.
Cancelling new office leases may have to do with WFH and a pandemic.
Dead Comment
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Appreciate it.
I have 2 NAS (one a old custom build running freenas, the other a QNAP) in 2 different continents. I use resilio sync to sync between them, and to automatically download photos from my phones to the two NAS (when the phones are charging and connected to wifi).
The two NAS also expose a network volume with all pictures, that is mounted on the PCs I use lightroom on. This is also how pictures from regular cameras can be ingested. Lightroom database backups also end up on that network volume.
Each one of the two NAS takes hourly snapshot of their FS (to protect against accidental deletion/overwrites). As data is rarely updated, these snapshots can be kept for years while using negligible space.
In addition, the qnap NAS backs everything up, encrypted, to glacier, just in case everything else fails.
Finally, the phones also sync to google photo in "high" quality, just as a convenience. If I don't care about quality, i can share from google photo. Otherwise I can share via the qnap NAS in original quality.
1. OneDrive also backs up my photos on my Android device in original quality.
2. I have Google Takeout backup to OneDrive quarterly.
The files were not necessarily touched (they're often from archived projects), I haven't been able to spot a pattern yet. (it may have to do with fast-moving changes + a mix of OS's perhaps)
There are topics in their support forums about this but no serious responses, it's a vague problem but I was shocked that it wasn't a red alert moment for them.
We're switching as soon as possible, but yeah, keep an eye on your recycle bin...
(Edited for clarity.)
Keep local backups.
There are a few tools out there but they all seem to have bit rotted to the point where they don't work reliably on modern Android.
It's a little confusing to set up the first time, but I've had it on this phone for 3 years and not needed to fiddle with it.
(It uses its own protocol.)