
Google Will Launch Google Photos, a Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage” - binjoi
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/confirmed-google-will-launch-google-photos-a-standalone-photo-host-with-unlimited-storage/
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mdeslaur
"Unlimited" until they retire the service 18 months from now.

~~~
philjohn
Came here to say the same thing.

I've started not to trust Google as a cloud offering because of their
continued shedding of services. Look at AWS - they add things they know will
fill a need, often because that need is present at Amazon, and as such I can't
recall them retiring any of their portfolio.

Google instead take a scattergun approach, which would be fine if they
actually interated and improved these services, but look at the mess they made
of Google Code - great at first, then no massive new features after a while
and they left it to languish.

~~~
slyall
Simpledb is a AWS product the don't promote much these days (it is often left
off the list of products). I wouldn't be surprised to see a notice that they
are turning it off at some point however.

The big difference is that it has real revenue from customers whereas "free"
services are a lot more prone to corporate fashion

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cdnsteve
Let's hypothesize for a minute, why a technology giant, like Google cares
about user photos?

Their machine learning systems are unmatched. In order for machine learning to
be more effective they need to be given context. What's the missing key for
photos? People. What happens when you add in an authenticated Google user, who
they already know everything about due to using other G services (mail,
search, adwords) to that machine learning with photos?

My assumption would be they can simply learn more about _you_. Personalization
is ad money, nothing more.

~~~
assholesRppl2
Yeah -- because when you provide a friendly, personal service for someone,
you're doing it for the ad money and nothing else. Look, you have _a_ point,
but it's an extraordinarily cynical point. You're connecting the dots to
reveal "the truth", that Google strives to make money, but it could honestly
be a lot worse. Personalization is more than just ad money. It's friendly and
great for business.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Wouldn't being friendly and great for business be providing customer support?
Something that Google rarely, if ever, does?

Google is a product lab that happens to fund itself from its most successful
experiment, ads.

~~~
growse
I've contacted Google for customer support twice in the last couple of years,
and both times they were excellent. First time was when I had an issue with my
Nexus 5, spoke to a human got it sorted straight away. Second time was when
they changed the VAT status on personal Google Apps accounts (here in the UK).
I raised a live chat to query this and had a callback from a guy on the west
coast within 20 minutes who seemed happy to take the time to walk me through
what was happening and what it meant.

Maybe I was just lucky. _shrug_

I'm skeptical about this whole "Google doesn't do customer support" thing,
especially given the internet's astonishing ability to amplify vocal
minorities and some people's desire to jump on anything anti-guy-making-all-
the-money.

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Arkanosis
I'd hardly trust Google again for a service I'd have to rely on in the future.
Let alone for a service that doesn't force Google+ down your throat today or
tomorrow. Sorry, but Google Reader, Hangouts and Android have been too much
already.

~~~
moskie
Just like with any product ever, if the product is popular and produces value,
it will stick around. Products come and go all the time, the difference being
with Google that since they are so big and have countless products, the
company doesn't go away when a particular one fails. Many products fail in
this world, but often the company that made the product also goes away, so you
have no one to complain about going forward. Google is easy to pick on in this
regard.

If this same product was released by a company you had never heard of, would
you use it? Would you honestly believe it to have a greater chance of
survival?

My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that
nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.

~~~
beambot
> if the product is popular and produces value, it will stick around.

I'm afraid there are more factors than this at play. Reader was both popular,
and it produced value (to me and many others). I was never even given the
option to pay for it. For whatever reason, Reader didn't fit Google's
strategic vision... so it got axed.

~~~
veritas3241
I'm with you on Reader. Heartbreaking to lose that. Oh well, Feedly has been
an acceptable replacement.

------
dudus
Google already have unlimited storage for photos, maybe they are just
increasing the size of things that count to the free storage. From:
[https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/6558?hl=en](https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/6558?hl=en)

Keep in mind that photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes
long won't count toward your storage limit.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I think separation from Google+ will be the big thing.

~~~
criley2
I'm super psyched about this. Photos was easily my favorite part of Google+,
but I was never comfortable having my entire phone connected to a public-only
social network.

I never trusted photo backup from my phone to a public-only profile page. I
understand that google respects privacy and tests their code well and doesn't
auto-share photos, but the reality is I will never be comfortable with a
public-only profile page directly connected to my cellphones camera with auto-
upload.

I may be that tiny, tiny minority but I'm very psyched I'll be able to finally
use some of the great tools without having to worry about the fact that my
phone is being dumped into a public-only social network that "should" protect
my privacy.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Photos was easily my favorite part of Google+, but I was never comfortable
> having my entire phone connected to a public-only social network.

In what sense is G+ a "public-only social network"?

~~~
criley2
When you create a G+ profile, you explicitly must check a box that affirms
that they are creating a publicly viewable profile for your account. That
profile page will, no matter what, be a public internet page with no
permission filter at all.

You can then subsequently lock down features ON that page, such as hiding work
information, hiding photos, hiding this, hiding that, (in fact, each of the
dozens and dozens of options must be individually hidden), but the net result
of that work is a public page with very little info on it.

By proxy, I can set my Facebook page to "visible to friends only" and even if
you have a hardlink, you'll receieve a "page does not exist" error when you
view it without logged-in whitelist (friend list) approval to even know the
page exists.

I was never OK with the idea that, essentially, my android device had a public
web page. A direct link between my data and a public profile page that I had
no ability to remove access to.

As evidence of this I made a dummy G+ for a mostly unused Google account I
have. Even though I turned off all features and hid all sections and turned on
all privacy settings, and have added 0 content, 0 customization, 0 demographic
settings (completely and totally blank G+ profile, no posts, nothing), the G+
dummy profile has "715 views" in the past year.

I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been
accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. It's forced-
public, searchable, etc. The best you can do is have a public profile page
that you mark "do not search" (but which will still be crawled because search
engines often crawl then hide instead of ignore).

You can never have privacy on G+ like Facebook, where you have a private page
that does not even resolve as an address to non-friends.

~~~
danellis
That's default-public, not public-only.

> I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been
> accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me.

You didn't say what information was revealed on the profile. If it was
completely blank, then how is that a privacy issue?

~~~
criley2
The information revealed was: forced real name and existence of page.

I do not want the existence of a profile to be known. I do not want social
networks, search engines, and government organizations crawling and recording
information from a profile page connected directly to my cellphone.

I explained this: on Facebook, if you click a link to my profile it will say
"sorry this link is invalid".

If you click it on Google, despite my best attempts, it will say "Hey, this
user exists, here is their full name, oh, they don't share anything else with
you".

That's an invasion of my privacy, to me, to have a public page that resolves
and identifies me against my will.

The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows
me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with
literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you
without your permission or knowledge. What do you think those 700 clicks are?
People hitting a blank profile? They're bots, and they're data harvesters. The
existence of a profile is great information to help build more complete
profiles of me, my devices and accounts, and ultimately my browsing history,
locations, purchasing histories, advertising history, etc.

~~~
danellis
Your real name, apart from almost certainly not being unique, isn't private
information anyway, so no privacy is being lost.

> The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile
> shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay
> with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about
> you without your permission or knowledge.

"blank profile" ... "personal information" \-- this isn't even coherent.

> without your permission

They implicitly have my permission to crawl anything I allow to be public.
That's what making something public means!

~~~
criley2
"Your real name, apart from almost certainly not being unique, isn't private
information anyway, so no privacy is being lost."

Yes, privacy is being lost.

I broke it down very simply: a public facing, crawlable webpage with a real-
name is different than a NON-EXISTENT LINK.

Do you understand the difference between a "This Page Does Not Exist" error,
and a "Hey, this is the public profile for Real Name" page? Do you understand
the difference between say "Google.com" and "lkskldjfklsdjsdf.com"? One being
a public page, the other being a non-existent webpage that returns an error?

I am shocked that your view of privacy is so broken that you cannot see the
difference between publically posting a page on the public internet,
accessible to literally every human on earth, and a whitelisted access page
that has a total of about 300 human beings who can see it.

Do you understand why accessible to 5,000,000,000 is different than 300?

Then you can begin to understand privacy.

------
sz4kerto
TBH I much more like the OneDrive approach when photo sharing is unified with
storage, and the photos can alternatively be organized into albums ('views' on
the data).

~~~
Veratyr
Photos has Drive integration [0] since a couple of months ago so you're free
to do exactly this.

[0]
[http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html](http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html)

------
e40
So, Picasa w/unlimited storage? I'm not joking. It seems that's what it is.

~~~
cheshire137
I remember Picasa! That's how I got all my old photos on Google to begin with,
after migrating from Flickr back in the day.

~~~
e40
I don't know if many know this, but you can still use the Picasa website. You
just need to add something to the URL, otherwise it redirects to google+:

[https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1)

I still use it to this day.

~~~
veidr
Haha, cool, thank you.

It is even complete with a "New!" sidebar referencing a blog post from 2011...
;-)

------
Chevalier
Since the original thread on this vanished, questions (and applause) for any
Googlers reading this:

\- - - - -

EXCELLENT. Two questions:

1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to
full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive?

2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be
upgraded to higher resolution versions?

------
fenomas
Stupid question: if there exists an unlimited photo storage service and it
supports a lossless format, couldn't people use it as universal storage by
splitting their files under the size limit and adding whatever header info is
necessary to make them into PNGs?

~~~
gruez
They can check the amount of "randomness" in each photo to determine whether
it's an actual photo or a disguised file.

~~~
yclept
You could probably use some steganographic techniques to embed your data in
what looks like a real photo prior to uploading though c:

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georgefrick
So people are just going to do this again? Hand over all of their photos in
exchange for free storage? How far are we from a computer being able to
determine what is going on in a picture, and then they can mine the things
you've done.

~~~
sbrother
> How far are we from a computer being able to determine what is going on in a
> picture?

[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-
wort...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-
thousand-coherent.html)

------
fapjacks
... until they decide they're bored with it and force you to migrate gigs of
photos off the service before shutting it down. No thanks.

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msoad
I use Google+ entirely for my photos. I pay $2/mo to have all my photos in
full resolution. So this is good news!

~~~
toomuchtodo
I pay the same for my grandfathered Flickr Pro account. Flickr gives all
accounts 1TB of storage. I'd rather have a limit than an "unlimited" Google
service that'll disappear at any time.

~~~
angdis
It won't just "disappear". I think we can safely expect plenty (months) of
notice.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I concede, disappear is the wrong word. "Prematurely sunset" fits their
actions better.

This is why my data gets stored in S3, and not Google's nearline storage. I
_know_ S3 is going to be around several year from now. I have no such
assurances from Google about any of the services they have "in beta".

"Fool me once..."

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moeedm
I don't want Google's servers looking over my images and analyzing them. No
thank you.

~~~
tjr
Then you can't put photos on the public web at all, right?

~~~
moeedm
Well I choose what to put on the "public web". Unlimited photo storage means
all your photos.

~~~
tjr
How would a user be forced to upload all of their photos? I have (allegedly)
unlimited storage with Flickr, but I manually upload the photos that I choose.

~~~
moeedm
They're not forced to, they're tempted to. And most people will. From the
presentation, it looks like as soon as you take a photo it's uploaded and
backed up on Google's servers.

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kolev
Actually, it's unlimited for "high resolution" versions, not for the
originals, which is sad. I guess I will stick with Carousel or Flickr.

~~~
hillsarealiv3
16MP limit means it's not much use for most recent DSLRs

~~~
kolev
Well, to me personally, it doesn't matter what the limit is - I just want to
have the _originals_ untouched, i.e. lossless storage.

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haberdasher
They learned how to recognize a person as they age from an infant to a
toddler! That's amazing and should be celebrated.

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wslh
Then, it is time to convert the whole filesystem to an image file and mount it
from Google.

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nolite
Gmail was supposed to be "Unlimited Storage" too.. I like how that turned
out..

~~~
pimlottc
Have you actual run out of space in Gmail?

~~~
nolite
Yes I have, and so have multiple friends.. 15GB doesn't go far these days...

So yes.. I've spent the day deleting years of emails that I didn't intend
to... thanks Google..

~~~
danellis
Why do you only have 15GB? I just looked and I have 100GB.

~~~
jsalit
Why do you have 100GB? Are you sure you're not paying $1.99/mo for that?

The default for new accounts is 15GB. I've had my gmail account since 2004 and
I "only" have 17GB (15GB + 2GB extra I got at some point for some kind of
security bonus; perhaps enabling 2FA).

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kuschku
It’s especially interesting when one considers that during the NoCaptcha®
relaunch several months ago they said that their algorithms could, by now,
read text and detect animals and people better than humans could.

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drb311
It will all be properly announced within a couple of hours but somehow I can't
stop myself reading these previews and leaks.

I'll be glad when they set Photos free from Google+. I hope they do something
with Hangouts too.

------
FlaceBook
"Google wants you to upload all of your photos into their data mining machine"

------
mayli
I am thinking about turning this into a unlimited cloud storage.

------
adam12
No thanks. I'm trying to move away from being their product.

------
miralabs
It would be interesting to know the computation they use to determine the
monetary gain on being able to mine/scan all the information from the photos
versus the cost of storing them.

