
Picture this: A fresh approach to Photos - cleverjake
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-approach-to-photos.html
======
walkon
_And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google
Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and
videos, for free._

In Google parlance, a (free product) lifetime is somewhere between 2 - 7
years.

<edit to add>

Looks like the unlimited free storage is for high quality, but not original,
versions of the images and videos. Original quality is subject to storage
limits/pricing:

[https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?p=storage&r...](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?p=storage&rd=1)

With some sort of revenue, maybe this product will be sustainable.

~~~
Chevalier
I believe that page is outdated as of today. Until now, G+ stored pictures up
to 2000px for free. As of today, photos of up to 16 megapixels may be stored
for free.

~~~
danieldk
But they can recompress it according to the help pages. If you want to store
the originals, it's counted towards your space.

------
vkb
I've been waiting for this with not a little paranoia, given Google's
propensity to dump products.

I have over 2k pictures taken since the birth of my daughter in January, 99%
of them with my Android phone and uploaded automatically to G+ or Google
Photos or whatever this is now called. In order to ensure that they are not
just in this one space (which used to be Google Drive and Picasa before that,
I believe), I periodically download through Google Takeout, save on a separate
hard drive, and also upload to an S3 bucket through Arc so I have redundancy.
Then I print the best ones physically through Snapfish.

I would love to stop doing all of this b.s. and just leave them where they lay
on Google, but Google has given me no guarantee that my photos are safe. What
a nightmare preserving memories is in 2015.

~~~
danieldk
I also became more careful with photos since our daughter was born last year,
but take a different approach. I store the photos on Dropbox, since it makes
it trivial to backup (locally in time machine and remotely with Arq). The
Carousel app is pretty great these days and it's great that its backed by
regular Dropbox storage.

Another reason that we didn't choose for Google is their terms of service and
privacy policy. We both have Google Apps for Work accounts, but Google+ photos
is not one of the apps covered and uses the normal terms. The terms say that
your data can be used for promoting Google service and that Google can keep
the data as long as they wish. Not something I want to put something as
personal as our daughter's photos on.

------
United857
Is RAW format supported? This is key for higher-end users.

Also, the branding is potentially confusing: "high quality" and "original" to
me implies the _former_ is the "better" option, whereas in reality, it limits
to 16 MP.

I get that "original" means original quality, but maybe "best quality" or
something non-ambiguous.

------
Chevalier
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?

------
apricot13
Where can I find more small print!

If a photo is < 16MP is it still uploaded as 'original' \- ie if I did google
takeout would I get my originals back or their 'high quality' edits?

------
Rainymood
Am I the only one who thought it was kind of weird that they used an iphone 6
in one of those shots?

~~~
mvgoogler
Why is it weird? The app is launching on Android, web and iOS - why wouldn't
all three platforms be shown?

------
datums
How are your photos as a baby group with your 40 something photos of yourself
?

------
thoughtchrome
google = mercurial

