Google Will Launch Google Photos, a Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage”

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/confirmed-google-will-launch-google-photos-a-standalone-photo-host-with-unlimited-storage/

by binjoi • 11 years ago

83 87 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

dudus• 11 years ago

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

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• 11 years ago

I think separation from Google+ will be the big thing.

criley24• 11 years ago

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.

soylentcola• 11 years ago

Yeah, I thought they already had this. For a while it was sort of half branded under Picasa and half under G+/Photos but I set it up last winter for my girlfriend's mom. She has a load of scanned photos and digital camera photos on her laptop but no backup plan. Since she didn't want to buy a NAS or subscribe to online backup, I set it up so imported photos were backed up to Google+/Photos. Same stipulations: resized (but still decent) photos wouldn't count toward any limit but original resolution would require her to pay for Google storage. She agreed that the free storage of resized images was a decent compromise. Chances are she won't need the backups but if her laptop's hard drive dies then at least she will have decent copies of all of her photos. For a free solution it wasn't a terrible deal. She's not a photographer or anything so the smaller (but again, still decent) images would suffice for the cost.

Arkanosis3• 11 years ago

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.

x5n12• 11 years ago

Their abuse compliance team has yet to get back to me despite the fact that I gave them my driver's license. It's been like 3 months.

moskie2• 11 years ago

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.

XJOKOLAT• 11 years ago

Potentially.

Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.

Sorry, you must understand that there are now enough people out there who have been on the receiving end of Google's careless approach to their end-users (note, I intentionally did not refer to us as customers).

Announcements like this used to excite me. Not anymore. I hope one day things will be different.

[Edit: downvoted as expected. Feel free. Just come back and upvote when it's your turn to get on the Google support rollercoaster].

x5n12• 11 years ago

Amazon's S3 has been around since March 2006, so almost 10 years. That's a much better place for anythinig you want to stick around than Google.

Amazon has my loyalty for the very specific reason that they don't release half-assed products and then pull them even when they have millions of users.

anon1385• 11 years ago

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.

Maybe RMS was right and the answer is to stop using cloud services?

beambot• 11 years ago

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.

discardorama• 11 years ago

Products come and go all the time,

Yep, just what I want to hear when I'm uploading my 1000s of photos to that product...

grkvlt• 11 years ago

What happened to Hangouts and Android? I know Reader was discontinued, but Google is hardly shutting down widely used services regularly. In fact, it's rare enough that, as with Reader, it is big news when it happens, and there's a huge backlash. This suggests, in fact, that there is actually an expectation that Google does and will keep products around for a long time, not the opposite.

People have a common tendency to extrapolate from low-N or even single events to produce an inaccurate picture of future possibilities. I'm quite happy with GMail, Drive, Android and so on, and don't expect them to vanish any time soon.

Arkanosis3• 11 years ago

Reader was discontinued, Hangouts has been sold as a replacement for GTalk with missing features (history, compatibility with xmpp…), Android is forcing you to use Google+ everyday more than before (and I really don't want to use it — I mean, really).

I'm still using GMail and Android, but I'm not happy with how their UI change, and with how the latter puts Google everywhere (it's a bit better with Cyanogen, but still).

Maybe I'm extrapolating, maybe not. The only thing I'm sure of, is that when trust has been lost, it's very hard to get it back.

mrb• 11 years ago

Can you elaborate why do you not "trust" Google?

You don't trust them to keep the Photos service operational in the future? But if the worst comes to the worst, in this theoretical scenario, at least they would surely provide you a way to transfer your files first. So why does it bother you so much?

Or you don't trust them to keep Photos independent of Google+? Surely they would never say "from now on you can't access your photos unless you sign up for Google+". Photos are very personal and important to people. This would cause an unprecedented outrage.

Arkanosis3• 11 years ago

I don't trust them to keep the service operational in the future if it doesn't get momentum (see Google Buzz, Google Wave…), if it doesn't bring enough money in (see Google Reader…) or if they finally give up against some competitor (see Google Code…).

I trust them even less to not put Google+ inside this, which for me is more or less the same thing as shutting the service down, since I really don't want to use Google+ (I mean, really), and I don't want people I share photos with to be forced to use it (I mean, really). You seem to be sure they wouldn't do this, I think the exact opposite. Well, future will tell us.

Now, you're right in that they have a excellent history of allowing their users to get their files back. This is something I definitely trust them and thank them for a million times. Now, a photo service isn't relevant without a sharing feature, and if the service is shutting down, no backup that I can think of backs the sharing up.

drb311• 11 years ago

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.

fapjacks• 11 years ago

... 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.

e402• 11 years ago

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

cheshire137• 11 years ago

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.

e402• 11 years ago

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

I still use it to this day.

FlaceBook• 11 years ago

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

msoad• 11 years ago

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

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

nolite3• 11 years ago

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

pimlottc• 11 years ago

Have you actual run out of space in Gmail?

notatoad2• 11 years ago

since they merged the gmail storage space with the drive storage space, i'm sure a lot of people have run out. I'm nowhere near 15GB of gmail storage, but it's pretty easy to dump 15GB into drive.

nolite3• 11 years ago

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..

anilgulecha• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure 99ish percentile are much under the limit. So I think it turned out alright?

nolite3• 11 years ago

"alright" if you accept that they're just full of shit..

mdeslaur• 11 years ago

"Unlimited" until they retire the service 18 months from now.

philjohn• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

sz4kerto• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

kuschku• 11 years ago

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.

georgefrick• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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...

fuzzywalrus• 11 years ago

That and also, what's the UVP here? Why not Flickr if you're going to sell off your photos for storage? Even as a somewhat avid photographer with RAW files dating back to 2004 (25k photos) I'm no where near the 1TB storage that Flickr offers.

notatoad2• 11 years ago

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

that's one of the selling points of the new google photos app.

moeedm3• 11 years ago

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

tjr2• 11 years ago

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

moeedm3• 11 years ago

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

middleclick• 11 years ago

This is pretty much what I try to do. I avoid people taking photographs of me altogether or if they do, I request them to not put them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet. It usually works if you ask kindly.

joezydeco• 11 years ago

So what happens if you, say, XORed the entire image with 0xA5A5A5A5 and then uploaded it?

Seems Flickr doesn't really examine the image, just the extension (.gif, .jpg, etc). I wonder what Google plans to do.

fenomas• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

yclept• 11 years ago

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

joefkelley• 11 years ago

Google has some serious chops when it comes to image recognition and machine learning. Telling the difference between a photo of a car and a photo of a train is much more difficult that telling the difference between a real photo and some random file encoded as a photo.

Achshar• 11 years ago

Pretty sure it's like one afternoon's work for any google engineer to write some code to figure out when something like this is happening.

mayli• 11 years ago

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

adam12• 11 years ago

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

miralabs• 11 years ago

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.

cdnsteve• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

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.

johannes1234321• 11 years ago

Sure they want to show ads, no question. But also the other perspective: The camera is likely one of the most often used mobile apps. Users create tons of pictures. For being a dominant mobile platform you need the accompanying photo "cloud" solution. If the offer this as part of their play services this is yet another benefit of Google-Android over OpenSource-Android versions (like Amazon fire)

TorKlingberg• 11 years ago

I see no need to theorize nefarious purposes. Every large web services company* has some kind of photo storage service. It drives users to their other products.

* Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, ...

rob-alarcon• 11 years ago

Yeah, nothing is free, they will know everything about us. It's going to be the social data source of google, like facebook comments, messages, events, friends, etc (which are also unlimited). We are the data source for the ultimate ad targeting machine.

veidr3• 11 years ago

The interesting interview[1] with Bradley Horowitz (Google's "VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing") directly addresses that.

Obviously, machine learning will benefit Google. But it will also benefit all the users of this service, by improving the automated assistance of managing your photos (some of which is already pretty neat, like the automatic photo albums Google will sometimes make for you).

If you are not a photographer, and say, you have kids, you definitely don't have time to do that much curation of your photo archive. You might set aside some time time make a share a photo album after a major event like a birthday party or something, but you will never have enough time to manually derive all the enjoyment our of your photos that you could be getting. This problem needs smarter machines to solve it.

Relevant quote:

    Q: You use artificial intelligence to surface photos on a given 
    theme, or find specific people in the photostream. What’s the 
    percentage of getting it right?

    A: It’s good enough. It’s not perfect, in the same way that voice 
    transcription five years ago was not perfect. The key to getting 
    that last percentage which tips it over will come now, when we deploy
    it at scale. Getting all that data will create a virtuous cycle of 
    getting better and better.

[1]: https://medium.com/backchannel/bradley-horowitz-says-that-go...

wslh• 11 years ago

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

haberdasher• 11 years ago

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

Chevalier• 11 years ago

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?

kolev2• 11 years ago

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

veidr3• 11 years ago

I don't know about Flickr, but Dropbox Carousel costs me $100 per year for a 1TB (have about 0.5TB photos in it).

You can buy a similar amount of storage from Google for a similar amount, and it will store your originals. So only the free version is limited in this way.

hillsarealiv3• 11 years ago

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

kolev2• 11 years ago

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

Google Will Launch Google Photos, a Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage”

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