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Google Photos Launches With Unlimited Storage, Completely Separate From Google+
An anonymous reader writes with a report that Google yesterday announced at its I/O conference a photo-storage site known as Google Photos. Says the article: The new service is completely separate from Google+, something Google users have been requesting for eons. Google is declaring that Google Photos lets you backup and store "unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free." It's a bit creepy to see all the photos that Google still has on tap, including many that I've since deleted on my phone.
Read the fine print. They can use the pics anyhow they want.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
It's a bit creepy to see all the photos that Google still has on tap, including many that I've since deleted on my phone.
Talk about missing the point of a backup device....
The trouble with the 'backup' claim is that a Google cloud service may suffer a permanent failure upon a behind-closed-doors business decision, with potentially little warning. If Seagate, say, could instruct your usb hdd to brick itself, would you use it for backup? The Cloud is convenient in the short term, but business reality means it must be thought of as 'may fail for no reason'.
John_Chalisque
What I'd be interested to see is if, and how aggressively, they take action against image collections that are not of any use for their desired purposes.
/dev/random just needs a dash of formatting information to be as many bitmaps as you could possibly desire.)
They obviously can't be too capricious and unpredictable, or they'll spook users; but you can't offer 'unlimited' storage without making some provision for 'that guy who hacks together a FUSE filesystem that uses images uploaded to Google Photos as a storage medium' or the 'Cool, this will make my next time-lapse video project way easier' cases.(and, of course, if you are feeling particularly uncreative,
Are they just going to go with the ISP-style 'I said unlimited; but I actually meant X photos or Y GB of traffic per month; apparently I'm allowed to get away with that, so STFU', are they going to have peons manually examine accounts whose size gets out of hand and decide what to do?
Because when you accidentally delete the wrong photo on the phone, the first thing you'd hope is that you could go to your backup?
I just went to the site and Its already got photo's of mine from yesterday to 2009. I'm sure most of those are only good for the bin. However it could be a good thing in some cases. Say you photographed something sensitive like the police using excessive force, well that can't be deleted from your phone now.
on the other hand there are some terrible photo's such as when you accidentally click the shutter..
you might want to check to see what you're sharing with google already.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
My wife uses gmail. I don't and have never had a google account, have never uploaded a photo to them or to any other web photo service. One day my wife asked me "What's that picture with your email, the Causeway?"
A long time ago, before Google bought them, I created a YouTube account and uploaded a couple of time-lapse videos of my commute across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. And my contact email for that account was my yahoo email account. So apparently, when I sent my wife an email the Google gophers went scampering for an avatar, and having nothing else took the sample still for one of my YouTube videos and pasted that at the top of my incoming email.
I'll leave it to others to speculate on just how this could have gone wrong. I could probably fix it since my old YouTube account has apparently been grandfathered in to a g+ or whatever account now, but I'm leaving it as is to remind me never to trust them with anything sensitive.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]