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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.
Datasets for neural net training.
If you didn't see the article/service, it can now classify photos so you can search by something like "car" or "red".
Read the fine print. They can use the pics anyhow they want.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
That's what spy agencies do. They keep your photos for 20 years after you've already forgotten about them, and then POW. When you step out of line and vote for the wrong person or support the wrong cause, they'll dredge them back up, and blackmail you on the basis that you were sitting together in the same bar as a known bad guy one day while you were both in college.
TANSTAAFL.
I'd rather just use Flickr or write my own little CMS. Google, you're a bloated, shitty company now. You release flop after flop and have ruined or killed all your older good products. Your social hubris has humiliated your reputation. 10 years ago I'd be excited about this news. Now I simply don't even care.
Backup...using a Google service? I prefer my backups to be reliable and private, thank you. Although hard drives do occasionally tell me "Hey, you've got a week to get your shit off me, ner ner!", at least they can't help it.
It's stupid anyhow. These days you can buy a 128GB USB flash drive for like $30, which should hold a lot of pictures at full quality.
But it can't be (easily) automated. And USB flash drives are EVIL for backups - you should buy a HDD for that. With the auto-upload you have the photos backed up (and also ready to be sent to someone through any channel) in matter of seconds, without the need for any action you can forgot, delay, or whatever. A good backup solution doesn't require any activity from the user. And this is especially important if you want to backup your grandma's data.
Try the new Google maps, when you embed it, it now only has one view onto a map (rather than one view per embed) and any selected market is lost.
Switch between street view and maps view and the location your street view is gone.
Stuff is hidden, what your maps? You click the cursor on search, and wait and a little menu 'My Maps' will drop down.
Want to edit your maps? Well you have to switch to the original map then edit, and in that edit mode you lose Satellite view now.
It's shite.
Android they're only just adding fingerprint and multi-window, split keyboard, and USB file browsing, whereas Samsung has had these for years.
It still doesn't play nicely with network drives insisting you store your stuff in Google spy cloud.
Face it, they have jumped the shark.
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
Just like Slashdot's parent company Dice seems to do anything they want with Sourceforge projects and then pretends it never happened.
Shit Dice, we have the rest of the fucking Internet. This isn't China. Have you ever heard of the Streisand effect?
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?
The Fappening II
There are some reports that Google simply rate limits uploads, by introducing increasingly frequent "cool off" periods during which the user can't upload. If that is true, then it depends on the implementation whether there is a hidden limit that you approach Xeno-like or can actually upload unlimited amounts of data, but take a very long time to do it.
I assume that most people who try to upload all of /dev/urandom or something equally useless do so with an account that does not have their real name attached to it, so Google could just decide to scrap that and these people would have no recourse.
Since when has Google started deleting data?
Hello! I am a company offering unlimited storage for no cost, and with no strings attached.
Umm... no. Frankly, I'd rather pay someone just because then, at least there is a chance, that it is an honest deal.
A relative asked me how to get some photos off of her Nexus 5 some time ago. All she wanted to do was to copy them from her phone to her Mac desktop. The last time I had used Android, which must have been some version of Android 2, it just involved connecting the phone to the desktop computer using a USB cable. This resulted in the desktop mounting the phone as if it were an external hard drive or flash drive. Then the photos could be copied off like files typically are from any other external drive. It was perfectly seamless and just worked. But when we went to do this with her Nexus 5, it didn't work like that. We had to jump through hoops using some piece of shit Android File Transfer program for transferring off the files. It didn't just mount the phone's storage as if it were an external drive. Why the fuck would they take an approach that worked perfectly, and replace it with this stupid Android File Transfer program that was slow and worked really awfully? This is one of the worst, stupidest, most unnecessary software regressions I've ever seen.
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
Why wouldN'T deleting a picture on a phone NOT also remove it on the backup device?
You're confusing mirroring with backup. If Google just mirrored what you did on your phone and deleted photos automatically when you delete them from your phone, then it's no longer a "backup device".
Though if you don't want Google to backup your photos, you can turn it off.
What? Where did Picasa go? Oh, right everything old is new again...thanks google!
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:[.]
Google is declaring that Google Photos lets you backup and store "unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free."
Thats until they're NOT.... Google has a VERY nasty habit of cranking up these spiffy services, running them for a while, getting everybody onboard
with them, then turning them off.... Stay away!! STAY FAR AWAY!!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Talk about missing the point of an evidence cache.
The price is not bad, but auto charge every month is a pain. I usually don't leave any active credit card number attached to my accounts (amazon or google wallet or ...) for long. Used to create virtual numbers with dollar limit and leave them on. But citi virtual cards numbers are usable by one merchant per number. Amazon has so many entities it is a pain dealing with mismatched virtual numbers.
Should create a virtual number for my google wallet with a low limit like 1000$ or so. It is crazy what laziness does to you. My IPass is on auto recharge, they don't send monthly statements, they take two to three days to post the charges, so you cant check the charges as soon as you return from a trip. Three days later you forget and you get lazy to log in and check the transactions.... Knowing how lazy I am, I am very wary of leaving an active number on a web account. Protection against being hacked and charged tons of money is purely an added bonus.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you find it creepy that they keep your photos around forever, just disable the auto-backup feature in your android settings. I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that most default camera apps I've used over the years don't allow you to specify the external SD card as the location that pictures are stored.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Of course the GPL allows it, but not everything that is legal is moral. Dice are being dicks.
"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."
Yeah, it's weird how when you delete files from one computer, they don't get deleted from all the other computers in the world.
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. 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, /dev/random just needs a dash of formatting information to be as many bitmaps as you could possibly desire.)
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?
Their track record on removing useful and loved services for little or no reason should spook users well enough without playing games with the content.
You know, we don't have to like, or even accept something someone or something does just because it's legal. There is such things for example as "bad behavior".
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
There is no free lunch
Did a test, uploading from the web only is possible for RAW. And... he converted a 12M RAW file for a 68K jpg.
No Linux desktop client.
The video isn't embarrassing and is publicly available, but it's not "me." There is no way I would have ever deliberately selected a pre-dawn windscreen shot of the bridge I drive across in the morning as the avatar to represent my identity for completely unrelated email. In fact, without the context of the video it's kind of a puzzle what the picture represents at all. Considering the number of reasons people upload videos to YouTube, randomly selecting a shot to use for this purpose is an incredibly stupid and invasive thing to do.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Since when has Google started deleting data?
Google has long allowed you to request that your data be deleted. See the Google dashboard. And, yes, it really does get deleted, permanently. I think sometimes it may survive for a while on tape backups, but eventually those get deleted, too.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you think that's creepy, wait until someone breaks into your account and begins blackmailing you; threatening to publish your photos of that long forgotten 'incident' which seemed like harmless fun at the time.
FWIW, Google Photos changes this behavior by default. I think there's a way to override it, but in general if you delete a photo in one place now, it gets deleted from all of them. There are some very prominent warnings trying to make people understand that. This doesn't apply if you've shared it, though; the shared copies still exist.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Google's offering unlimited storage of 16MP images and smaller. For most consumers that's all they need, though professionals will still want to back up their larger & raw files themselves of course. 1080p video is now unlimited too.
The categorization that Google is doing uses image recognition that goes a fair ways beyond any photo management software you can run yourself, but again likely won't be flexible enough for pro users.
The "unlimited" part isn't actually new, BTW. Google have been storing unlimited photos and video for a while now, but the size limits were 2MP and 15 minute clips, previously. This is much more useful for the average person.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You get a choice when you upload to use your assigned GBs or have the image reduced and placed in unlimited storage. I uploaded a few large files and could still see all the detail when I zoomed in, so if there is a limit to the resolution it must be high and or they are using some very smart compression on them.
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
http://agbeat.com/social-media...
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This sounds pretty standard. To go through it word by word:
"a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license"
perpetual: So you can't say "Oops, the license expired. Now you own me $750,000 for hosting my photos."
irrevocable: So you can't suddenly decide that Google isn't ALLOWED to have the photos you submitted to them.
worldwide: So Google can't be sued by a user in Country A if their photo is stored on a server in Country B.
royalty-free: Google is hosting this for you for free, why do you think they would pay you royalties for hosting your photos?!!!
non-exclusive: This one protects the customer, not Google. This means Google is given a license but you can still give/sell a license to someone else.
"reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content"
reproduce: So Google can copy the photo files without infringing on the owner's copyright.
adapt/modify: Google will sometimes apply various kinds of "photo magic" to your photos. This allows them to change your photos for these features. Also can apply to resizing your photos for display or rotating them so the top is up.
publish: If you share your photo with other people, Google is actually publishing them. So they need to make sure they have the right to do so.
publicly perform: In case you share your video with the general public.
publicly display: Same as previous, but for photos.
distribute: Again, displaying photos to other people can be seen as distributing and Google wants to make sure they won't be sued by people for "copyright infringement" when they do just what their users asked them to do to the photos that the users submitted.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Fine (and good work btw), but the intent you have shown, although admirable on google's behalf it can also be pretty dark side. The fact that copyright is still owned by the uploader may have a significant impact.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
It's okay, they promised to not be evil.
You have fallen for marketing bullshit.
Modern flash in it's raw form has some nasty properties that magnetic media does not suffer from (or suffers to a much lesser extent). The erase blocks are much larger than the write blocks and much larger than the logical blocks used by most file systems. The lifetime of each erase block is determined in terms of the number of erase cycles (unlike magnetic media which doesn't really suffer from localised wearout),flash cells can also discharge over time causing a cell to validate initially but later have errors. Shrinking processes and the use of multiple voltage levels to store two (mlc) or three (tlc) bits per flash cell improves density but at the cost of making the above problems worse.
The designers of common flash media wanted their products to be a drop in replacement for magnetic storage. The result is that the flash media contains controllers that attempt to deal with the problems of the flash and present an idealised block device to the host. How successful they are in maintaining that abstraction varies massively. It's possible to engineer in nice failure modes (e.g. turning read-only on wearout) but there is no gaurantee that the manufacturer will have actually done so. Bugs in the firmware or badly handled corner cases can easily result in data corruption.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Ooh, if they can extend that to automatically classify photos with tags like "FFM", "ladyboy", and "bukkake" I predict a HUGE market.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.