Google to end free unlimited online photo, vid storage, will eventually delete files if accounts go over their cap Google will cap its free online storage to 15GB per person, give or take some caveats, and users will have to pay if they go over that limit – or have their excess data deleted – the search giant said on Wednesday. That storage space includes Gmail, Photos, and Drive, which includes Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other …
"Google justified the changes by saying its users were consuming tons of digital storage space in its cloud "
Well duh, you gave them the space, don't come complaining that they are using it. If I had availed myself of that cloud platform, I would currently have 61.6GB stored up there (the total of all my family picture data on my Photo disk) and I would be wondering just how much this change would impact me.
As usual, something offered up as free is now being taken advantage of to tie users into paying. A despicable move, even if it had been forewarned.
Honestly, people should stop falling for all that free crap - it's just a bait and switch.
and these, currently, go for approx. 35 quid (ok, double that for this vulgar 5-letter word that with b....). But this solution is for old farts, you know, baby boomers and such relics (did you have electricity when you went to school dad?) who use those... computer thingies and gloat they can "type" on their "keyboards" and send "eeeemails". So uncool, so unlike "swipe press done" or better still "ok google". Googlegooglegoogle.
If you run Owncloud/Nextcloud on your hosting or home server, there's an Android app that auto-uploads photos to your personal cloud as they are taken, no big corp needs to scan them and sell/give them to Getty Images on the sly, or use them to boost visits to their site while you provide them with free content.
Those clouds do videos as well, and plays them if right there if you send a link to someone else.
You can also use Owncloud/Nextcloud to safely store other things you may need from time-to-time, like scans of driver's license and so forth, so instead of emailing them you can send the recipient link to download what is needed.
Thus, cloud services without Google's less-than-divine intervention. It's almost like you don't need Google's "free" stuff at all.
"You can also use Owncloud/Nextcloud to safely store other things you may need from time-to-time, like scans of driver's license and so forth, so instead of emailing them you can send the recipient link to download what is needed."
You are advocating that people post sensitive documents to a service to store them? Are you nuts? How many times each month do you see that yet another company has had PII hacked from their servers? Personally, I see lots of that.
If somebody legitimately needs my DL or passport info, I'll be standing there in front of them making sure they only get what they need and aren't making copies. I don't want to be spending the next several years trying to sort out identity theft issues I helped along.
Couldn't agree more with your points Pascal.
There's too much expectation that everything, everywhere is free, it really is no surprise to me that this will become a paid service.
It's much like the Unlimited data mobile telco's are touting in the UK, until you read the AUP and see what Unlimited Data really means to them, it's a far cry from the view of a consumer.
Ahh well, why you'd need to store your personal photo's etc. in the cloud has always escaped me. Haven't people seen enough celebrity boobs to realise it's relatively easy to access! :)
I remember when dial-up ISPs used to give out free Internet access, and then complain when you used it all the time.
And I think it's very much that the consumer knows the deal exactly - and doesn't care. They got to have huge amounts of storage for nothing, and now if they haven't used it, well who cares about the change? And if they have used it, they'll go elsewhere or say "$1.99 a month? Sure, I used it enough to justify that".
So long as you think of these things as long-term free trials, not lifetime free unlimited storage, then you're fine. And I imagine there are thousands of people who got a Google account as a student, then kept it because it was free, and it saved them having to pay for the basics for all those years and may now be in a position to pay or move elsewhere.
I've had a Google account since they were a tiny, tiny company that nobody had heard of. Same way that I had a Hotmail when it was still HoTMaiL. At one point Hotmail went non-free, and I looked at it and said "Yeah, I use you enough" and paid for it. The fact that later the paid tier became inferior and wouldn't let you collect your email via POP3/IMAP was what made me move away (I assume they've reverted that). I moved to GMail, but I've never given Google a penny for that account that I've been using for all those years as storage, document editing and email. If they said "It's no longer free" tomorrow then I'd probably hop straight on their lowest paid tier. If they raised prices stupidly, then no I wouldn't and I'd seek alternatives.
It's not that people are falling for it. People are taking advantage of it while it's free.
When I moved out a few years ago and had to live on my own for the first time, I was totally strapped for cash (you know it's bad when you have to knock up a spreadsheet with checkboxes and see what you can afford to keep paying and what you can't). Pretty much, there's nothing IT on that spreadsheet beyond an Internet connection and a phone, because everything else was unnecessary.
And that first year was TIGHT... so I signed up for a bunch of trials, free accounts, etc. I got free TV for a year (TVPlayer). I got free Netflix for six months. I got free promotions for everything from laundry detergent to combs. I started free trials of computer games and then cancelled them before the end of the trial period and play through the entire game in that time. I did everything I could to "abuse" free offers, coupons, discounts, trials and freebies. The time spent doing so was well worth it and my entire "entertainment" budget pre-moving disappeared off my spreadsheet for over a year.
Now that I'm settled and don't have huge moving expenses etc. to pay off still, I've paid for the things I wanted to keep, and let the rest fall by the wayside. I replaced TVPlayer with a Raspberry Pi and a DVB-T hat with tvHeadend. Does a better job, but cost me £50 or so and a few hours to set up. I turned off Netflix entirely, I didn't use it much.
People aren't stupid. They know free services aren't free forever. But while they are, you can use them - and whether you're skint, or just very careful with money, or even find it enjoyable to do whatever you can to save money, they can be a great boon. The companies aren't stupid, they know most people won't pay, and they know they can't offer a free service forever. But if the free service operates only as a "Hey look, our services are great" and then even 1% of users pay for them later, it's probably profitable. It doesn't cost Google that much to store a few million free accounts, and it introduces companies etc. to them because people get the free account at home and then say "I know what we can use".
I'll be honest with you - my email actually is on a hosted domain that goes to a dedicated server that I rent, that filters all my email for 20-year-old business and personal domains and then passes it onto an email account of my choice. That used to be my Hotmail. Nowadays it's my GMail. If they suddenly start charging, that will go elsewhere. I'm paying for the rest of the system, but not the end destination. And if it really came to it I can set up dovecot and a SquirrelMail in about an hour. I just can't be bothered.
Free services have their function. It's just not something to rely on permanently. But I don't think anybody really does.
> Why would i even consider cloud storage.
Remote access from any connected device and ease of sharing are two possible reasons. These may or may not apply to you.
> I have these backed up in multiple locations.
Do you have any *remote* backups? What happens if your house floods or burns down, for instance? This is one reason why our business data is replicated across about a dozen devices in three countries.
"Remote access from any connected device"
Many don't need any device to access a whole photo catalog. Photos that are shared can be published through specific means. My photo catalogs are indexed in Lightroom, and most photos are RAW images with specific Lightroom edits. To be shown to others they need to be properly exported.
"Do you have any *remote* backups?"
Remote backups are usually a good idea when made on specific backup services with the right SLAs, TOS and privacy expectations. That said, there are countries where houses are not made of wood and very rarely burn (and more even so completely), and floods strictly depends on where you live. Sure, there could still be other issues like thieves, etc. An off-site back does not need to be a cloud backup, though.
"Do you have any *remote* backups? What happens if your house floods or burns down, for instance? This is one reason why our business data is replicated across about a dozen devices in three countries."
If the data in two countries is wiped out by common disaster, you may have more problems than the need to get your data back.
I use a family member's top shelf in a guest room closet as my remote back up. The drives are boxed up (and some DVD's) with a note on top of what's in them and a return label. In a day or two, I can have 8tb of data returned if my house burns to the ground. Given the destruction of my home, I'm not bothered about the waiting time as I have other things to deal with. I can spend a day or two to retrieve the drives myself. If something happens to both places, the backups aren't going to be an issue. Much of my work was registered with the US Copyright office up until they changed their limits so it's protected, but in the last couple of years only my published work has had regular registrations. Since I limit access to my images, there is less of a chance of it being infringed and my having to deploy the blood sucking lawyers. A cloud burst might mean a lot of work and cost on my part. My portfolio images are hosted on my own server and I can furnish the URL to anybody I want to have see it. Most of them are on my website anyway. What isn't online isn't stuff I want to show.
I also have lots of code that I'm not going to put on a cloud server.
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I'd be surprised by this development, but the only thing stopping me is my complete lack of surprise.
And I don't have much sympathy, either: I've lost count of the number of times I've warned people that their stuff stored in the cloud isn't under their control, only to have them shrug at me and tell me I'm paranoid.
Careful with that attitude. Intelligence gathering is a tedious and at the same time fascinating thing. You take little snippets of information, utterly irrelevant by themselves, but you start putting them together and a picture forms, increasingly detailed the more information you have.
I think in the beginning they needed to quickly build a large corpus of images to train their AIs on. As they waited for more and more users to get on board they let the first ones to upload as much as they could to build such corpus. Now they probably have enough, and need more diversity to train AIs. So fewer users with a lot of photos are less useful than more users with fewer photos, while also saving on storage and monetizing those users still wanting to use their system.
As usual, those who believed to be the users where actually the product, in this case the soil to build the Google AIs. Even it they don't use the image directly for target advertising, there's a lot the can learn and build from a such large corpus of images to be used in their products.
Can always be taken away. I don't feel so bad about Googles move here as I did when Microsoft sold me 15gb one drive storage as part of the purchase of one of their phones, and then took it back because a guy in Australia wanted to test the limits of the unlimited cloud storage he'd bought from them. Haven't we all lived long enough to regard a free service as provisional?
Paid for things can be taken away too, if they're provided by unaccountable behemoth corporations that don't care about the rights and convenience of their customers. There are numerous accounts of "cloud services" from IoT to storage and backup that have been discontinued at short notice because they ceased to be sufficiently profitable.
If you don't control it, you can't trust it.
I'm not sure why you added the qualification. Small corporations and even individuals can also take away things that have been paid for, particularly if they go broke. And yes, I speak (sadly) from personal experience.
"...when Microsoft sold me 15gb one drive storage as part of the purchase of one of their phones, and then took it back"
Took back?
I still have the extra 15 GB "Camera Roll" space in my Onedrive even though my Lumia 820 was destroyed maybe 4 years ago. Same with the missus - she also has the 30GB Onedrive even though her Lumia 640 (?) was recycles a couple years ago.
15GB is not really very much in when lots of phones can now record 4K video. I've got a 6 minute video recorded at my mothers 70th which is almost 1GB in of itself. And Google have been pushing Google Photos as a way to 'free up space' on your device by uploading everything to Google and then deleting them from your phone.
Its not really clear from what Google have announced are the going to continue offering the option to store at 'High quality' so you can store more in the 15GB or will that option be ending so they can then force you to pay for Google one?
to share your photos with other people or other devices, I don't see the point of such cloud storage. USB sticks with the same capacity are dirt cheap and you aren't beholding to a third party to look after your files. 1Tb drives are now commonplace and cheap giving you a vast amount of storage. If you are worried about data loss, buy two and keep one (encrypted) in the garden shed or car to mitigate the risk if your house burns down.
"...share your photos with other people..."
Ah, you have hit the nail on the head there.
I have, for the time being, an account on Photobucket. I got it because a forum I was a member of did not have a facility to post photos directly, you had to link to them. As I was doing a project on refurbishing a 1853 Enfield Rifle I needed somewhere to put photos of my progress so that I could include them in my reports.
At the time Photobucket had a policy of allowing linking of photos hosted on their site and all was well. I recently started getting e-mails from Photobucket saying that I had to take out a paid subscription if I wanted to continue linking my photos. I contacted them and told them that I had used them as a convenience and did not care if they closed my account. I have made alternative arrangement for the photos on the project to be housed elsewhere so Photobucket can do their worst.
Bait and switch is one thing but when the offering has no value it does not work.
> to share your photos with other people or other devices, I don't see the point of such cloud storage. USB sticks with the same capacity are dirt cheap and you aren't beholding to a third party to look after your files.
A very common usecase is to automatically back up your images almost as soon as they're taken.
Particularly useful if you're on holiday or similar.
I switched to using self-hosted Nextcloud for this though when I hit the "hi res" capacity limit on Google.
I'd actually have been happy to pay for more storage from them, but I'm on a (free) legacy apps for domains accounts, and they won't let you pay them money without first converting to their newer paid model.
So, to buy an extra GB of storage I'd have had to agree to shell out every month for each email account etc in my domain.
billions (if not trillions) of photos and videos on google servers, think of the ways to monetize it! Face recognition. Mood recognition. Behavioural patterns. Lifestyle patterns. Trends in fashion. Family relationships. Business ideas. Traffic and crime hotspots. Births, marriages, divorces and deaths, all accounted for. A quote, perhaps ;)
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
Somewhat ironically, google didn't have to invade our lives, we welcomed them with open arms and banners: YES, PLEASE, FUCK US REAL GOOD, WE LIKE IT NOW, NEVER MIND CONSEQUENCES!
well, FREE SEX is GREAT, eh?! It's only when you can't abort the fruit of your relationship that grows into something you never imagined (but google did!) which comes back to bite you in the ass later...
Which, kind of, reminds me of what I heard on radio recently (not in the UK, mind), when a professor was asked what he thinks of people who wear face coverings that don't cover their nose. He said: "It is as useful as a condom put over your balls". There was a good few seconds radio silence, they all must have been choking in that studio, while I blinked, unsure whether I really heard what I just heard.
Trouble is, there is no google-proof condom, regardless of how you apply it, unless you abstain from online relashionship aka experience completely, for life. Otherwise, just lie back and think of England. Wasn't so bad, eh?
until they suddenly aren't in two years time. I've had a gmail account since it launched, and can remember when the storage limits were so small that I had to periodically delete stuff to free up space. Then they made a big fanfare about announcing how unlimited it suddenly was. And now we arrive back at the point where we have to periodically delete stuff to free up space. Unless we pay the monthly data ransom of course.
The Cloud : Hand over your money or your data gets it!
IANAL, but does that not sail close to tying of one service to another?
It may well be that conditioning the use of a service is associated with the purchase of another item from the same vendor is legal but I wonder. Given the EU's attitude to competition rules it may be that Google find themselves on the naughty step, again.
Given our Beloved Leader, Johnson's attitude to "private enterprise" (see also Covid contracts to friends of friends) I do not expect the UK to take any action over this.
>>The internet goliath also claimed it doesn't mine documents, email, photos, and videos stored in accounts for targeted advertising
I suppose this means all the machine learning models are mature and the existing data sets in their system is diverse enough to train for the future.
On a plus note, this does mean they don't care about individual or personal machine learned services such as face recognition. I suppose the brand damage of doing that surreptitiously means only Amazon (for your new shiny) or Facebook (we're sorry, so sorry) will participate.
> There are three different plans, ranging from $1.99 to $9.99 per month to add 100GB to 2TB of space, or $19.99 to $99.99 if you decide to pay a lump sum for a whole year.
Infomaniak's kDrive (a custom Nextcloud deployment) starts at €4.99/mo for 2 TB. No, I am not associated with them.
"The internet goliath also claimed it doesn't mine documents, email, photos, and videos stored in accounts for targeted advertising."
New Google One Free! Simply sign up and allow Google to mine the documents, email, photos, and videos stored in your account, and not only will your free account revert to having unlimited storage, but we'll send you the best targeted ads you've ever received! Unlimited free storage is here again!!!
If I did pay.. What do I get for it other than some extra storage?
Could I use my own domain name? Could I opt out of Google using my data for their own whims? The capacity to raise, chase up and..... *gasp* have resolved an issue with any of Googles services covered by the charge?
If not then sticking with my current usage (a.k.a. Only have a Gmail account because of Android, and even then I never use it for anything other than what apps I have and a couple of passwords for sites I don't care for.)
There's a hell of a lot of 'upto' in there. Also very vague over what defines 'expert help' other than a Google looking phone icon (oh, sorry was that dark pattern supposed to make me think it meant I actually got phone support? Call it out in writing or I don't belive you).
Cynical, moi?
So, I've been meaning, for ages, to write my article about "Get unlimited Google Drive space at a fraction of the cost of dedicated Cloud storage", with the caveat that you need a bit of IT knowledge. But, I'm a lazy fuck so never got round to writing it. Also wanted a video for my YouTube channel.
My point? I got my GSuite bill for this month and it said "Google Workspace". What? When did that happen? They've changed their name? Hmm.
(I'm dragging this out for dramatic effect). I once worked at a place that had GSuite. So when left I purchased my own basic package with 3 users, so I could keep up with how it all worked. Eventually stopped playing and the 3 users sat doing nothing for months. I realised I should delete those users and just keep the admin account. That way I can still look at some of the admin stuff but not play with GAM (for managing permissions between users etc). Fine. Then looked at more of the packages. I could pay for GSuite Business and it would only be slightly more a month, yet, I'd get unlimited drive space. Ooo, I'm not a fan of Cloud storage but maybe I could use it as an offsite backup option. I have all my drives I backup too, and I try to, unsuccessfully, put the in the small fireproof save I have. But offsite would also be a good idea.
I did the maths and with the cost of the hosting, the cost of the domain and the cost of GSuite Business (I already have the knowledge to do the setup), it works out much cheaper per year to get unlimited drive space, than paying for Google Drive on it's own with 2TB, same with Amazon and Microsoft offerings.
Anyway. I look up when did they change to Google Workspace only to find a rant happening on Reddit (which I still don't know how to use properly) where they've pointed out they also done away with the unlimited drive space per user on the, what was GSuite Business package. For unlimited drive space you now need to pay for Enterprise!
WTF!!!! How the fuck do they get away with this shit? How is that going to affect resellers "Yes, sorry, I know I said to you last year that the best package deal for you per month, per user, would be GSuite Business but now, several months later Google have decided to scrap it. If you want unlimited you'll now have to pay an arm and a leg for Enterprise, even though you are a small business".
I've also read, now, if you are a business that was trying to keep costs down by only pay for the Basic package per user, if you have 300 users or more, you'll be now forced, with the only other option being to cancel, onto the Enterprise package.
It's BULLSHIT. When will bean counters in business understand the Cloud is actually more fucking expensive than on prem. A mix of the too is good but going full Cloud is a fucking BAD idea. And Google have just proven this.
“it works out much cheaper per year to get unlimited drive space, than paying for Google Drive on it's own with 2TB, same with Amazon and Microsoft offerings.“
Last time I compared which was over a year ago, MS Office Home was just £80 pa and includes upto 6Tb OneDrive (6 accounts of 1Tb each).
And my family gets Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Publisher installed on their PCs or Macs, and online too. Vastly superior offering and ROI compared to Giggle.
A microSd slot can give you up to 1 TB of storage. It's generally faster than a cell signal, a LOT more reliable, a LOT more secure, and it doesn't randomly ask for more money.
What could you do with a 1 TB card?
- High resolution OSM maps of all of Earth with hill shade and contour line overlays : ~ 370 GB
- Entire Wikipedia from Kiwix in your language: 20 to 100 GB
- 100 music albums in FLAC: ~ 30 GB (CD) or 85 GB (studio)
- Back up your real camera on vacation: ~ 3 GB/day
- Emergency laptop backup while away from home: ~ 500 GB
- Store 20000 cell phone photos: 160 GB
Best of all, you're not worried about running out of space. You can't do it on a no-slot Pixel, of course.
Just seen news today and came here to find was reported ages ago.
These big companies are doing this more and more. Tie people into the free offer then once enough people are so buried in it, take the free offer away and make them pay.
Arseholes.
More reason I hate the cloud and try to storage as much as I can locally.
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