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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] mdeslaur|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philjohn|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cdnsteve|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veidr|10 years ago|reply
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:
[1]: https://medium.com/backchannel/bradley-horowitz-says-that-go...[+] [-] TorKlingberg|10 years ago|reply
* Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, ...
[+] [-] johannes1234321|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob-alarcon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arkanosis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moskie|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grkvlt|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrb|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] x5n1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudus|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soylentcola|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sz4kerto|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veratyr|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheshire137|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chevalier|10 years ago|reply
- - - - -
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?
[+] [-] fenomas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joefkelley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Achshar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgefrick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbrother|10 years ago|reply
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-wort...
[+] [-] notatoad|10 years ago|reply
that's one of the selling points of the new google photos app.
[+] [-] fuzzywalrus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fapjacks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msoad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moeedm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|10 years ago|reply
Seems Flickr doesn't really examine the image, just the extension (.gif, .jpg, etc). I wonder what Google plans to do.
[+] [-] kolev|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veidr|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberdasher|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolite|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilgulecha|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drb311|10 years ago|reply
I'll be glad when they set Photos free from Google+. I hope they do something with Hangouts too.
[+] [-] FlaceBook|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayli|10 years ago|reply