[superflyguy]

They're giving 3 month's notice of the automatic deletion of any photos over the 1000 allowed free ones. Not much time and sure to catch out people who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos). I wonder if they'd be better of holding onto the soon to be deleted content for a lot longer, as they're hardly likely to go bust continuing to host it a little longer. I guess moving them to a non-free account would feel a like like extortion but surely this is worse - photos which were uploaded many years ago lost forever.

Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.

[smacktoward]

I would feel better if they just grandfathered in any existing photos and made the change to all new uploads going forward. I'm generally OK with the reasons behind the move, but having people lose data because they were using the product in a way they were explicitly told was OK to use it at that time leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[ghostly_s]

Yeah, two months' notice does not meet my definition of "ample time to upgrade to Pro [...] or download your photos and videos.*" And it's scummy to hide the timeline in a tiny footnote. I'm sure plenty of these people are using it as a backup solution and never even visiting the site. Totally fine with the decision not to support those users anymore, but it's not reasonable to nuke their data in 3 months because some email notice got lost in their inbox.

[stevenwoo]

It took 3 days to get my data download request response, I have about ninety 300 megabyte zip files of photos, and at my maximum download rate it would take a couple of weeks to download, plus there's an unspecified time limit where the zip files are deleted from their servers and one has to request the data again.

[thimabi]

> Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.

I'm actually quite fearful of the day when Google will end its generous offer... We often see cloud providers struggling to cope with “unlimited” free plans, perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt and rely on local backups precisely to avoid the quasi-extortion that comes when the “unlimited cloud” mantra goes downhill.

[chiefalchemist]

AFAIK -

1)Gmail is free but does have a storage limit.

2) You can have an unlimited # of photos but not at full/original resolution. If you want full/orig you have to pay.

p.s. "...perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt..." Do you mean you haven't been doing this already? :)

[thimabi]

Indeed, Gmail does have a limit, but Google Photos still lets you upload “unlimited” photos on that lower quality plan — which is more than enough for a vast majority of users.

I've began noticing the issues of large-scale cloud storage with the OneDrive fiasco, so I learned my lessons the hard way over there. But unfortunately too many people remain invested in such ecosystems and have no idea of the risks involved...

[tomjen3]

They downsample the images, which is why I don't use it. Gmail is large, but not unlimited.

Besides the gigabyte price of a harddrive is about 0.02[0], so if google makes a dollar more in advertising it can afford to store quite a bit...

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

[petepete]

I use Google for my 'main' feed of photos just because Photos is an excellent product and I don't mind if they are downsampled for sharing or posting online.

I also keep all of all of my processed RAW files on Amazon Prime Photos. I never log into the app though, it's simply just my offsite backup. My NAS automatically syncs to Amazon Photos weekly.

[fma]

I agree it's not enough time, and is screwing over the least technical users. Even if they don't want to actively host photos, they could archive it so when users log in they can say "Hey all the photos are in long term archival...download them now, or pay for an account".

Amazon offers unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime users...I think I'll move my items there.

[Jedd]

> Not much time and sure to catch out people ...

We live in a world where most people get twitchy if they haven't looked at their phone for an hour - how is 3 months notice considered so hugely unacceptable in this particular circumstance?

> ... who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos).

This really does sound like a tiny minority of Internet users - sufficient bandwidth and tech savvy to upload > 1000 photos back in the good old days - but insufficient attention, bandwidth, or local storage a decade later to host their own photos.

Just how many people are out there that uploaded to flickr / yahoo and then deleted their local copies of their photos? And how much pandering are they expecting?

"Here's a system I uploaded my most important memories to, but I only look at them every 6 months, and I didn't pay for their storage, but I'm confident that where I dumped them a decade ago will be where they'll stay forever."

[tjr]

It might be a nice Flickr feature -- even if you had no plans of leaving Flickr -- to auto-transfer all of your photos to some other storage service. Even something like Amazon Glacier, which would obviously not be a competitor to Flickr. The user would, of course, be responsible for having, maintaining, paying for, etc., this other storage service.

[onethumb]

Google's "free" unlimited photo storage comes with some costs. First, they compress and resize your photos. They're pretty public about this, and they do offer paid plans which don't do this. If you're fine with that, great, it's a good deal. Second, it's widely understood that they're likely mining data in your photos to profile and advertise to you. I can't know this for sure, since I can't see their source code, but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence. (No idea if paying for storage removes this or not).

[msravi]

> but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence

I'd be very interested in looking at this research and evidence of correlation between ads and photo data. Can you please cite the reference?

[bjelkeman-again]

You should ask someone in Europe who use the same tools to do a GDPR request on their data. Something interesting may show up.

[fyfy18]

No need, its spelled out pretty clearly in Google's TOS [0]:

> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

> Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

[0] https://policies.google.com/terms

[LiquidFlux]

Is there an obvious way to get a total count of the number of photos you currently have uploaded?

[vitaflo]

It says it right on your flickr account page, in the header.

[digianarchist]

They didn't even have export tools last time I looked. I had to use an open source java application to download my photographs.

https://flickrdownloadr.com/

[danso]

They have a one-click button in the user account settings to download all your data.

[allenbrunson]

have you actually tried it? because i did, when i was trying to close out my flickr account, and it failed miserably. every third or fourth photo downloaded was corrupted. all the free options i tried weren't much better. i wound up paying for a third-party app i used exactly once, to get all my photos out.