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PSA: Google Photos Unlimited Storage Ends Next Month, Here's How to Export Your Pictures to iCloud
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Three things come to mind,
1. Sharing, being able to easily share photos with anyone easily, no lock in to the Apple ecosystem.
2. Ability to display photo albums in Google Home Hubs, love seeing pictures on my devices around the house.
3. Biggest one, the best photo tagging, i.e. metadata. Being able to easily group people using the best AI is simply amazing in Google Photos and beats out all other photo managers imo. The search capability this provides as well is hands down the best around. When your taking hundreds/thousands of pictures a year this is HUGE!
So yeah, much better then iCloud.
If I could keep my 10s of old thousands of photos in Apple but not have them show up on my phone that would be great.
Bruh. Any service you use gets free data mining from you. If they do AI training with customer data that comes gratis too. You can't escape the data mining.
Metadata.
Sometimes I cannot remember where, when and which devices I took picture from. Google Photo will able to provide information.
If I want to go that location again, I can directly go to Google Maps for navigation. I can also make photo album, order print from directly from Google Photo app.
I can also use Google Lens to identify something I don't know. For example, I am able to tell what kind of flower just by taking picture and using Google Lens directly from Google Photo app.
When I need to send large amount of photo to someone, simply select all of them, create hyperlink and send this link to person I wish to share.
You can't do any from iCloud.
Google Photos is a far better option for those who are ecosytem agnostic imo. I have PCs, Macs, Android, iPads, and my kids have iPhones. Google Photos plays well regardless of environment.
I mean if you have a good example of where Google did you wrong let me know. The argument that they use some of your data to serve you ads is a justifiable cost to otherwise free software to me.
I found this story a bit confusing. You will still get 15GB free storage on Google but only 5GB free storage on iCloud. Also all photos uploaded before June 1 this year will still be available under the free unlimited storage option. Only makes sense to move if you have more than 15GB of photos and need a paid plan.
No one is forcing me. All I'm saying is that they lure people to use it by offering it for free, then after some years of developing and testing, it's time to monetise it - as always. They never stated "limited time only" Ever Because it suited their marketing. So the "free" option is usually bullsh*t, and it stays free when there is on potential for making money, otherwise, nothing will ever stay free, and I don't expect it to be free, but I just don't like this kind of strategy.
Now, about living without it - I don't know anybody who cannot actually live without, it was just an expression. Although many people who are not tech savvy will be forced to pay. Migrating thousands of photos aren't easy, and Google definitely won't help with that. Even if you download all you gigabytes, you'll loose all the albums and everything. It's not that they will simply deliver your data nicely cataloged, you will get a zip file filled with mess. The same happened to Flickr not so long ago. They asked everybody to pay or download all your data, and you'd get it in dozens of zip files, all filled with completely random images named like this: "2sdfsadf8s5f587as6f6fs6fas98f6fas8d6s6f9fsf7.jpeg". So in order to catalog it again, you'd need to preview every single file and put it right where it belongs, which would take you months! And it's done this way only to make your life more difficult, so in the end you say "meh... I don't have the time for this, I will pay", and that's the whole point.
I understand you don't/won't take effort to shape your future. I understand then it is "no big deal to you". I am good with you having that concept and acting as you deem fit.
Hopefully you can ALSO learn to understand that great things in human history are not made by people like you, but rather by people who do own how their future shapes up. They don't speak words of "inevitability" and instead speak words that match their actions of change. For those people, privacy matters.
I think you are missing the point of the privacy issue. You and the data collected from your photos IS being sold on the internet. I could by that data tomorrow if I wanted. There is a VERY large world out there of data collection that I don't think you are aware of. During the pandemic when companies were struggling, I was pitched HARD on just to what level of detail I could pinpoint people to sell more. Its not about a data breach to some hacker, its about creating a digital fingerprint of you and then using that to try and manipulate your behavior. And to anyone who says "well that won't work on me", lol you keep being naive! If it didn't work, billions wouldn't be poured into continued development of the technology. They are getting 10x back in increased sales. It works and it is manipulative and (personal opinion here) not moral.
Since I don't know everything about Google Photos, I am glad for your response. However, it also seems like your information on iCloud Photos is a bit outdated.
1. You can easily link share anything from iCloud to anyone (even outside of Apple's ecosystem) since iOS 13 I believe.
2. This is nothing I have ever used, but seems like a neat feature.
3. I find that iCloud tags photos very well, I can easily find photos of for example cats by just searching for it. Faces are also recognized and sorted into albums for viewing. I also get recommendations, photos taken this day, auto-made memories and more.
So yeah, I still think Google's tagging and search is probably a bit better but not a huge difference. They seem quite equal in functionality.
For all we know, Google could have their own image encoding and translate from that when the user requests an image.
Sadly, managing it yourself still seems like the best option, at least for me. I thought storage was supposed to be cheap, but none of these cloud storage options are even remotely cheap. And I've had the same iPhoto library auto-migrated repeatedly since 2003, longer than any of these services (even Flickr) has lived.
Backups are always annoying, but I need to keep backups of other stuff either way, so it's no added effort.
I can think of at a few reasons iCloud is a better choice than Google Photos:
1) Google has a habit of discontinuing their products and services.
2) Google has a poor record as far as user privacy is concerned.
3) iCloud integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Apple Ecosystem. I can shoot a photo on my iPhone and it is automatically available on my iPad or Mac for editing.
Apple One bundles carefully designed to not save anyone money.
I'm sorry, please tell me how you can buy "MY" Google Photos data tomorrow? I would love to know that! Your talking about audience segmentation and targeting for Ad's. None of my photo's are leaving Google or being sold which is where the privacy aspect would mater to me. Do I care if I get some targeted Ad's, no not really. I consider that my payment for using free services. Again if you don't like it, do what you do, don't use the service. There are tons of options out there, we all have a choice.
I have amazon and it’s free as long as you are a prime customer for photos and 5gb of videos I think. I was doing backups on both google and amazon so now I’m just going to keep uploading new photos to amazon.
You could I guess, but that would create a nightmarish divided photo library, with zero usability advantages.