Huh, thatās a bummer. Maybe another reason to move stuff away from Google. Question is, where to?
I see this as an inevitable thing. Free to attract, then charge to maintain service.
Storage isnāt free after all.
Iām happy to pay a couple of quid a month for Google 1, 115gb is more than enough.
Ā£16 a year is still pretty good value š¤· Plus sharing it with your family is easy enough, too.
I think if Iām paying for storage, I might as well pay for Apple One. The extras it offers are much better compared to Google 1. And with Apple I know my data is safe
The big issue is, they never said it would happen. They have trillions of photos, made a bunch of people reliant on their service then boom! It now costs money. If I knew this was coming I wouldāve never sacrificed the image quality of my photos and I wouldāve just paid for something else from the start.
Google were happy to use our photos to train their ML algorithms in exchange for free storage but now they want us to pay for the privilege too.
Iād wager your data is plenty safe with Google too. Theyāre pretty good at web services.
Agreed on this! Now we all just have years of photos not at as high a res as weād like given that we now have to pay.
Iām a pretty heavy Google user but this definitlely rings true. I get what Google does with my data and Iām okay with it because the āfreeā value they provide to me more than covers the other costs. But once I have to pay it changes the equation of what I will and wonāt put up with.
Big tech at its ābestā. And in the meantime theyāve killed off all the other photo services (except iCloud).
I know it is easy to say with hindsight, but what were you expecting from a free service? Pay for a decent service from the start, or at least keep the photos at full resolution on a device whether a computer or a phone.
I was talking about the āroyal weā.
I already pay for 2TB of iCloud Storage and for BackBlaze, as well as having multiple SSDs with my photos backed up.
As for your question, I was expecting what they were offering to stay in place. This isnāt Everpix / Picturelife / Flickr, itās the third biggest company in the world.
These days everyone expects everything to be āfreeā so if any service (Monzo, Google, IFTTT) doesnāt offer it all for free first how is it supposed to build a customer base?
Someone on here told me as much when complaining about IFTTTās shift to charge ā they would never have begun using the service they now rely on had it cost from the beginning.
Imagine Monzo offering a free current account (itās not really a good comparison because Google Photos was free whilst others were paid whereas all banks are pretty much free).
Imagine Monzo giving you 50p every month just to bank with them on top of all the features. A whole bunch of people switch to them, other banks go bust or just reposition themselves because they canāt compete. Then Monzo starts charging everyone Ā£5 a month unless your balance is below Ā£25 (any money you had in your account before the change doesnāt count but if you spend it your allowance gets reduced, of course). How would that feel?
I never expect anything for free. I just know that when I use āfreeā services, I pay with my data. I expect it and in most cases Iām happy with the trade off so I sign up.
But when I continue to have my data used but I also have to pay for the privilege, it gets harder to take. Especially if itās a move that was never advertised. Google is in an almost monopolistic situation thanks to the prior offer and now expects everyone to kiss their 
and be thankful for it.
If it was always positioned as āfree for 1 year then $xx.yy a yearā I donāt think anyone would have an issue
Whatās to say they wonāt reduce the capacity or remove the free storage for existing photos offer in the future?
I see no issues with this, I donāt store my photos as high res anyways as any device I view them on the quality is high enough to not need it.
If I did wish to store them in that format then Iād just pay for additional storage once itās needed.
Iāve just read that article, and itās not exactly the horror story it appeared. It still looks generous in comparison and if Iām reading it right, the charges donāt kick in till the 15GB has been reached.
Most folk (80%) will never hit 15GB anyway (present company excepted). And if the cost of Google One is anything to go by, the package seems great value.
The only issue then, must be the principle of āwe werenāt told this would happenā. Well thatās more palatable than āwe were told it would never happenā.
Doesnāt feel like in issueā¦
Given that Android is used by billions of people across the world, 20% is still an huge number of people and is likely to be disproportionately in the US and Europe.
Canāt speak for others but the cost isnāt really an issue for me. Itās more the strategy of eliminatiing competition before then upping prices and having a much mroe captive market with limited competition.
Iām the first to complain about Appleās measly free iCloud stoage but at least you go in knowing exactly where you stand.
I get that. But itās still a very inexpensive service.
Google Reader.
Google Wave.
Google Buzz.
Google+.
Google Reader.
No-one should ever expect a Google offering to stay in place.
Yes backblaze and wasabi are dirt cheap , but Google photos includes the client, the image sorting , link sharing , Google photos shared albums etc. For me itās worth paying for the product, plus thereās a few other Google one perks.
Google Search
Android
YouTube
Google Drive
Google Sheets
Google Docs
AdWords
Google Maps
Google Calendar
Google Translate
Iād guess plenty of people are expecting these offerings to stay in place.
I do get your point, and have been burned by Google before. But I count Google Photos in the here to stay list.
Today I started thinking about how Iād de-Google my life. I will be giving Bing and Apple Maps a go. Iāll also migrate files from Drive to iCloud, but Iām unsure how Iād go about replacing YouTube sadly
I had a half hearted attempt at de-Googling last year.
I tried different search engines, but I found Google gave me better results (I still use DuckDuckGo on my phone, though).
I have three mapping apps, Waze, Google, and Apple. They all have their good and bad points, but I find that I always come back to Google. And Waze is owned by Google, as well as becoming more and more integrated into Google Maps.
Like you, finding a replacement for YouTube is a struggle for me. But their ever more intrusive advertising is driving me away, anyway.