The countdown is over. There is exactly a month left until Google Photos offers free unlimited storage in a paid service and I don’t know what to do with my life. Literally. At the time of this writing, I have 138,587 photos and videos stored. The first one dates from December 2000, 20 years of memories, which will soon be said. But if i tell you the truth i have so many pictures i am lazy to move them to another service, and let’s not talk about buying a NAS and building my own cloud.
Google played us by announcing that Google Photos was going to get paid and those who, like me, have stored our entire life in its service have faced a crossroads: Are we paying or are we looking for alternatives? I’ve been thinking for months about where my photos will go from June 1 and as the date draws closer, I see it more clearly: I will end up paying.
Google, it’s not done
I don’t think anyone wants Google Photos to get paid. What Google has done is promise lifetime service, let’s fill it with our memories and take it away. A low blow in its own right.
Apparently, they hadn’t fully planned for people to use unlimited free service en masse, which is also preinstalled on all Android phones. You can’t tell.
In their statement, they assured that 28,000 million photos and videos are downloaded per week
We can regret anything we want (I did it and continue to do it), but the reality is that in a month, Google turns off the tap and neither I nor anyone else will change it. And now what?
Option evaluation: all is well
As I said at the start, since that fateful announcement, I have been wondering what I’m going to do from June 1. One thing is clear to me and that is I will not save the photos I downloaded to physical disks. I remember with horror the endless lists of folders and subfolders in which nothing could be found. I don’t even want to know how many hours I’ll have spent organizing photos. Now what I want is to forget all this and ask them to do it for me, which I had achieved with Google Photos.
The only free and unlimited storage alternative is offered by Amazon. The problem is, it only works with photos, with videos up to 5GB only, and I shoot quite a few videos. Videos don’t worry me as much as neither the search engine nor the app is as powerful as the ones we have in Google. It’s not (only) a question of money, it’s a question of functionality and with Amazon, I would take a step back.
One of the alternatives that appeals to me the most (or rather, it seduced me). Yes, these are physical disks, but there are manufacturers like Synology that offer their own face tagging image organizer software and more, so this idea started to take center stage in my mind. . Problem: it’s not cheap. The model that was recommended to me the most is the Synology DS220 + and it costs 362 dollars to which must be added what the hard drives cost. For example, this Seagate 4 TB goes up to 175 dollars and you would have to buy two. The total is over 700 dollars. Yes, I know I would write them off eventually, but they’re still 700 dollars to avoid paying a much lower amount if I decide to stay on Google.
Then there is the matter of uploading all photos and videos and uploading them to the NAS. Here I have to make a clarification, and that is that even though I uploaded everything to Google Photos, I also keep the originals of a lot of my photos on physical disks (yes, the ones I have so many passwords for. -time). On the discs I have photos taken with SLR, most of them in RAW, from trips and photographic projects that I wish I had as original. I count this because the process It wouldn’t be as easy as downloading from here and downloading there, but you will have to combine everything
Going to another service like OneDrive or Dropbox, I don’t even think about it. You would lose the potential of Google Photos and keep paying. If I want to stay in the cloud, that’s why I stay with Google. And here we come to the point where the idea of paying is starting to sound good.
What if I stay?
Currently, I signed up for the Google One 200 GB plan for 29.99 dollars per year, but that would clearly be insufficient (in fact, I already have it at 82% capacity). The best option would be to take out the 2TB plan, with which you would pay $ 99.99 per year. Those are 8.33 dollars per month, more or less three times what I currently pay, but it’s not 700 dollars. It would be nice if Google offered an intermediate plan, but there isn’t one; or 200 GB or 2 TB, period.
If I think about the long term, there is a problem and it is that these 2 TB are not infinite. If I continue to store photos (which I will obviously do), maybe one day I’ll need 10TB and it’s already going to 50 dollars per month. How long does it take to refuel? Guess that with this tool you can find out, but in my case Google says it can’t calculate it.
Neither solution is ideal. Ideally, Google would keep its promises in 2015 when the service launches, but that won’t happen, so here I am, unsure of what to do.
Neither solution is ideal. Ideally, Google would keep its promises in 2015 when the service launches, but that won’t happen, so here I am, unsure of what to do. What I do know is that every time I go to Google Photos to search for something and find it, the first time I feel a pang in my heart. The service works so well and I got so used to it that changing anywhere feels like a mountain.
La respuesta que se merece una jugada como esta es que todos nos vayamos y Google Fotos acabe siendo el desierto que en su día fue Google+, pero seamos realistas, aunque haya un éxodo de usuarios muchos se van a quedar, y puede que yo sea una of them. What are you going to do on June 1?