Google have just announced free, unlimited storage space for your photos.

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-approach-to-photos.html

Game changer? Now I just find out to see who holds the copyright on photos you upload…

This is good news.

I’ve been automatically sticking all my photos into G+ for a few years now, but it was starting to eat into my Drive storage and the older photos sat on my laptop were only backed up onto various CDs and an external hard drive.

Looks like I need to boot up the laptop and start it uploading.

Great for most people, but for ‘ power users’ using it as a back up service it’s less suitable as they compress the images.

Now I just find out to see who holds the copyright on photos you upload…

Same as most services like this; you retain copyright but also grant Google the right to do whatever they want with your images. It’s a free service and this is the price you pay if you choose to use it.

“All your photos are belong to us”

It’s picasa with a shiny new url, which had unlimited 2k images and 15GB larger ones.

Unlimited large images is nice though.

oh no, i barely understand googlePLUS photos, now theres google photos too?

im struggling to manage my photos as it is between g+ and g+photos, sharing, uploading….. will this make it easier? (please say yes) 😀

A cunning way to get people to use Google+ rather than Facebook perhaps? Does anyone regularly use Google+ ?, I have an account but I have a look once every few months.

I thought below a certain size they did anyway.

A cunning way to get people to use Google+ rather than Facebook perhaps? Does anyone regularly use Google+ ?, I have an account but I have a look once every few months.

No, they’ve realised the only good bit of Google+ was picasa so they’ve ditched the crap and relaunched it stand alone.

Does anyone regularly use Google+ ?

G+ will soon be an integral part of Google’s ranking algorithms. So major brands will shortly diving into it fully, followed by smaller brands and then (if the plan pans out) consumers will follow.

Just had a play. Not convinced. Yet

(Felt the same way when I switched from Picasa to Google+)

for ‘ power users’ using it as a back up service it’s less suitable as they compress the images.

Only if they’re over a certain size, I think?

Doesn’t say that, it explicitly says that the image stored is compressed.

It compresses if they are over 16 megapixels – this is the unlimited storage.

If you choose the uncompressed versions it goes against your storage limits.

They claim that the compression is invisible to the human eye, even zoomed in.

It compresses if they are over 16 megapixels

I don’t think that’s how it reads.

We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.

to me that says we keep the original resolution up to 16MP, above that it gets knocked back (assuming to 16MP), and then the image is stored as a compressed version.

I think for most people that will be fine, but I don’t think it’s suitable if anyone is thinking of using it specifically as a back up of originals.

I think for most people that will be fine, but I don’t think it’s suitable if anyone is thinking of using it specifically as a back up of originals.

True. Ideal for a secondary-my-house-just-burnt-down-along-with-my-nas backup though.

We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP

So that’s, what, a 5Mb .jpg or a 50Mb .raw file? If you need better than that you should probably be paying for storage, no?

No, it’s maintaining the same resolution (1024×768 for example) but applying a higher compression algorithm which will be lossy.

So I’ve already sync’d my mobile but I’ve got 10 years worth of assorted photos and videos stored on my laptop and backed up on a failing shonky NAS drive.

Duplicates in places, lots of photos I’ve taken for ebay listings that I don’t want, and other assorted rubbish.

Whats best, spend a weekend deleting rubbish and duplicates or just upload the whole lot? Will it flag duplicates or at least group them together so its easy to delete them later?

im having the usual mare with mine. problem seems to be the photos in g+photos arent the same as google photos.

1. am i right in thinking that the new google photos is the same as the ‘photos’ section of google+. and the google+ photo app is different, and will be defunct soon, so only the photos in google+ will be accessible?

2. if i go to the g+ photos app, i see some photos and video files just as blank squares or clapperboard logo. if i click them it just says ‘video processing’ and hangs. any reason for this?

3. the app suggests its finishing soon, so go to google photos instead etc etc, when i do this i expect to see the same pics as ive just seen in the app. but theres loads missing, pics and albums, theres maybe only three quarters of the albums/pics in the app. why arent they exactly the same?

thanks. im really struggling with google photos and syncing.

I’m with Cougar – what’s going on?

Why have my photos stopped auto-uploading.
Where’s the video I’ve just uploaded to Youtube gone?

I’ve been using Picasa for yonks but Google are really starting to get my goat – searching my own photos is becoming almost impossible, and I now have no idea what’s where. AAgh!

Cool Google photos trick: you can search for things at the top like “cat” or “sky” or whatever and it runs through your photos and matches them even if you haven’t tagged them using some neural net machine learny magic. Not sure how many object classes it can find but pretty impressive.

No way to organise/re-order photos in an album? Grrr.

If a company gives you something for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

Im a picasa man and have completely ignored google+ as it’s utter shit. But since google photos seems far more sensible I shall give it a go. Just trying out embedding google photo in a thread, can you guys tell me whether you can see this one please?

and if I manually change the dimensions how about this one

EDIT I can see them OK BTW, I need to check there’s no cookieboolox invovled, and the manual size changes seem to work. 640 wide has always seemed best on STW.

Yep – both are there, same size. The top one looks sharper though.

cheers onion.
The top one is at “original” pixels 845 x 634

the second one I changed the url to say w=640 but left H unchanged. The ratio seems to sort itself out I think.

The sky in both images is littered with digital artifacts. The bottom is visibly worse, though. Was the photo taken on a smartphone?

yeah, taken on a v shitty lens’d (I broke the original) Nexus 4. TBH, quality is not what Im after, but being able to link/embed photos in threads easily.

whats a digital artifcat, coz Im damned if I can see them.

“w845-h634” seems to be the default image size, but I have no idea what res my phone is taking them in.

whats a digital artifcat, coz Im damned if I can see them.

Have a look at the borders, e.g. where the mountains meet the sky. Lots of artifacts there where the colour denoise is attempting to figure out where one colour ends and the other begins.

And also colour banding in the sky, especially on the right hand side.

(I used to work for an SoC vendor that cared quite a bit about image quality, though I’m far from being an expert; that photo would have broken their hearts).

Not worked out how to post pictures from the app yet. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Due to living in ‘broadband poverty’, it’s taken about 3 days to upload 1500 photos from my phone! I like what I’m seeing so far. Might save me from using flickr as my image backup. Some of the background trickery is pretty neat as well.

Wait for a few days time when some of your photos magically get “auto-awesomed” 🙂

Muggo, there’s no way of extracting the online image url from the app you have to get it from photos.google.com

I’ve been uploading 10 years of old pictures and getting loads of new “stories” made by the magic Google machine in the sky. Quite neat to look back and I doubt I’d have looked through them otherwise.

Fastest way to upload for me is 4G – 25Mbps speed in my house.

Thanks Stoner. The copy link button had me thinking it might be possible from the app.

I’m about 3000 photos in to uploading 23000…

The search feature is freakishly amazing; I’ve tried dog, beard, glasses and they all seem to work.

The search feature is great. My “bike” album is full of lovely pictures of my old bikes.

The Google Photos app is pants now – only shows photos which are uploaded, rather than photos on your phone. I read that this is a great space saver, but what if you want to look at your photos a) before they’ve synced and b) any time you’re not online/got crap internet?

Otherwise, yay for unlimited storage.