New Storage Solution

Before I get into this subject, I would like to note that it was surprisingly difficult to come up with a title for this blog that was not click-baity. Furthermore, when I was working on an earlier draft of this blog, I kicked my surge protector, my computer shut off, and I lost about 30 minutes worth of writing because Squarespace doesn’t have an auto save feature in its blog editor even though it is 2023.

I’ve been using Google Photos as the primary online sharing service for my photography since 2017, and I am finally done with it. Like most photographers, I keep my photography on a local hard disk as well as in the cloud. I use a hard disk that is separate from my computer and stands next to my monitor on my desk. It is my hope that should an emergency occur and I need to get out of my apartment quickly, I can easily throw my photos into a bag without too much hassle, it is only about the size of 3 DVD cases. It is both practical and inexpensive. Until fairly recently I thought I had a similar situation with my digital storage solution: Google Photos. In the beginning, I would upload all of the pictures I took as jpegs, then select my favorites and add them to another album that I would then share. I loved it, not only was the service easy to use on the app as well as the desktop, but it was extremely effective for sharing photos with just about anyone your heart desired. For a period, I also really liked the editing suite native to Google Photos itself. As I grew as a photographer, my process evolved. In about 2020, I started making my selections before editing and uploading them. This slowed the volume of photos being uploaded, though I was unknowingly starting to approach a storage limit.

I don’t actually know how many photos I have on Google Photos. It says 70,000+ but who knows the true number. On my hard drive my photography takes up roughly 1.5 TB. From the day I started using Google Photos it was extremely convenient as a young photographer because it would store an unlimited amount of photos at the 16 megapixel size without any charges. If you wanted to store higher quality images, they would count against your 15GB data limit from Google Drive. In Summer of 2021, this arrangement changed. Moving forward, all photos, regardless of size would be charged against the 15 GB data cap. In order to make things fit as best they can, Google started compressing the Hell out of images. As an example from my account: for a 1.72 MB jpeg, Google will compress it by more than an order of magnitude to 149 KB. Predictably, this level of compression is highly noticeable. I am now actively embarrassed to share photos on Google because the compression artifacts are so bad they make my pictures look like they were shot on early 2010’s iPhones. Due to some pretty intense career changes in my life and a severe reduction in my photography hobby as a result, I was late to recognize this issue and now I am finally getting around to addressing it.

If Google Photos is no longer my perfect solution and is now actually a pretty bad solution, what am I going to do? I am not an Apple user, so switching to relying entirely on the iCloud is not possible for me. I would rather not add another monthly bill to my burden so DropBox and Flickr were not ideal either. OneDrive isn’t really ideally suited to photo storage and organization as its scope is considerably broader. The magic solution which has presented itself to me is: Amazon Photos. I have been a Prime member since 2013 or so, but it was only recently that I realized what a deal I was getting with the Amazon Photo service. You are entitled to unlimited photo storage with no resolution limit or internal compression going on. A 5.92 MB jpeg exists on Amazon’s servers as a 5.92 MB jpeg. It may not seem like much if you are not much of a photographer, but I find it really nice to put some of my creative work somewhere and be able to come back to it without any degradation later. There is a 5GB limit for video uploads, but I can live with that as I am not a videographer. It is not entirely perfect, the app is not great and the website could use a bit of polish too; despite these little problems, I am very pleased overall that my photography has found a new digital home. All that is left now is to upload the darn thing.

What is my postmortem assessment of Google Photos? Well it would seem to me that Google was hoping to be able to use Google Photos to track its users in pretty intense ways, some may remember the incredible image recognition abilities of the service. I always sort of assumed that may have been the case; simultaneously, I though it was something of a loss leader for them to combat and reduce the prevalence of the iCloud. It might have been fulfilling that role in an inadvertent manner, but it would seem that Google was likely trying to mine some pretty serious user data; it became no longer profitable, perhaps due to changes in laws regarding how companies can track users, and they decided to considerably reduce the scope of the service. It is very disappointing, because not only do I feel a bit “used” as a former user of the product, but it brings to mind an all too familiar feeling of this era. This feeling that all sorts of everyday things used to be either higher quality or less expensive. There are all sorts of factors at play that cause this, but it is a grossly depressing feeling. If we want to say that this is another case of diminishing returns and reducing product quality, maybe we can take a bit of solace in the fact that there was another great solution out there waiting for me. Hopefully we will all be so lucky the next time we have to come to grips with something you had come to trust and rely on suddenly dropping in quality, with a relatively quick and painless alternative we can switch to.