Google Photos - Should I upload all my photos there?

[kiemchacsu]

Hi rff fellows,

As you may all know that Google Photos is a great service that you can upload unlimited photos with reduced quality (or you pay for extra storage to upload full resolution)

While it is great with my purpose to upload family photos, I am still wondering few issues:
- can my files be there forever (well at least 20 years for instance?)
- any issue with privacy? I can see that Google detects faces/ locations and other activities on those quite accurate.
- can Google by any chance leak my photos to other 3rd party?

I appreciate all your thoughts!
Kind Regards,

 

[sevo]

While it is great with my purpose to upload family photos, I am still wondering few issues:
- can my files be there forever (well at least 20 years for instance?)

Will Google still be around, and operating in the same business, in twenty years? Given the decline of many former computer industry giants and their frequent changes of target, there are valid reasons to doubt that.

- any issue with privacy? I can see that Google detects faces/ locations and other activities on those quite accurate.
- can Google by any chance leak my photos to other 3rd party?

By their terms, Google do not share image date with third parties. They may by the contract however share anonymized metadata. Which could theoretically include broad (non individualized) classifications of the people on a photograph, and what they are doing. But there is no reason to believe that they actually do that - for one, it would be so unpopular that it would destroy the service if they got caught, for the other, they are in the business of selling contacts based on meta-metadata (that is, distributing advertising to you depending on where you travel or what you like), so they are hardly inclined to share the raw source of their revenue. While theirs does not fit my definition of privacy, you are not dumping your images for public (or universal corporate) access either. The things you expose if you use Google are two or three stages removed from the actual images...

Google being a computer system, they can of course fail and leak some or all their content - and if you talk twenty years, it is inevitable it will happen at some time, and only the sheer mass will make it somewhat unlikely that you (or any other given individual) become a victim. No organisation outside Google is able to leech 100% of their data, most, perhaps except for the NSA, won't even be able to cope with 1%, for sheer lack of storage.

 

[mdarnton]

Except for mail, I stay away from Google services. They have this bad habit of discontinuing things they think aren't being used enough, and I don't know if it's just me or them, but I've always found their Google+ (which used to be their photo interface) to be incredibly slow, so I never checked out their new photo service at all.

People love to hate Flickr every time they change something for the worse, or even for the better, but it's been around for a long time and does a good job for me.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Where are more chances what Flickr, Instagram, Photobucket, etc. will disappear as service. Google will stay.
I have my pictures uploaded to picasa web albums by picasa app for decade or so. It is now not supported. But they are still giving access and keeping it as on-line structure, I still upload by Picasa. I have to pay some small fee for 20GB of online storage, but it is plenty. It also has Google Drive storage included.
Where is setting for image quality. Compressed or no.

 

[willie_901]

- can my files be there forever (well at least 20 years for instance?)

No one knows. However it is extremely unlikely Google will disappear overnight. This means it should be possible to move your photos to another long-term storage solution.

- any issue with privacy? I can see that Google detects faces/ locations and other activities on those quite accurate.

It is in Google's interest to comply with the Terms of Service. Consumer confidence is a significant component of their business plan. Eventually Google will eventually have billions of photos. Unlike gmai,l they can not use your photos for business purposes unless this is permitted in the Terms of Service. Even Google developers with access to your photos have better things to do than look at or share your photos.

- can Google by any chance leak my photos to other 3rd party

If Google secretly shared data with third-parties would it violate the Terms of Service? I don't know. Of course federal and local governments can subpoena Goole for access to individuals' data in the course of legal investigations.

It is more likely a malicious hacker would break into Google and leak your photos. Once more, the risk is extremely low, but it is not zero. Given the profit Google generates from Android, a wise-spread security breech would be a financial disaster.To assess IT risk, follow the money. Except for notable exceptions (Target for example), data breaches are most likely to occur for smaller businesses who can't afford state-of-the-art IT risk remediation.

The only alternate to Cloud-based, low-risk, long-term photo storage is sneaker storage. You put your sneakers on, go to a bank and physically swap storage devices in a rented safety deposit box every week or so.

 

[kuzano]

Your images will likely still be on the servers that get stored away in some warehouse, when Google goes bust before the next decade. Nobody will fire them up to retrieve your data. So, it's a yes and no answer. The data will be somewhere, but you'll never see it.

I've worked on computers and systems for 25 plus years.

There are NO storage facilities that will likely be in existence for the twenty years you are seeking.

You can't pass the buck on storage or BACKUP to any other party. They are your pics and only you can be responsible for them.

You might want to note that every backup system contract on any storage system, either yours inhouse or on the internet, ALWAYS contain the word "Not responsible for data loss".

Standard contract language.

I've lost data on the web much more often than I have on my own systems.

 

[stupid leica]

Ultimately we don't know what kind of interfaces we'll be using in 20 years, or whether the jpg will even be relevant.

Picasa's photos are still accessible within the Google Photos interface.

Google Photos does some things well, but others are a disaster. Picasa was much better for manual curating, Photos is better for letting the system do things for you.

I upload at full quality, and have something like 100gb of visual media on there I think. It is fast, it is reliable, and I'm not worried about anybody getting into it but me.
If you worry about the security of your Google account, enable 2-step authentication for login. That will keep out the bad guy much more successfully than just normal password.

 

[rscheffler]

I agree one of the annoyances of Google is their propensity to drop a service or feature rather suddenly because it no longer suits them, for whatever reason.

That said, I do use Google Drive and Google Photos. Photos is quite convenient for client, friends and family image delivery. They can browse a gallery, share the link with others, download individual high-rez files or do a one-click batch download of the whole thing.

I upload images to Photos under the 16MP (IIRC) resolution limit and let it compress the files further. I've downloaded said compressed files and done side by side comparisons with the originals and the differences are extremely minute. Hardly perceptible.

Ko.Fe.: the option for compressed or not is in the new Photos service and not in Picassa (I assume since I'm not familiar with it), under the settings sidebar menu.

All in all, Photos is really just an online fallback option for me where I upload final edits for both storage and potential sharing/distribution. Same with Google Drive. Additional to these Google services, I use Amazon's Web Services S3 cloud storage service. This is not free, rather pay as you go based on how much you have uploaded and how much traffic you generate on their servers (uploading is always free), i.e. from downloading and how quickly you download large amounts, such as in a disaster recovery event. Anyway, I have a lot on AWS and it's about $10/month right now. IMO, AWS is probably a safer longterm online backup/storage service than Google because a lot of 3rd party websites and web services rely on AWS for their own infrastructure/storage. As far as I know, AWS does not do metadata scans of your images, or optical character and facial recognition either, like Google does. However, it's simply a storage service without a nice gallery option available. But that's probably OK because that kind of traffic would probably start costing you a bit of money every time you browse your collection (due to the server traffic it will generate).

Again, AWS for me is an online fallback to physical storage and backup.

IMO any free online service always comes with a catch. There's certainly one with Google - they analyze your images. What they do with that info, I don't really know. Will Photos be around forever? Probably not. But at least it has tools to allow you to download everything relatively easily if and when they announce they're pulling the plug.

Someone mentioned about no computer storage ever having a 20-year lifespan. I don't think that's as big a problem as some make out. The key is to keep on top of things and constantly migrate to newer, better, bigger storage options, whether it's hard drives or online services. You can't realistically expect to forget about your digitized images for 10-20 years and then recover them. It might happen, but it also might not. Google does offer a nice feature that lets you assign a 'successor' to your account should it ever go dormant for a long period of time (over 2 years?). I.e. should you pass, etc... so at least in theory, someone else close to you should be able to continue to access and/or recover your data.

As for two step authentication.... Google has a good tendency to send you warnings as soon as it detects log ins from locations outside your usual haunts. I.e. when you're in another country. My fear with activating two step is it wants to use my phone number as the secondary contact method, however, I'm on a prepaid cell service that does not roam outside my home country. I wouldn't be able to access that number at a time when I often most need to use the services in question, therefore don't want to get locked out. Just something to keep in mind. (Looking forward to the day when we can each have a global phone number without any roaming BS, etc.)

 

[kiemchacsu]

well; thank you all for deep thoughts.
even though few concerns remains, I've uploaded nearly 10,000 images to Google's service.
During the years, I've manage to archive my files in external drives and my first digital photos since 2003 are still accessible at the moment.
However with the revolution of digital media, includes HD video, the external drives are becoming full quite rapid.
I am testing Google service as a second back up place while waiting for the next bigger external drive when the current one is full.

My Verdicts:
- I do not take the risk to choose Google Photos as my ONLY place to back up my photos
- Since I hardly can do anything to against them in terms of privacy condition, I just ignore it and let my mind ease.
- Interesting that the privacy issues are being discussed here at the moment, regarding the way Facebook and Google tracking their user. <click here>

 

[mdarnton]

I forgot to mention that last year I decided to make friends with the enemy, and got a Microsoft Office subscription with 1Tb of storage. I've been putting everything there. It's not a photo service, as such, but I have more confidence in MS being around for a while than any other service (several of the web back-up services I casually used in the past for specific little things have gone belly up, so I'm wary of small-company solutions). The nice thing about the Office interface is that I am able to fully automatically mirror all of my files completely on two widely separated computers, so I have three separate archives, and their phone interface is very good, so I can also find photos easily on my phone if I need to send something to a client immediately. Ten bucks a month, and it includes five full installations of Office, too.