Google wrapped up the first day of I/O yesterday and out of everything they threw at the wall - Android M, some new design language they're calling Material whatever, a VR cardboard thing with a bigger camera rig attached - the one everyone in my feed is actually talking about is Google Photos. Free, unlimited storage for your photos and videos. Sundar Pichai said it from the stage like he'd just discovered fire.
I want to believe it. I really do. I've got an external drive labeled "Photos backup 2" sitting at something like 340 gigs, my Dropbox plan tops out nowhere close to that, and I pay Dropbox $9.99 a month for the privilege of it not being close. So when a company that also sells cloud storage by the gigabyte says "unlimited," I squint a little.
And sure enough, there's a catch, and it's not a small one. The free unlimited tier only applies if you let Google compress everything - photos get capped at 16 megapixels, video gets knocked down to 1080p. Shoot RAW off a DSLR, or even just full-res stills from a newer phone, and it stops being unlimited and starts eating into your regular 15GB Drive quota instead. So the pitch is really "unlimited storage, as long as we get to shrink your files first," which is a very different sentence than the one on the keynote slide.
I'm not saying that's unreasonable. Compression at that quality is honestly pretty good, from what people are already posting in comparison shots this morning, and most people looking at photos on a phone screen or a laptop are never going to notice the difference between 16MP and whatever their camera actually shot. My complaint is smaller and pettier than that: I hate when "free" gets used as the headline and the asterisk gets buried four paragraphs into a help doc somewhere. Just tell me up front. I'm an adult, I can handle nuance, I promise.
There's also the obvious thing nobody on stage brought up, which is that Google now has an excellent reason to want every photo you've ever taken sitting on its servers, tagged and searchable and running through whatever image recognition they're cooking up next. The keynote demo showed off search working shockingly well already - typing "dog" and having it actually find your dog, no tagging required. That's neat. It's also exactly the kind of feature that only works because they're indexing the contents of your life. I don't think that's evil, necessarily. I just think it's worth saying out loud instead of only marveling at how well it finds the dog photos.
My actual plan, for what it's worth: I'm going to upload the backlog and use it as a second copy, not my only copy. Anyone who's lived through a service quietly changing its terms, or Picasa doing whatever it's been doing to people's albums the last couple years, learns not to treat "the cloud" as a place you can stop thinking about. A friend of mine lost a chunk of wedding photos a few years back when a syncing app did something dumb during a migration, and it wasn't Google's fault, but it's exactly the kind of thing that makes me keep a local drive around no matter how generous the free tier sounds.
Still, fifteen minutes into playing with it this morning, the search thing got me. I typed "beach" into the search bar mostly as a joke and it pulled up a trip from three summers ago I hadn't looked at in ages, including a genuinely bad photo of me falling off a paddleboard that I'd honestly managed to forget existed. So, credit where it's due. I'm annoyed about the compression thing and I'm using it anyway, which is probably exactly the outcome Google was going for.