Google I/O happened this week, the keynote was Thursday, the 28th, and there's a mountain of stuff to sort through already: Android M, something called Android Pay, a VR project named Jump, a whole new OS for connecting your toaster to the internet called Brillo. Honestly I'm skimming past most of that. The one thing that actually made me sit up was Google Photos.
Here's my situation, and I'd bet it's a lot of people's situation. I've got something like 40,000 photos going back to 2007, spread across an external hard drive that's started making a clicking noise I don't love, an old Picasa library I forgot existed until this week, and a folder on Dropbox I stopped paying the extra storage fee on about eight months ago. None of it is organized. None of it is backed up in any way I'd actually trust if my apartment caught fire.
So when they announced free, unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and video up to 1080p, I said "finally" out loud to an empty room, which is the sort of thing that happens when you work from home too much.
The catch, because there's always a catch with "free," is that 16MP ceiling. My phone (a Nexus 5, go ahead and laugh) shoots at 8MP so I'm fine, but if you're on an iPhone 6 or pulling files off a real camera, you're either getting compressed down or you're paying for the full-size storage tier instead. Google's also being a little vague about exactly how the "high quality" compression works, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that phrase.
The other catch is the one nobody said out loud on stage: this is Google, and Google's whole business is knowing things about you. Unlimited storage for your entire photographic life, run through their servers, indexed by whatever computer vision powers the new search. And that search is real — you can type "dog" and it finds your dog, no tagging required. I tried it on a friend's phone this afternoon and it's a little unsettling how well it works. I don't think that's a dealbreaker for me personally, I'm already deep into Gmail and Drive and not exactly naive about the tradeoff at this point. But almost nobody in the writeups I've read today has sat with that part for more than a sentence.
What I actually care about, selfishly, is getting my photos off that clicking hard drive before it dies for good. I spent about two hours this afternoon uploading a chunk of the old stuff just to see how it feels. The upload itself crawled on my home connection — I'm still not on the fiber my neighbor two streets over apparently has, which is its own ongoing source of irritation I won't get into right now. But once photos were actually in there, the search held up better than I expected. I typed "beach" and it pulled up a trip from 2011 I'd completely forgotten I'd photographed.
I don't think this kills Dropbox, and it definitely doesn't replace a real backup strategy if you're serious about not losing anything, cloud-only is still one copy sitting in someone else's building. But for someone like me, with photos scattered across four half-abandoned services, "free and unlimited" is the kind of number that actually gets me to move. Flickr tried something similar with its 1TB free offer back in 2013 and it never stuck for me, mostly because nobody I still know uses Flickr. Google Photos might actually stick because it's just already there, tied to the account I check forty times a day whether I mean to or not.
Ask me again in six months whether I've finished the migration. Past experience with myself says no.