So Google I/O happened this week, Thursday specifically, and I did not watch a single minute of the keynote live because I was stuck at my sister's place helping her return a car seat that turned out to be the wrong model (do not get me started on that saga). But I caught up on it Friday morning with coffee, and the thing that actually made me sit up wasn't Android M or the VR headset thing they're calling Cardboard now has a bigger cousin. It was Google Photos.
Unlimited storage. Free. Photos up to 16 megapixels, video up to 1080p, no cap, forever, or at least "forever" in the way tech companies mean it, which is to say until they change their minds in three years and email you about a policy update nobody reads.
I have been hoarding photos for years in the worst possible way: half on an external hard drive labeled "PHOTOS 2011-2013 DO NOT DELETE" in Sharpie, half scattered across three different Dropbox folders, and a genuinely embarrassing chunk still sitting in Picasa Web Albums like its 2009. I think I have something like 14,000 photos total if you count the duplicates, which I definitely do because I never got around to deduping them. My old approach to backup was "hope nothing bad happens," which is not a strategy, its a prayer.
So Friday night I just started uploading. Not all 14,000 at once, the app choked a little when I tried that from my phone on wifi that isn't great to begin with (we really need to get that router replaced, its from like 2012). But I let my laptop chew through the external drive overnight instead, and by Saturday morning — today, as I write this — most of it was up there. It's weirdly satisfying watching a progress number climb. Photo hoarders will understand.
Here's my actual opinion on this, not just the "yay free stuff" reaction: I don't fully trust it, and I don't think you should either, at least not blindly. Google has killed products I loved before (RIP Reader, I still haven't forgiven you) and Picasa itself is basically getting folded into this new thing, which tells you something about how permanent any of Google's photo strategy actually is. "Unlimited and free" also isn't free in the sense people mean when they say that word. They're not doing this because they love your vacation pictures. Somewhere there's a very good reason this makes sense for them, probably several reasons, and I'd bet money at least one of them involves training something or selling ads against "people who just had a baby" demographics down the line. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just how the company eats.
That said (and this is the part where I contradict myself a little, which is fine, its my blog) I'm still doing it. Because the alternative is what I was already doing, which is nothing, badly. At least this way there's one copy that isn't sitting on a hard drive that could die tomorrow. I backed up nothing for two years after my last laptop's drive failed and I lost roughly eight months of photos from a trip to Portland I still think about. So yeah, I'm choosing the imperfect option that actually exists over the perfect option that lives only in my head.
The other thing worth mentioning, just because it's such an obvious tell: this is basically Google admitting Google+ Photos never worked. They spent years trying to make you store your pictures inside the walled garden of a social network nobody wanted to use, and now they've just... pulled photos out into its own app entirely, standalone, no G+ required. I actually said "finally" out loud to an empty kitchen when I read that part. If you want proof a product failed, watch how quietly a company dismantles the thing they insisted was the future eighteen months ago.
Anyway. Upload's still running in the background as I type this, laptop fan going, and I've got half a bagel getting cold next to me because I keep getting distracted checking the progress bar like it's going to do something more interesting than tick upward by a percent every ninety seconds.