Caveat Photo ex Googlus

[anticpated]

A word of warning. 

Do not store large photos on Google Photos.  I only just realised that after doing so all the backed up DNG files are stripped of all the exif data and colour information. Leaving a small file with no extra metadata stored. 

Fortunately I have another back up solution and not everything is ruined. Keep it for jpeg and png files but not master files.

Most were local photos so I can try to capture them again. Although I would be furious if they weren't.

I am going turn off auto sync to Google photos now. As that really made me a bit mad.

Rants over with.

[sheepdog]

Learnt a long time ago never trust Google nor any free service especially if it says cloud. At a moments whim, they'll just decide to kill it and you have no chance of recovery. They've now realised how much money its costs for cloud storage so need to (excuse the pun) recover costs.

Local backups are the answer. If you've got a pc and several hard drives, I can recommend StableBit DrivePool (paid for but its cheap) as it replicates across the drives. Take one out and it should recover the data. Even better, even if the pc breaks, you can transfer all the drives across and (if you have your licence key), you won't even lose sleep! As I found out...

[pgn]

One of my photographer friends swears by Amazon's Photo storage offering, part of your Amazon Prime benefits (up to a certain volume of photo data).

And yes, setting Google's "don't use compressed format" option does chew through your quota at a fair lick as a result, making it necessary to fork out a few quid a month for more space - but the photos remain reasonably unmolested for that (but I don't do as much mangling on my pics as you appear to do, @anticpated )

[anticpated]

I guess what annoyed me was I trusted Google too much. They basically obliterated any filing system or file metadata belonging to the files. Being as the colour space, exif data and everything was missing from the dng files they are essentially ruined.

[anticpated]

@pgn 

I recently subscribed to Adobe Cloud which allows for more control over content. 

So for the moment I have up to 100gb of storage for my processed photos.

[anticpated]

Just you know, it may be something like Cave imaginem Google rather than my silly thread title.

[pgn]

Romani eunt domum, in the inimitable style of John Cleese... 🤣

I think it's quite a catchy title, tbh 👍

Just thought - Dropbox is (was?) another bit-bucket that didn't compress stuff pushed up to it. 

Nowadays? Wasabi, or perhaps Lyve Cloud - if you don't mind a bit of lag (photos, fine, video not so 😖).

[anticpated]

Romans go home! 

[Spenny]

Most of the fee services come with restrictions.

If you are a Google one subscriber the service comes with 100gb data for £16/year. Large files may chew through that quite quickly though.