my cloud storage crisis
After years of giving free unlimited storage for Photos, Google announced sometime in 2020 that in June 2021, they would be counting all photos uploaded to Google Photos after June 1st as part of your 15 GB Photos limit. I understand this is part of their push to get people to subscribe to Google One (where you can pay $2/mo to get 100 GB), but it all still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps its because of the way they never mentioned this switch at the beginning, leaving us to trust Google Photos as this sort of forever free and unlimited service. Once we got hooked, as we are wont to do, Google pulled the plug, and left us with the choice of a painful migration to another storage system or to fork over the money month after month after month.
If you take a lot of photos, you will likely hit this 15 GB limit pretty soon. It took me not even a year and a half to get dangerously close. Earlier this week Google warned me that if I exceeded my 15 GB, I would be unable to even receive emails, because Google One ties together your Gmail along with your Google Drive and Google Photos. How dare they threaten me like that. For most people the ability to receive emails is an essential need. Without it I can't communicate with my doctors about prescriptions, get letters from my friends, or even login to websites that require two-factor authentication.
Naturally, because I am allergic to subscription models and don't like being told what to do, I decided to mass delete photos from my Google Photos and back them up in an external hard drive, which is not nearly as practical, but far cheaper. Google doesn't make this easy either. You can only download 500 photos in one go, so I had to select large swaths of my thousands of photos and videos and wait for them to download before organizing them myself in local storage.
This process is a royal pain in the derrière, and a little depressing when you realize that you won't be able to access picture of all these happy memories quickly from your phone anymore, but upon reviewing my photos I've come to the realization that the vast majority of them are useless. Many of them are videos for my 1SE vlog, screenshots or pictures of things I wanted to share to a friend, or pictures of food. I'll never again look at 90+% of all these pictures, which leads me to the conclusion that 1. I should be more mindful of when I choose to take pictures (and take fewer in general), and 2. I should do something about the best 1% of my photos, like post them on this blog.
That being said, I will start photo dumping some of my favorite photos from the past year and a half in the next few posts on Bear. I hope you enjoy them!