Google Photo

FastEddieB

FastEddieB

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Fast Eddie B
Google Photos

I only had the opportunity to watch a portion of the Google I/O conference yesterday.

The portion I did see covered the new Google Photos, spun off from and independent of Google+, which seems to be languishing.

Here's a CNET summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfXx5dULR9U

In any case, for Google Photos they are offering unlimited online photo storage for free! And it appears to have a lot of clever and powerful organizational tools. Apps for iOS and Android are promised.

The idea of uploading my entire iPhoto library to Google Photo and having all my photos available on any device anywhere I have signal is intoxicating.

I've been using Flickr for like forever, and it works. But it seems like they make it intentionally difficult, or at least convoluted, to extract simple image links. I would love an easy and free alternative, and hope this is it.

As Google Photo gets rolled out, I'd love to hear experiences before I plunge in.
 
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I'd suggest very closely reading the agreement terms for the "free" storage.
You may very well be giving up some/all rights to the photos.
 
Badger said:
I'd suggest very closely reading the agreement terms for the "free" storage.
You may very well be giving up some/all rights to the photos.
Click to expand...


I'd be more worried about how Google will mine both the location metadata and image content.

Their search engine can identify objects in the photos, and perhaps people by name with current or future facial recognition capabilities.

I would assume that Google will be hard at work indexing the visual content of your photos against their database, ready to sell your data to their customers based on where, who, and what you were snapping pics of -- ready for sale to the highest bidder.

No thank you for me.

But where Photos really wrecks your brain is when you start searching for random things in your collection. Beers? It finds photos of beers. Bars? It finds photos of bars.

1273248359663559571.jpg


Ugh, I am going to regret this, but type in selfies, and it finds selfies!

1273248359730407315.png
Click to expand...

Google Photos may be free — but at what personal cost?

Google Photos Hands-On: So Good, I'm Creeped Out
 
I already used the Google+ Photo section to store my photos online, only difference now is it's a standalone app.

They already get a ton of info on me, if they want to mine my photos for info on my pets or other random crap I take photos of with my phone... feel free. I'll ignore them just like I do 99% of the other ads I see daily.
 
Badger said:
I'd suggest very closely reading the agreement terms for the "free" storage.
You may very well be giving up some/all rights to the photos.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

I just have a hard time imagining how it could affect me in any major way.

I'm not making money off my photos. If I post a photo of Chowder...

18231241162_68ffed9c23.jpg


...and PetMeds or PetCo or whoever use it in an ad, or someone puts it in a coffee table book on Chows, I'm not sure how my life is diminished in any way.

I'd think commercial photographers would be more concerned, but likely they'd avoid services like this out of hand.
 
"Free" is never really free. With the facial and content recognition technology that exists and is being developed, there is much more going on than just letting an advertiser use the photo.

But YMMV.
 
I would be curious how Google makes money off this (I'm certain they do). My only real worry is if I take a photo of someone's airplane will they get unwanted promotion offers because of my actions. I don't care if someone tries to sell me stuff. But I don't want to place anyone on anyone else's chump list.
 
I have Gmail, so I feel Google already has access to 90% of my habits.
 
So Google gets to look at and possibly derive marketing information from my photos. Who cares? That's a fair exchange for being able to use their storage for free.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Currently iCloud is giving me all those functions on my devices. However, our business uses many of the Google Merchant systems, and this might be great for our product photo storage and stuff.

Thanks for sharing this one!
 
Just remember: You're talking about a company whose motto used to be "Don't be evil."

Rich
 
steingar said:
I would be curious how Google makes money off this (I'm certain they do). My only real worry is if I take a photo of someone's airplane will they get unwanted promotion offers because of my actions. I don't care if someone tries to sell me stuff. But I don't want to place anyone on anyone else's chump list.
Click to expand...

Even using a non-tracking web browser with cookie-blocker is a problem. I looked at a Hilton hotel booking in a city this summer. Next time I logged into Facebook (I remain logged-out unless using), and I started getting spam ads that read "Going to (city)? Click here to see hotels".

That's with normal tracking stuff off.

Google may not make a lot of money directly, but they do have your data that they can mine. With facial and image recognition (remember, G has been offering that for a long time...), they can estimate who you knew, what you saw, and where you went. The EXIF data in many photos contains much more detail - they might look at mine and estimate when I changed and upgraded cameras and the types of lenses I had. That data is valuable from a marketing perspective - and helps estimate your income, travel habits, friends, and the like. In other words, it makes the entire dossier more valuable.

And to think that folks worried about the government collecting data...
 
wsuffa said:
Even using a non-tracking web browser with cookie-blocker is a problem. I looked at a Hilton hotel booking in a city this summer. Next time I logged into Facebook (I remain logged-out unless using), and I started getting spam ads that read "Going to (city)? Click here to see hotels".

That's with normal tracking stuff off.

Google may not make a lot of money directly, but they do have your data that they can mine. With facial and image recognition (remember, G has been offering that for a long time...), they can estimate who you knew, what you saw, and where you went. The EXIF data in many photos contains much more detail - they might look at mine and estimate when I changed and upgraded cameras and the types of lenses I had. That data is valuable from a marketing perspective - and helps estimate your income, travel habits, friends, and the like. In other words, it makes the entire dossier more valuable.

And to think that folks worried about the government collecting data...
Click to expand...

I don't know about Facebook, but through experimentation during the past winter (when there wasn't much else to do, anyway), my friend Uri and I identified at least ten ways that Google identifies and tracks users:


  1. Logged-in user (obviously)
  2. IP address
  3. Cookies
  4. Flash cookies / data
  5. Cached HTML5 content
  6. Geolocation / WiFi geolocation
  7. Browser fingerprint (derived from plug-ins, fonts, screen size, color depth, etc.)
  8. User fingerprint (derived from user habits and third-party sites with Google cookies, Adsense, or accessing Google APIs or libraries)
  9. https supercookies (on Chrome; Firefox has fixed the bug that allowed this to work, and IE never had the feature)
  10. Device ID (on mobile devices), so mobile browsing / search history is integrated into your user fingerprint and carried over to other devices
The last one is interesting. My BlackBerry has no Google software whatsoever installed (I uninstalled it before I even activated the phone), and I have never accessed Google on it. And yet the first time I used the phone's browser, I saw "relevant" ads on sites that used Adsense. This was because the Berry was on my WiFi connection and thus sharing my public IP address (which is static, just to make it that much easier for Google).

Here's another interesting thing that Uri and I found. You can try it if you're ever really bored. Do a fresh install of Windows or Linux (Or iOS, I suppose). You probably could also just do a fresh install of a browser you've never used before and don't import anything, although we didn't try that. Then before you do anything else with the computer, connect to the Internet through an anonymizing VPN proxy server. Then open the browser, go to Google, and search for something. You will get an error page stating that Google has detected "malicious activity" from your computer and can't fulfill your request.

Close the browser, disable the proxy, and open the browser again on your public connection. Browse for a few minutes, visiting any sites you like except sites owned by Google. (You actually can visit Google-owned sites if you want: Avoiding them is just part of proving a point.) Then close your browser, restart the VPN proxy, open the browser, and go back to Google. This time you'll be able to search.

What Uri and I gathered from that little experiment is that if Google knows nothing at all about you and knows you're on a proxy server, they won't even let you use their search. But once there's something on the browser that they can use to track you, then they'll let you search using the proxy. The one exception is that if you log in using a virgin browser and a proxy, go to Google, and log in with a Google account, then they will let you search. They will know who you are because you logged in.

Back when I had an Android a few years ago, I had to make a trip to Johnson City to take some pictures for the railroad. I stayed at a hotel in Binghamton. When I got back home, I was seeing ads for various things in Binghamton (including the hotel I stayed at) for several weeks on Adsense-enabled sites. Creepy.

Uri and I are both professional geeks, and we started this experiment out of sheer boredom during a long, frigid winter. But we were flabbergasted at the results. And mind you, these are just the ways that we were able to identify that Google tracks users. There almost certainly are more.

Rich
 
Re: Google Photos

I downloaded the Google Images app to my iPhone and iPad.

It appears to be a carefully crafted and elegant way to store, back up, edit and organize your photos.

Bad news is right now I don't see a way to link to actual images. There is a "Copy Link" option, but that link goes to a page where the image displays, not the image itself.

So, I'm still stuck with Flickr for embedding images.

As soon as I'm clear on how to do it, I plan on uploading my entire iPhoto library to Google Photos. It will be very handy to have access to all my photos on all my devices, as long as I have signal, of course.
 
I think you misunderstood their definition of "unlimited." It's only unlimited if your photos are less than 2Kx2K. If you store larger ones there, you either have to downsize it to 2kx2k (it calls this "high resolution") or it eats into your 15G google storage quota (shared with your other google drive stuff).

osPIFvspPMe7uk61tmaqwNdqgTeyHH2xW_vBOpZKwA=w240-h192-no


It doesn't have the automatic downsample that flikr does (as near as I can tell), but you can appear to link to the images as the little test image I tried above works.
 
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RJM62 said:
I don't know about Facebook, but through experimentation during the past winter (when there wasn't much else to do, anyway), my friend Uri and I identified at least ten ways that Google identifies and tracks users:


  1. Logged-in user (obviously)
  2. IP address
  3. Cookies
  4. Flash cookies / data
  5. Cached HTML5 content
  6. Geolocation / WiFi geolocation
  7. Browser fingerprint (derived from plug-ins, fonts, screen size, color depth, etc.)
  8. User fingerprint (derived from user habits and third-party sites with Google cookies, Adsense, or accessing Google APIs or libraries)
  9. https supercookies (on Chrome; Firefox has fixed the bug that allowed this to work, and IE never had the feature)
  10. Device ID (on mobile devices), so mobile browsing / search history is integrated into your user fingerprint and carried over to other devices
The last one is interesting. My BlackBerry has no Google software whatsoever installed (I uninstalled it before I even activated the phone), and I have never accessed Google on it. And yet the first time I used the phone's browser, I saw "relevant" ads on sites that used Adsense. This was because the Berry was on my WiFi connection and thus sharing my public IP address (which is static, just to make it that much easier for Google).

Here's another interesting thing that Uri and I found. You can try it if you're ever really bored. Do a fresh install of Windows or Linux (Or iOS, I suppose). You probably could also just do a fresh install of a browser you've never used before and don't import anything, although we didn't try that. Then before you do anything else with the computer, connect to the Internet through an anonymizing VPN proxy server. Then open the browser, go to Google, and search for something. You will get an error page stating that Google has detected "malicious activity" from your computer and can't fulfill your request.

Close the browser, disable the proxy, and open the browser again on your public connection. Browse for a few minutes, visiting any sites you like except sites owned by Google. (You actually can visit Google-owned sites if you want: Avoiding them is just part of proving a point.) Then close your browser, restart the VPN proxy, open the browser, and go back to Google. This time you'll be able to search.

What Uri and I gathered from that little experiment is that if Google knows nothing at all about you and knows you're on a proxy server, they won't even let you use their search. But once there's something on the browser that they can use to track you, then they'll let you search using the proxy. The one exception is that if you log in using a virgin browser and a proxy, go to Google, and log in with a Google account, then they will let you search. They will know who you are because you logged in.

Back when I had an Android a few years ago, I had to make a trip to Johnson City to take some pictures for the railroad. I stayed at a hotel in Binghamton. When I got back home, I was seeing ads for various things in Binghamton (including the hotel I stayed at) for several weeks on Adsense-enabled sites. Creepy.

Uri and I are both professional geeks, and we started this experiment out of sheer boredom during a long, frigid winter. But we were flabbergasted at the results. And mind you, these are just the ways that we were able to identify that Google tracks users. There almost certainly are more.

Rich
Click to expand...

As you discovered, the data collection is far more invasive and far less disclosed than most people could even imagine. Even if you try to avoid it, you can't as every cookie and web beacon sends browser & computer info back to the mother ****.

But plenty of folks think it's OK, and don't worry about it as they believe they are getting something "free".

The NSA would be proud. And Congress is fighting over bulk collection of phone records - G and FB have more data than NSA could collect.
 
flyingron said:
It doesn't have the automatic downsample that flikr does (as near as I can tell), but you can appear to link to the images as the little test image I tried above works.
Click to expand...

Ron,

How did you grab that link?

When I just hit "Copy Link" and paste that link between image tags, it doesn't work.

Finally, there is SnapSeed integration, which seems to provide some very powerful, if not always intuitive, editing tools.
 
I went to the image display (not the gallery page, but clicked on the image in the gallery to go to the image) and used the "Copy Image Address" feature of my browser (in this case Chrome, but similar features exist in most browsers).

I tested it on a different computer that doesn't have my google login just to be sure it didn't go away (which happens if you grab links in Flikr like that).
 
While we are google bashing(not a fan but am in their Spidey web) what's with the rumors you don't hear anymore that they were gov seeded from the start? And for the data pile y'all have herpes.:no::lol:
 
flyingron said:
I went to the image display (not the gallery page, but clicked on the image in the gallery to go to the image) and used the "Copy Image Address" feature of my browser (in this case Chrome, but similar features exist in most browsers).

I tested it on a different computer that doesn't have my google login just to be sure it didn't go away (which happens if you grab links in Flikr like that).
Click to expand...

Thanks,

I'll play with that later from my Mac - I've been trying to find a way to do it from iOS, since I often just have my iPad and/or iPhone with me.
 
wsuffa said:
Even using a non-tracking web browser with cookie-blocker is a problem. I looked at a Hilton hotel booking in a city this summer. Next time I logged into Facebook (I remain logged-out unless using), and I started getting spam ads that read "Going to (city)? Click here to see hotels".

That's with normal tracking stuff off.

...

And to think that folks worried about the government collecting data...
Click to expand...

And so what. Don't use the free Internet then, and don't search the world's information instantaneously again. Gov't can take your civil liberties away; Google can show you relevant ads about hotels. You fear the latter more than the former. I don't get it. :dunno:
 
Irish_Armada said:
And so what. Don't use the free Internet then, and don't search the world's information instantaneously again. Gov't can take your civil liberties away; Google can show you relevant ads about hotels. You fear the latter more than the former. I don't get it. :dunno:
Click to expand...
And with the stroke of a judge's pen, the government has all of Gs data on you. With which they can take away your liberties and you will never know that they got the data or what assumptions they may have made.

You may may make a choice that I may not with respect to data, but I should have the option to not be stalked. And yes, even the pay serviced track you.

By the way, given G's profit, you aren't getting anywhere near true value for your dossier....
 
What is the final answer, if you go with Google photo, will you find your photos online somewhere down the road or do they keep them private? Well.... "to themselves"?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
What is the final answer, if you go with Google photo, will you find your photos online somewhere down the road or do they keep them private? Well.... "to themselves"?
Click to expand...

You can probable learn what they might do with them by reading the TOS. I suspect the answer's probably buried in there somewhere. If I had to guess, you give them a perpetual license to do whatever they like with them, but I haven't read it, so that's just a guess.

Frankly, however, I doubt they care about the photos so much as the information they can glean from them. Google stopped caring about content a long time ago, if in fact they ever cared at all.

Rich
 
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