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- Hacker News
- Regardless of whether this is legal or not, I think this move is subjectively scummy. I know that profit maximisation means going against common ideas of what is "a nice thing to do", but there's a line that's been crossed here between "the business has to support itself" and "trying to exploit and milk our customers".
Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.
Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".
by Liftyee - > I think this move is subjectively scummy
I'd argue that it is objectively scummy.
by dspillett - > I would have preferred they delete it
The fact that they did delete it, and then tried to sell access to bupkis, is just the icing on the scummy corporate cake, eh?
by swiftcoder - Given this is a largely technical crowd, I feel it my duty to share just how good (and free/open) Immich is.
If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you.
What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top.
The day I’m sick of Immich and there’s a better alternative, I switch.
I’ve written about how it works as I’ve gone along. Recommend reading and putting your own twist on it.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
by jmathai - Can Immich on Android automatically upload taken photos like Google Photos?by garaetjjte
- Just a heads up, but Immich mobile app deleted my local copies when I activated the backup, for some unknown reason. I've checked my settings and there is an option to free up space on backup, but I didn't activate it. It's not something catastrophic, but some messaging apps will not see your pictures and will consider them corruptedby tuesdaynight
- I've been using it for about 6 months now and I'm mostly happy with it, but there are definitely some pain points. Depending on individual use-case, it can be a bit tricky to get setup.
I dislike Docker Desktop for Windows, so I run it in a docker container on Windows Subsystem for Linux with Tailscale and have configured it to automatically initialize all of it when my PC is powered on. It took me many hours and lots of chatting with GPT to get it working. Perhaps my configuration is uncommon though.
My biggest issue with it is the overhead and lack of smart configuration. For example my wife and I have the same mobile device (Android) and we can't share an account while having backups made at the same time because backups mimic the default android images folders and both devices have the same structure. If we have two different accounts, then each account generates its own thumbnails and you have to run facial recognition on each one individually (which required a lot of manual tagging). This wastes a lot of time and space.
The second problem is it can't just work with the file system structure and organization I have in my external folders "as-is". You basically have to recreate them as albums inside immich yourself. I found a handy script that did this for me, but the experience is somewhat lacking.
Third issue is I can't backup to external folders. Backups go to the default immich folder and I have to manually pull them out of these and dump them in the correct external folders (recall that I have my own file structure).
I've gone to their github and luckily there are issues out on all of these which I promptly upvoted, but I'm not sure any of them have been resolved by the team yet. I'm hoping they get fixed soon.
Edit: I should mention that I don't enjoy having a bunch of different services running to get this working like an out-of-the-box experience should. For example adding Dropbox to the equation is a no-go for me. The idea of adding even more system resources dedicated to this function is a huge turn off. I also use a cheap DAS (not a NAS - and yes I do manual backups for offsite storage) because I don't want to fork out a fortune for the Synology solution. These are all things that Immich itself should be able to handle without having these complex systems with multiple failure points.
by y-c-o-m-b - I was a big fan of your OpenPhoto / Trovebox solution back in the day.
It was ahead of its time. Glad you're still working in the photo sharing space!
by gorbachev - 100%!!
In fact I'm also using Immich and it's amazing! It's as good as the Google Photos app, but you own your data and can more cheaply upgrade your storage, if needed.
On that old Photobucket account I was hoping to find screenshots I made as a kid. Didn't store actual photos there, thankfully.
by lutr - There’s a emphasis and repetition of sound bites and empty words in our culture, as though they mean something clear and understandable though it’s really a sound bite and a phrase to ease your discomfort and help you feel better about yourself: corporate greed is one of those words.
There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter.
We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.
by mannanj - Tolerating it? No! Greed is good. We've grown this monster from a pup and now it's all grown up and eating people.by pixl97
- Shout out to Flickr! No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them. You just can’t upload more without a Flickr Pro plan.by ComputerGuru
- Is this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.by jmcphers
- No, because I am dealing with this right now. I stopped paying for Flickr Pro after 20+ years and can only download my photos in bulk as 1024px resolution in order to get back under the free plan limits unless I pay for Flickr Pro… which is $82/year. My photos are held hostage unless I pay.by incanus77
- In times like this, I am happy I live in the EU where I can request a company send me a copy of all data they have stored about me. That includes all pictures I ever send to them, or at least a low-resolution preview sufficient for me to realize which picture it is, or at the very least a file listing. Ah yes and they must do so without charging me anything.by jojomodding
- Oh hey, Photobucket! I wonder what I stashed in there...
Look through old email to figure out what email address they had.
Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail.
Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes.
Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password.
Create a new password, put it on my vault.
"Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)."
Perfect. No notes.
- If ever there was a use-case for chargebacks, this is it. Threaten their support to refund or you will file a chargeback, and then file one if they refuse.by joshstrange
- Exactly. And I wouldn't threaten the chargeback. If they refuse the refund or ignore you, then just file a chargeback.
To me, ideally the end result is a chargeback instead a customer support refund. Otherwise they have no incentive to change. A high chargeback percentage could be that incentive.
I think the credit card companies expect you to attempt to talk it out with the merchant first though, so you'd still want to reach out to customer support first to "give them a chance".
by calc_exe - > Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea. I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post.
I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.
Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.
Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.
I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.
by janalsncm - If Google Photos gave me my photos in one go, exactly as they are in the app, I'd gladly pay $5.
As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places. To make matters worse, if you try to download more than two zips at a time, it throws an error and forces you to start a new Takeout request. You then have to wait 24 hours for an email telling you that you can try downloading the zips all over again.
I just assume the project manager responsible is a Dark Triad personality whose sole goal in life is preventing people from ever leaving Google Photos.
My current strategy is to chisel it down by using the Google Photos search function to show 100 files as a time, which I download as a zip, then delete those 100 while they're still selected. That way they are somewhat organized and still deduped, unlike the mess that Takeout gives me.
by geor9e - Huh, that reminds me of trying to download photos shared by other people after a group trip. Select all, download, GPhotos claims to have zipped all of it, but nope, the zip was missing a lottt of files...by netsharc
- Have you tried https://github.com/simulot/immich-go for dealing with the some of the complexity of google takeout? Not sure how much it actually handles, and whether it can be used easily if you're not migrating to immich, but it's what came to mind here. (I'm a new user of immich but never used google photos)by physicles
- Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.
- The ToS is what binds. Good luck getting most card companies to allow you to do a chargeback these days.
I’ve been sold counterfeit or defective merchandise on eBay thrice in the last year. eBay’s guarantees are totally worthless even with evidence, and it was like pulling teeth to get my bank to do a chargeback. In one case they wouldn’t at all.
by sneak - And for an amount that low it would be automatically approved and cost photobucket a lot more. Only real way to punish companies for doing this isby dawnerd
- Fully agree, that's just straight up fraud and it's covered by chargebacks.by StrLght
- 100% issue a chargebackby dkuntz2
- Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this.
But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.
by lutr - Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
by mbo - Yeah, I think this is actually kinda nice. I recently got my fotos out of flicker and paid them a month of subscription to do it. I didn't mind that at all. At least my data is still there.