If I was up to mischief I would say that some people, especially Apple users, suffer from clouded judgement. Of course I mean this as a pun. If you use Android devices, or Windows machines, or Linux, you can purchase a microSD card and within seconds have one or even two terabytes of extra storage. With such a vast amount of storage you can keep decades of photos and videos with greater freedom.
Last night and this morning I have been toying with the idea of the paid tiers and whether they’re worth it. In the proces I told Gemini about my context and it went from advising me the pro tier at 170 CHF per year, to going for the “free” Google AI studio option.
From Gemini to Google AI Studio I find the pivot interesting because you go from a conversational bot to something more powerful.
As I write this my consolidated photo album is being uploaded to kDrive, to serve as an offsite backup but the journey to this point took about two weeks, due in part to experimentation and learning to use various tools.
Tools I used rsync Google Takeout Flickr Export jdupe Gemini Euria Le Chat, by Mistral Work Flow The first step is to request your data from Google Photos via the Google Takeout Tool, the Flickr Export tool for flickr, and to download all your photos locally from Apple Photos before disconnecting the local library from iCloud.
Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.
In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto.
I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.
For years, or even decades I have had Google Adsense on my site, and I have been paid several times over the years. In recent years though Google Adsense has flooded my site with ads, but has not flooded me with revenue so yesterday I removed the ads.
For a while we had to tell Google Adsense where we wanted ads, and how we wanted them to be displayed. With time they gave us the option “Let google place the ads automatically” out of practicality, but Google placed ads so aggressively that legitimate sites looked like spam sites.
For weeks I haven’t updated Google Photos because I ran out of storage on the 200 gigabyte tier and I avoid using more than 200 gigabytes of storage with Apple iCloud. If either of them had a 500 GB tier, then I’d consider them. As they do not offer this option I chose to phase them out with Immich and Kdrive.
Immich As Photo Gallery Immich replaces Google Photos, and iCloud among other apps.
Those of us that are geeky, and old enough, will remember when apps were local and we saved data to internal and external hard drives. We would take photos with a camera, or a phone, and once we got home we would download them to our computer, using apps like Picasa and iPhoto. Both apps would help us to organise them chronolgically, and eventually by location, people in photos and much more.
The default action for many is to think “I want to buy this book” and they automatically either buy a physical copy because they love physical books, or they buy an e-book. The default is almost always Kindle and Amazon because of its market dominance.
I was shopping for The Night Train to Lison and I found it for 6 CHF on the Google Play book store, around 8 CHF on the Apple Books store, 19 CHF with Payot, 20 with Buchhaus, or even more, and that’s when I find the book.
Next year all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks. Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.
The SMS Era on Twitter URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS.