Even on a bad day, I cannot pick just one. But Google Photos wants you to pick just three years of your photos.
To my google-loving friends, I am worried about you!
To my super organized Facebook-posting friends, I am scared.
To my “I have three hard drives for back-up” friends, you are not safe!
If you have a plumbing problem in your home, you aren’t going to hire a professional painter to fix it
If your car is making a new noise, you aren’t going to take it to the nail salon to have the nail tech look at it.
The painter and the nail tech are great at THEIR job, not so good at someone else’s.
The same thing applies to photo storage. Google is a search engine and email service. They are good at that. Amazon sells us (way too much) stuff. Their specialty is NOT photo storage. Facebook and Insta and all the others are social media. There is no guarantee of longevity or privacy for our photos, even if they do allow us to create nifty little albums.
All of those free and included services do some other thing really well.
They added photo storage because they recognized another way to wrangle us in and data-mine what we store there.
Do you really want your photos to be a PS?
Do you want your photos to be used for data-mining and further marketing?
And worst of all, do you really want to give algorithms permission to make your family photo available for advertisers to use somewhere
If you haven’t done it before, read the user agreement for the places where you store and post stuff.
The latest free service to fall flat and betray memory keepers everywhere is Google Photos.
They have now retracted their promise of unlimited free storage. What they’re now offering is enough storage for THREE YEARS. Which three years of your life are most worthy of preservation? That’s like choosing your favorite child.
And when you’re gone or stop using the service, your free photo storage is gone too. I mean, you didn’t pay them for it, so they can empty it out and pass it onto the next person who’s living and buying and giving them new data to mine.
Harsh, isn’t it?
I have a few real-life examples I want to share with you. These are stories shared with me by the primary sources – the takers of pictures, the lovers of memory keeping, clients and friends who matter to me.
Andy.
Andy passed away shortly before Christmas in 2018. I still miss her. I still have the prizes she won at an event she paid for and didn’t show up for. That wasn’t unusual for Andy. So, when she purchased FOREVER Storage, we talked about preservation settings and making sure her partner knew she had their memories stored there. But Andy would go for MONTHS without a word. Then she would respond to a text I had sent months before and we would talk daily. So, I didn’t know she was ill, and I didn’t know if she had taken steps to prepare her account for her passing.
A couple of days ago, I was looking at percentage of storage used by permanent storage owners to see who could use more space. Andy’s percentage was UP. Andy had set her preservation settings! Andy’s partner still has their photos and is adding to their account. It stopped me in my tracks.
In a very real – albeit small – way, my business, my passion, has enabled Andy to live on.
Laurie.
Years ago, Laurie and I were colleagues. We didn’t know each other, but she was one of those people who, with one glance, I knew I wanted to be friends.
Like me, Laurie has a passion for protecting her family story and passing it down to her daughter. She came by it honestly. Her father too was a gatherer of family history, but he had it all on devices.
Laurie intended to get that family history moved into her new FOREVER Storage account. But her dad passed away. Unexpectedly. Her dad had everything stored and password protected. He had shared the passwords with his family – every password except for one – the password to his Apple computer. Apple would not help – and the only avenue to his files was through that password. Laurie and her family had to stare at that Apple computer, a monument to the family stories locked inside and no key to open it.
It shouldn’t have been like that. With preservations settings in FOREVER, you can pass on the account, regardless of the device you use to access it.
Eileen.
Eileen is a newer client. I am enjoying getting to know her. She and her family do fun and adventurous things together, and when she shares the photos, I get to experience it vicariously. And they take some great photos!
Recently, Eileen got that e-mail from Google photos saying they would be deleting photos. (FYI, they’ve always deleted photos. It’s in their user agreement that they can / will / might.) She made the choice to purchase FOREVER storage. When she opened an album in her Google account, half her photos were gone. She messaged me, “I guess they already deleted.”
She was organized. And yet her photos are gone. It’s not really free if they’re stealing from you.
There are more stories – my friend who carries her back-up hard drive in her purse – my friend whose husband says, “I have them all on two hard drives; we’re fine,” – the daughter of a colleague whose photo (through the winding road of user agreements that usurp your copyright control) ended up on a billboard advertising a controversial service – one of my colleagues whose videos of her grandfather were stored on YouTube and when she went to get the most special one, it was gone. Deleted. No way to get it back. Memories Lost.
Jokingly, I’ve been calling myself an Agent of Time Travel, but it’s really not a joke. I join my clients on their journey through time. I provide them with the vessel and provisions for their journey. I hear their joy, their heartache. Sometimes I hold their hands. Sometimes I do some of the work for them. I help them to heal, to celebrate, to retrieve all the stories from the past, bring them into the present, so that they can carry them into the future. With permanence. With privacy. With promises that we take seriously.
So, I suppose the moral of the story today is “friends don’t let friends use free and included services for photo storage.”
To them, you are data. You are a product.
To me, to Dani’s Pixel Place, and to Forever, you are a living breathing volume of stories and joy, even pain.