Tim Cook spoke recently about privacy and cloud services:
“You might like these so-called free services, but we don't think they're worth having your email or your search history or now even your family photos data-mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose.”
I’m going to give you a very cynical translation, which I don’t often do: We are in denial about how much better Google Photos is than what we’re doing at Apple. It is so advanced in terms of search that we won’t be able to match it anytime soon. In fact, we don’t even have anyone working on similar technology at all.
It’s not about being free. I pay Dropbox $20/month to be grandfathered into 2 TB of storage so that I can put all of my photos and documents there. Dropbox is rock solid and worth it.
Like Marco and others, I have tried to avoid Google services. I don’t use Gmail. I hate advertising. But the idea of being able to quickly search my photos by content without even tagging or organizing them was too compelling to not try. So I’ve uploaded over 10,000 photos so far to Google Photos. It is really good. (I’m going to finish uploading all my photos and give it a few months before making a final judgement on the search vs. privacy trade-off.)
Some of the random searches that work out of the box to filter my photos: “beach”, “trains”, “New York City”, “Oregon and 2013”, “road trip”, “party”, “basketball”, “Christmas tree”. I never saw a demo or tutorial for how to use Google Photos; I just type stuff in and it mostly works, discovering photos and events. And on top of that, there’s also the automatic stories and collages, which is something we always wanted to build for Sunlit.
My family photos are the most important files I have on my computer, and I very rarely share any photos of my kids publicly. But ironically I’m willing to overlook some of the privacy concerns around this exactly because the photos are so valuable to me. I want multiple copies in the cloud, and I want the power of search that Google has built.
