Free, however, meant that photos could stay online potentially past the end of someone's life. Now the dead will have their memories & photos that they've shared vanish. This is a dark day.
This helps me personally a little bit, but it's sad to see that going forward the world will need to find a new way to organize & make available their visual media, especially after death.
Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
Yes. Everyone is focussing on the curtailing of free uploads for high resolution images. But I don't think anyone yet has mentioned what is far more concerning for me; the fact that Google'a announcement also says that if your account is inactive for two years, they MAY [my emphasis] delete your data:
>What happens when you're inactive
When you have been inactive in a product for 2 years, we may delete all content for that product. But before we do that, we will:
Give you notice using email and notifications within the Google products. We will contact you at least three months before content is eligible for deletion.
Give you the opportunity to avoid deletion (by becoming active in the product)
Give you the opportunity to download your content from our services.
Important: As an example, if you're inactive for 2 years in Photos, but still active in Drive and Gmail, we will only delete Google Photos content. Content in Gmail and Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) will not be deleted if you are active in those products.
That is pretty concerning for anyone who believed that, in the event of their death, their Google Photos archive would still be around for their surviving friends and family to enjoy.
I was rather expecting that our presence online didn't disappear as soon as we went inactive. I don't want my message board messages to all get erased when I croak. Same goes for the pictures I share with others online too.
Not sure how this is not-an-issue for so many people. Thanks for the reply though. I really don't understand how I'm so far downvoted for what seems like the beginning of a new era where information starts to delete itself, whereas before it survived.
Any downvoters care to register dissent? At -2 now. I see almost no one discussing this. This is how more than one person I know had planned to preserve some of their mementos for the future. This option is now cut off. Why the downvotes, chums?
