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.
There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.
Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.
What They Do Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast.
Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?