Google Photos, quota, and having it both ways

icrew · 09-22-2022 11:43 AM

Hi all:

(I thought about posting this to Feature Ideas, but it's not so much a feature idea as a commentary on a business decision by Google.)

Now that few if any Workspace editions include unlimited storage, I wanted to highlight something that I think is really pretty unfair.

According to https://support.google.com/a/answer/9214707#zippy=%2Cwhat-counts-toward-storage, stuff stored in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos counts towards our storage.

However, Google Photos is a non-core service, which means that we as Workspace admins have zero control over our users' usage of Photos beyond turning the service on or off. Specifically, we have no way to remove any content stored in Photos by our users, but we're paying for the space that that content is using. Even if we disable the service, the storage that’s already there still counts against us.

I really think that Google Photos needs to pick one side of the fence (give us proper admin control) or the other (don't debit us for Photos storage, like all the other non core apps such as YouTube). They appear to be wanting to have it both ways, which doesn't seem right.

I've raised this with my Google rep and reseller, and I'd encourage the rest of you to do the same.

Cheers,

Ian

cryptochrome

I don't really share that sentiment. If an employee with their paid Google Workspace license is using Google Photos, then of course it counts towards your paid storage quota. If you don't want your users to use a non-core service like Photos, turn it off.

We are talking about user accounts that are under your control. You decide what they use - or don't use.

icrew

Maybe it'd help to illustrate this with a scenario:

We've had Google Workspace at my work for over 10 years now.

Up until recently, our license came with unlimited storage, so there was no reason to block people from using Photos as much as they wanted.

Now, we no longer have unlimited storage. Even if we turn off Google Photos, we're still billed for the storage for any previously-uploaded photos. And we as admins have no ability to clear those photos out of the system: there's no admin UI or API available to do that.

But I'm not at all arguing that Photos shouldn't count towards our storage quota.

I'm only arguing that IF Google is going to count Photos towards our storage quota, they also need to give us the ability to manage those previously-uploaded photos as admins. For example, maybe I want to migrate all my users' photos to some other, cheaper, solution, then delete them from Google Photos and disable that service. I simply can't do that today--the controls don't exist.

Or, on the other side, if Google is unwilling to give us that sort of admin control to be able to export and/or delete the data in Google Photos, they also shouldn't charge us for the space being used.

I actually don't have a preference for which way Google goes with this, I'm really just arguing that they need to pick one or the other.

Does that clarify at all?

Ian

cryptochrome

@icrew wrote:
Does that clarify at all?

Yes, and it make perfect sense. Thank you for elaborating. I'm with you, some controls should exist to manage that storage.

kim_nilsson

Aaaaaaand also don't unilaterally block random Google services for Workspace users.

Yes, looking at you Additional Service / YouTube... where one can't use YouTube Premium Family with a Workspace account. Workspace works perfectly fine with YouTube Premium, so I can pay for four full-price YouTube Premium accounts for each of my family members on my Workspace account that I use for my family, and have for the last ten years.

Why won't you just take my money? Instead I, and everyone I know, pay for zero YT Premium and use adblockers to avoid the ads. Last time I checked, zero is less than anything that is more than zero.

jnord

Agreed. We have never had Photos enabled in our Google Workspace, but some users had them imported when we migrated their personal google accounts. When we lost our unlimited storage, we enabled Photos for only those users, emailed all of the users with Photos multiple times and asked them to move them off/delete them from Google Workspace. Most complied, some did not, and now we have no way to manage those Photos to delete them ourselves.

carlbehmer1

You can upvote this feature request if you feel it is appropriate - https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Allow-Admin-to-manage-photos-stored-in-Google-...

kenmoore

@icrew - I put this in the linked feature request as well, but if you haven't done so, it would be good to create an issue here:

https://issuetracker.google.com/

Once you do, we can star and comment on it - hopefully that will get some traction and drive some work at Google (I've found it usually at least gets some movement)

icrew

Thanks for the suggestion, @kenmoore. What I’m commenting on isn’t a bug in the Photo Libraries API, and issuetracker is explicitly only for bugs, not feature requests.

This is about Google’s business decision to charge organizations for storage used by Photos, without giving admin control over that storage.

My whole argument is that Google needs to either give admins control over that storage (which is the feature request) or they need to not charge us for that storage (which would be a business decision). Attempting to have it both ways is what I believe to be unfair and am raising here.

Hope that clarifies,

Ian

phyxiis

Seems we got a little glimmer of hope with them adding storage in relation to Photo storage used in your domain (at least in our instance). Albeit only for a few years, hopefully enough time for them to either A) give Admin/API permissions to manage Photos or B) totally exclude the storage of Photos from Pooled storage numbers

icrew

Yeah, here’s hoping that they do that—January 2025 really isn’t that far off. I’ll be watching the roadmap closely.

icrew

Just noting that the 6-month anniversary of this tread passed a few days ago, with no effective response from Google.

A new example of how ridiculous this situation is occurred to me this morning:

Let’s say that we made the decision to discontinue our users’ ability to use the Photos service. If we turn off the service, our users lose access to all their content there, and therefore can’t clear that storage, meaning we’re stuck paying for it forevermore. Even if we were to convince each of our (many thousands) of users to clear out their storage before shutting it down, there’s no effective way for them to do that short of manually selecting and deleting files in the UI. We can’t give them a “clear your Photos” tool, because there’s no “delete” endpoint in the consumer Photos API.

What’s confounding to me is that this isn’t a hard problem. Google just needs to choose, one way (admin controls) or the other (don’t debit the space against our organization’s quota). I really don’t care which.

Ian

phyxiis

Did they not give you extra storage based on the amount of photos your school has? We were given an additional amount of TB's based on the Photo storage used in our domain. Granted, that may not continue to extend if more people start using Photos, maybe it was a one time addition.

Regardless, your points are valid and I agree.

icrew

They did give us some extra space, but only for 2 months beyond the effective date of our quota limits, and still gave us no way to draw down that space, meaning that we're stuck paying for it after that point.

icrew

Over a year, now, and Google is still choosing to not address this issue.

They've even gone in the other direction, making the issue worse. The Photos team recently announced that they will not be adding "delete" capability to the API for Photos. They marked the feature request for that capability as "Infeasible (won't fix)," with no further explanation.

That means that we can't even supply our users with a tool to help them clear out their own content in Photos if they decide they want to do that.

This still makes absolutely no sense to me.

Ian

kim_nilsson

wow, four years ago it was marked as won't fix.

Insane that nobody at Google is realising that it is a very bad decision.