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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data.

How is it difficult? I regularly takeout photos at original resolution and then compress the cloud copies.

I guess you won't respond since you blocked me, but perhaps someone else has context.

How is it difficult? I regularly takeout photos at original resolution and then compress the cloud copies.

It's not unusually bad, either by Google standards or by the Cloud in general*, but Takeout has almost no tech support, can take arbitrary amounts of time to create the archive files, throttle(d) after daily download bandwidth limits that are often far less than the typical Takeout, can miss data, and is weirdly inconsistent between Takeouts. It's very far from the typical Photos experience, both in terms of user experience and in terms of literally not being part of the Photos UI.

  • compare Ring, where bulk downloads of more than fifteen videos at a time requires either a warrant or the use of a half-broken python script.

Fwiw, I've never had any of the issues you mention (except that it's not part of the photos UI). Of course at the tail distribution of outcomes someone is liable to have a bad experience.