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Its really easy to fill up your phones storage with photos and videos. In a time when microSD card support is rarer and rarer, it means the cloud can be a lifesaver. But whats to stop you eating through your storage allowances in the exact same way? Thats where Google Photos storage saver feature comes in.

The goal of storage saver is to free up space in your Google cloud storage, by reducing the quality of backed up photos lowering the amount of storage they need in the process. So far this feature has only been available on desktop, but it looks like itll be making the jump to Android in the near future.

Android Authority spotted this during an APK teardown of the latest version of the Google Photos Android app. The code references Googles storage saver feature, with dialogue mentioning users being able to choose the quality of photos that are backed up to the cloud.

However, reducing the quality is a permanent change, so while you will save storage space it means your photos wont look as detailed as they were when you took them. Which is exactly how storage saver works on the web right now. Presumably that means photos will be reduced to 16MP, and videos downgraded to 1080p.

Its also worth noting that this change covers everything backed up to your Google Photos account. So theres no picking and choosing which files get downgraded, while keeping some at their original quality. While it would be very nice to do that, its not something Google has offered at the time of writing. Google also limits compression to once per day, which should be fine for most people.

Reducing the quality is a permanent change, so while you will save storage space it means your photos wont look as detailed as they were when you took them.

Judging from the code this change just means Android users will be able to tell Google Photos to compress photos and videos on the cloud from their phones rather than having to log into Google Photos in a web browser. Which could prove useful if you dont mind losing some quality to save storage space. After all, Googles 15GB free allowance isnt a lot.

Of course if you need to keep all your photos and videos in their original form, then youll want to pay up for the right amount of storage. Google offers up to 5TB storage as part of Google One, but you may prefer to use one of the other best cloud storage services instead.

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Or, alternatively, if youd rather not be locked in with a subscription, or upload to the cloud, the best external hard drives gives you a way to keep everything backed up locally. Just make sure to back everything up regularly, since it cant be done automatically.

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Google Photos is making it easier to free up space for your pictures and videos here's how - Tom's Guide

Google Cloud is revamping its AI Hypercomputer architecture with significant enhancements across the board to support rising demand for generative artificial intelligence applications that are becoming increasingly pervasive in enterprise workloads.

At Google Cloud Next 24 today, the company announced updates to almost every layer of the AI Hypercomputer cloud architecture, with new virtual machines powered by Nvidia Corp.s most advanced graphics processing units one of the most significant revelations. In addition, it unveiled enhancements to its storage infrastructure for AI workloads, plus the underlying software for running AI models, and more flexible consumption options with its Dynamic Workload Scheduler service.

The updates were announced by Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of Compute and ML Infrastructure at Google Cloud. He explained that generative AI has gone from almost nowhere just a couple of years ago to becoming widespread across a wide range of enterprise applications encompassing text, code, videos, images, voice, music and more, placing incredible strains on the underlying compute, networking and storage infrastructure that supports it.

To support the increasingly powerful generative AI models being adopted across the enterprise today, Google Cloud has announced the general availability of what it says is its most powerful and scalable tensor processing unit to date. Its called the TPU v5p, and it has been designed with a single purpose in mind to train and run the most demanding generative AI models.

TPU v5p is built to deliver enormous computing power, with a single pod containing 8,960 chips running in unison, which is more than twice as many as the number in a TPU v4 pod. According to Lohmeyer, the TPU v5p delivers some impressive performance gains, with twice as many floating point operations per second and three-times more high-bandwidth memory on a per-chip basis, resulting in vastly improved overall throughput.

To enable customers to train and serve AI models running on large-scale TPU clusters, Google is adding support for the TPU v5p virtual machines on Google Kubernetes Engine, its cloud-hosted service for running software containers.

As an alternative, customers can also use the latest hardware from Nvidia to train their generative AI models on Google Cloud. Besides its TPU family, its also providing access to Nvidias H100 GPUs through its new A3 family of VMs. The A3 Mega VM will become generally available from next month, and one of its main advantages will be support for confidential computing, which refers to techniques that can protect the most sensitive data from unauthorized access even while its being processed. This is a key development, Lohmeyer said, as it will provide a way for generative AI models to access data that was previously deemed too risky for them to process.

Character.AI is using Google Clouds Tensor Processor Units and A3 VMs running on Nvidias H100 Tensor Core GPUs to train and infer LLMs faster and more efficiently, said Character Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Noam Shazeer. The optionality of GPUs and TPUs running on the powerful AI-first infrastructure makes Google Cloud our obvious choice as we scale to deliver new features and capabilities to millions of users.

More exciting, perhaps, is what Google Cloud has in store for later in the year. Though it hasnt said when, the company confirmed that its planning to bring Nvidias recently announced but not yet released Blackwell GPUs to its AI Hypercomputer architecture. Lohmeyer said the Blackwell GPUs will be made available in two configurations, with VMs powered by both the HGX B200 and GB200 NVL72 GPUs. The former are designed for the most demanding AI workloads, while the latter is expected to support a new era of real-time large language model inference and massive-scale training for trillion-parameter scale models.

More powerful compute is just one part of the infrastructure equation when it comes to supporting advanced generative AI workloads. In addition, enterprises also need access to more capable storage systems that keep their data as close as possible to the compute instances that power them. The idea is that this reduces latency to train models faster, and with todays updates, Google Cloud claims its storage systems are now among the best in the business, with improvements that maximize GPU and TPU utilization, resulting in superior energy efficiency and cost optimization.

Todays updates include the general availability of Cloud Storage FUSE, a new file-based interface for Google Cloud Storage that enables AI and machine learning applications to tap into file-based access to its cloud storage resources. According to Google Cloud, GCS FUSE delivers an increase in training throughput of 2.9 times compared with its existing storage systems, with model serving performance showing a 2.2-times improvement.

Other enhancements include support for caching in preview within Parallelstore, a high-performance parallel file system thats optimized for AI and high-performance computing workloads. With its caching capabilities, Parallelstore enables up to 3.9 times faster training times and 3.7 times superior training throughput, compared to traditional data loaders.

The company also announced AI-focused optimizations to the Filestore service, which is a network file system that enables entire clusters of GPUs and TPUs to simultaneously access the same data.

Lastly, theres the new Hyperdisk ML service, which delivers block storage, available now in preview. With this, Google Cloud claims it can accelerate model load times by up to 12-times compared to alternative services.

A third part of the generative AI equation is the open-source software thats used to support many of these models, and Google Cloud hasnt ignored these either. Its offering a range of updates across its software stack that it says will help simplify developer experiences and improve performance and cost efficiencies.

The software updates include the debut of MaxDiffusion, a new high-performance and scalable reference implementation for diffusion models that generate images. In addition, the company announced a range of new open models available now in MaxText, such as Gemma, GPT3, Llama 2 and Mistral.

The MaxDiffusion and MaxTest models are built on a high performance numerical computing framework called JAX, which is integrated with the OpenXLA compiler to optimize numerical functions and improve model performance. The idea is that these components ensure the most effective implementation of these models, so developers can focus on the math.

In addition, Google announced support for the latest version of the popular PyTorch AI framework, PyTorch/XLA 2.3, which will debut later this month.

Lastly, the company unveiled a new LLM inference engine called Jetstream. Its an open-source offering thats throughput- and memory-optimized for AI accelerators such as Google Clouds TPUs. According to Lohmeyer, it will provide three-times higher performance per dollar on Gemma 7B and other open AI models.

As customers bring their AI workloads to production, theres an increasing demand for a cost-efficient inference stack that delivers high performance, he explained. JetStream helps with this need and offers support for models trained with both JAX and PyTorch/XLA, and includes optimizations for popular open models such as Llama 2 and Gemma.

The final ingredient for running generative AI on Googles cloud stack is the Dynamic Workload Scheduler, which delivers resource management and job scheduling capabilities to developers. The main idea is that it improves access to AI computing capacity while providing tools to optimize spending on these resources.

With todays update, Dynamic Workload Scheduler now provides two starting modes flex start mode for enhanced obtainability with optimized economics, and calendar mode, for more predictable job start times and durations. Both modes are now available in preview.

According to Lohmeyer, flex start jobs will be cued to run as soon as possible, based on resource availability. This will make it easier for developers to access the TPU and GPU resources they need for workloads with more flexible start times. As for calendar mode, this provides short-term reserved access to AI compute resources including TPUs and GPUs. Users will be able to reserve co-located GPUs for a period of up to 14 days, up to eight weeks in advance. Reservations will be confirmed, and the capacity will come available on the requested start date.

Dynamic Workload Scheduler improved on-demand GPU obtainability by 80%, accelerating experiment iteration for our researchers, said Alex Hays, a software engineer at Two Sigma Inc. Leveraging the built-in Kueue and GKE integration, we were able to take advantage of new GPU capacity in Dynamic Workload Scheduler quickly and save months of development work.

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Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer cloud infrastructure gets new GPUs, TPUs, optimized storage and more - SiliconANGLE News

Key Takeaways

It seems like everyone and their dog has a Google account nowadays. Its the most popular email service around, with over a billion daily users, but its usefulness doesnt end there. Its used as a hub for all the Google services, allows easy syncing of Google Chrome between devices, and enables hundreds of other quality-of-life features.

One of the most handy perks that getting a Google account gets you is 15GB of free cloud storage available on Google Drive. Sure, that storage is shared between your Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos, but its still useful for keeping your backup, email attachments, and a few documents around and ready to share online.

The 15GB limit between all the Google services was introduced back in 2013, and the bar has not been raised since. On the contrary, over the years, the company opted to remove some of the advantages that its cloud storage offered, such as unlimited photo backup for Google Pixel users, essentially making it a worse deal than it used to be all these years ago.

That begs a question: Why doesnt the free storage tier change? Over the years, prices of storage have gone down significantly, so Google should -- at least theoretically -- be able to offer much more storage to Gmail users. Unfortunately, its not as simple as that, and there are a few quite good reasons that the company is sticking to its 15GB limit.

Lets talk about the expenses first. Its true that storage prices have gone significantly down in the last few years, with both hard drives and SSDs significantly coming down in price per gigabyte. However, this fact doesnt take into account the growth of Google itself, rising prices of electricity and server space, all of which are contributing to significantly increasing costs of maintaining the cloud storage that the company offers.

In the blog post from 2021 when Google announced the end of unlimited photos storage, the company mentioned that more than 4.3 million GB are added to Google servers by users every day. This number increases significantly every year even without making the free storage tier bigger, so the operating costs for Google are tremendous. So, the biggest and most obvious reason that the company doesnt make their free storage tier bigger is the cost.

Plus, 15GB is still one of the bigger allowances around, so Google doesnt see the need to compete in this space anymore, and doing the bare minimum is usually preferable for giant companies to minimize their costs.

Speaking of doing the bare minimum: Most users really do not need more than 15GB of free storage.

For tech enthusiasts, 15GB of storage might feel like a pittance, but for a casual user whos only backing up some photos from their Android phone and getting a few emails a day, 15GB is really much more than enough. That's especially true if you only use your Google account for Gmail. Seeing as the maximum attachment size is 25MB, you could easily store 600 emails with the biggest attachment possible before running out of space.

Thats quite an unrealistic scenario, though, so lets see something more day-to-day.

I got my personal Gmail account around 2010, and ever since I have probably never deleted more than 50 emails. I use this account for almost everything, with tens of emails every day that end up simply rotting in the inbox -- a terrible habit, I know, but who has the time to take care of their inbox? Whats the result? Over these years, with more than 10,000 unread emails and probably more read than that, my Gmail has grown to 1.74GB. I could be as disorganized as I want for the rest of my life, and my Gmail account wouldn't touch the free 15GB limit anyway.

Of course, that's different if you want to use Google Photos as your backup or Google Drive to share and store some files, but for the most basic uses, 15GB of free cloud storage really is enough for most people.

Ultimately, though, the reason why Google doesnt want to give you more free cloud storage is really simple: It wants to make money selling you this service. Especially now that cloud storage is getting even more popular and widespread, its difficult to imagine Google taking a step back and offering more free storage, considering the push toward using Google One.

Of course, its not all bad in the paid cloud storage world. I know because Ive been using Google One for a while now. The cheapest tier is quite affordable at $1.99 per month and gets you not only 100GB of cloud storage across Google services, but some additional goodies as well. Were talking about the ability to share your storage space with up to five people, as well as more editing tools in Google Photos.

However, the real fun starts when you choose the highest-priced Google One plan called AI Premium. Not only does it include 2TB of cloud storage, but more importantly, it also lets you use Google Gemini Advanced. Its an improved Gemini AI model, which works both as a standalone chatbot, but is also available in Google Docs, Gmail, and other Google services if you buy the highest tier of Google One subscription.

So, ultimately, you shouldnt expect Google to offer more free cloud storage any time soon, as it would significantly harm the companys business and discourage users from buying the services that Google wants to push.

You really shouldnt worry that much about the lack of free cloud storage available. Ultimately, using Googles (or anyone elses for that matter) cloud solution is not only not very safe, but its also not the best practice if you value the safety of your data. Instead, if you feel like 15GB is not enough for you, you should look into getting yourself your own Network-Attached Storage, or maybe even setting up your own cloud storage solution. It would not only let you create a cloud storage service thats much more spacious than the ones offered by Google or other companies, but thats also, ultimately, much more affordable in the long run.

Read more from the original source:
Why won't Google increase its free 15GB cloud storage? - Pocket-lint

A new option hidden within the code for the Google Photos app teases a familiar space-saving function.

According to PunikaWeb, courtesy of AssembleDebug, the latest 6.78 version of Photos contains information regarding a coming "Recover Storage" option. The feature was discovered within the "Account Storage" section, under "Manage Storage." Upon tapping, the Android app showed an addition to the page that would let users "convert photos to Storage saver."

Google's description says the saver will "recover some storage" by reducing the quality of your previously cloud-saved items to save space. This method involves all of a user's photos and videos they've saved via the cloud.

A subsequent page states Photos will not touch the original quality of items stored in Gmail, Drive, or YouTube. Additionally, other items on a user's Pixel device may not be roped into this either.

The publication states Google's continued development of Recover Storage has brought in more information about photo/video compression. The company will seemingly warn users in-app that compressing their older items to a reduced quality "can't be reversed."

Users should also be prepared to wait a while as the app does its thing, which could take a few days.

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If this feature sounds familiar, it's because the web-based version of Photos already offers this space-saving option. The good thing is that compressing your older media won't affect your future uploads, as stated on its support page. So, if you're running out of space (again), you can always try to compress your files again.

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There's speculation that Google could roll out its Recover Storage option to Android users soon as its functionality seems nearly done. Moreover, it seems it will arrive for iOS devices in conjunction with Android.

Yesterday (Apr. 10), the company announced that a few powerful AI editing tools will soon arrive in Photos for free. Beginning May 15, all users can utilize Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Portrait Light, and a few more without a subscription. Eligible devices include those running Android 8 and above, Chromebook Plus devices, and iOS 15 and above.

King of the Androids

The Google Pixel 8 Pro arrived with a paradigm shift in tow. The device features loads of Google's AI software such as Gemini and other tools for editing up blemishes in our photos. Moreover, the Pixel 8 Pro delivers an immersive display for smooth scrolling, great haptics, and more.

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Google Photos on Android seems primed to pick up a 'recover storage' option - Android Central