Great and terrible Bobuk
Grigory Bakunov, aka Bobuk – the main speaker and media person of Yandex at one narrow-minded site – once said that Google Photos is, apart from jokes, the best Google product of recent times. Even then, understanding people began to rub their palms – soon we will see a tempting offer from Yandex in this field. After all, in recent years, Yandex's PR has promoted the idea that only Yandex is saving Russians from the horrors of monopoly. Therefore, for Yandex to present a product that will “beat” competitors in terms of its capabilities and make the “giants” move is a matter of image. Once Yandex has already made a broad gesture in favor of the Russian audience: when the ruble fell from 30 to 60 per dollar, all international services doubled in price, and Yandex.Disk left the ruble price unchanged. It was very beautiful! But three years have passed since then, and the time has come for the next move of the domestic company. Yandex is unlikely to be able to develop its own YouTube or Play Store, so Google Photos was a logical target to impose competition on the “monopolist”.
Google Photos, who doesn't know, is a service for organizing and backing up your photos and (suddenly) videos. It has two main features: free and unlimited space for photos and videos and an intelligent assistant (not to be confused with the service – Google Assistant), which organizes your media library and regularly invites you to look at it from new angles, for example, if you have a lot of photos with a person, the assistant will offer to create an album in which he will group your joint photos, similarly for places, photos with animals, objects united by a generic trait (food, cars, sports), etc. The service will soon have a third feature – Google Lens, which is currently only available on Pixel smartphones. Its essence is in the end-to-end integration of Google Assistant into other Google applications, for example, if there is a poster in the photo, then Assistant will tell you detailed information about the film and offer to buy tickets for it to the nearest cinema. Similarly, he can tell about famous buildings, monuments, dishes, extract information from a business card, etc. In general, whatever you photograph will be used against you in court to simplify your life.
Google Photos is, without exaggeration, a unique service. Nobody offers anything like this on the market now. Perhaps only Apple has a similar experience in the field of machine vision for smart search and cataloging of a media library, but Apple requires expensive purchase of space in the cloud. Therefore, when the news appeared that Yandex was offering free and unlimited space in the cloud for photos and videos, there was hope that Google Photos would finally have a worthy competitor.
Yandex did not create a separate service for photos and videos; instead, it went along the path of expanding the functionality of Ya.Disk. Now new users of the mobile app have an offer to turn on synchronization and store files in the cloud without limit. Those who had synchronization turned on earlier do not automatically connect to unlimited, you need to go into the settings and turn it on manually. Immediately the first bummer – unlimited only for photos and videos that are downloaded from the phone through the autoload function. Yandex rigidly cuts off those who want to free up space on their PC from movies downloaded from torrents. Sadly ((