Misleading and clickbaitish titles, both the OP and Forbes. It is not Google Photos which is cancelled, it is the 'Photo Printing Service' used by Google Photos. This is a better source that gets to the point [0].
I wish we could do the same for Shutterstock and all these useless stock image websites that have totally hacked Google image search yet Google won't do anything about them for some reason.
My understanding of it as an outsider is that Getty Images filed a suit against Google seeking money for their images being displayed in GIS results. They later announced a settlement, and the 'View Image' button disappeared and the search result quality plummeted (my judgement) at exactly the same time. Here's some more reading:
Wow, Google. Inconvenient as fuck. Put it back right away. I don’t even want to use image search anymore. Seriously fucking shitty, shitty, shitty idea.
EDIT: This is the result of litigation with Getty Images? Guess who I’m boycotting. This isn’t the first time they’ve had their fingerprints on bad news.
So why did Google decide to delete all those Panoramio photos, then? And user numbers don’t mean anything to Google if they decide to kill a product, look at Google+.
And someone upthread claimed their image search was so great in comparison to google... because google also censors their results. They just censor different things.
That’s interesting. The timeline here doesn’t dictate someone publishing the photo to Google. I expect Google crawled out and that they decided to use it in search results and decided to collocate it with articles.
Google search isn’t really a publishing platform, but they do have lots of money and lawyers, which counts for something, I guess.
I am hoping that AI tooling like this becomes even more widespread (Google Photos is doing that) that more people will finally understand that they cannot trust everything they see online. I hope.
I hope someone at Google is raising ruckus over Imagen and LaMDA not being publicly available. I’m quite sure that the public could come up with something much more creative and compelling using the technology than what these guys did.
IIRC it was mostly from groups like Getty images. They and other image licensing companies didn't want google showing their images in search results. They claimed it was copyright infringement and given the absolute state of IP law in the US they could have made Google's life very difficult.
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