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- Hacker News
- My reason was the irritating, and equally convulated ways they go about where they are kept - are they part of drives, if I delete those albums, do I get more space.
I came from Picasa, (20+ years ago) eventually went on to Google Photos later. I kept that one as a back-up for a pretty long time, besides being a long-time paid user. I’m still on one of their cheaper tier for the family as Google’s services are such that we got to use one or the other (read relatives, friends, extended family etc).
However, I have made sure that if I have to walk or get blocked or something of the sorts that happens to people, I will just walk - no emotions attached.
Disclaimer: Article from my own personal blog, but I did blog about why and how I completely did away with Google Photos from our core photos collection (I still use it to host a bnunch of archives for friends, and families group photos).
https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
by Brajeshwar - Plastering a "Back up now" pill over the top of every photo (not a header, I mean it actually covers the photo) was always a favourite of mine.
Example (doesn't show it covering the photo but view a portrait photo and you'll see it): https://media.zenfs.com/en/android_police_756/2ba414b46f9732...
by cube00 - Bad take. This is exactly how I use non-auto-backup Photos: 99% of my shitty smartphone pictures are local only, and I don't care to lose them.
Occasionally though, I want to share or save a photo. Having this (small) button is quite convenient.
by Zopieux - Ah, bigcorp with the Pick-Up Artist model of consent: keep asking until they relent.
I find Google Photos asks me once every update. I got a Pixel 9 with 1 year of free Gemini Pro (or whatever version it is, their offering almost feels like Windows 7 Home Enterprise Ultimate), but because of their nagging about the backup I loathe to give them money to subscribe to Gemini beyond that.
I have a Google Pixel 1 I got from eBay, with "lifetime free photos backup", sitting plugged in on a shelf. Every evening my main phone syncs photos I take on it to my NAS, and another app copies the images from the NAS to that Pixel phone, which then backs it up to Google Photos... it's my finger to Google for being the enshittfiying assholes they are
by netsharc - I love you.by Mistletoe
- Feeding all your photos into their AI models for free, really showed them bud!
- Worth the shout-out to the open source NetGuard app which allows you to block internet access for select apps without root, using Android's always-on VPN feature as a firewall. This is useful to prevent this and any other apps from talking to the network in a way external to the app itself.by afarah1
- Then you can't use an actual VPN.by rationalist
- Does Big Tech understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask me again later
by rmellow - They're the enlightened few! Your consent is assumed for your own good!by xg15
- The actual problem is that all this stuff is "free" and after many years of this, expected to be "free".by WarmWash
- I personally use Fossify Gallery to browse my photos and I just manually back up my photos from time to time by plugging my phone into my PC and copying the entire folder into an Archive folder which I keep organized by year and back up in multiple places. It's an oldschool solution to the problem but it works great for me.by merryocha
- fossify gallery is great, but any idea how to only view videos? while there are sections for favorites, screenshots, and others, I don't see any for videosby defrim
- I recently canceled my Google One subscription. You can cancel any time, but Google WILL make sure you're feeling the withdrawal symptoms fast.
Because without the subscription I had overstretched my storage space, several Google apps went full red-alert-and-howling-klaxons, plastering their UI with warnings about my data's impending doom, should I not solve the storage problem quickly or resume the subscription.
The most obnoxious was Google Photos: It showed a red warning message on 1/3 of the screen space and put a red "no cloud backup" marker on every single thumbnail in the gallery.
All that even though cloud backup was turned OFF. None of those photos was supposed to be backed up anyway.
The app will let you turn off the backup any time, but for unfathomable reasons, it will still get angry if you don't keep enough storage space reserved so you could "hypothetically" turn it back on...
by xg15 - One of the answers points the right steps to disable the Google account (and the annoying popup) in the Photos app:
- click on the account icon
- choose switch account and pick use this application without an account
- That does not work for all use cases.
For me, I want to use Google Photos exclusively to see my past backups but never back anything up again.
by novafunc - Just tried that.
Unfortunately, it seems to completely mess up the interface?
I couldn't even see all photos anymore. Even though I do not use backup at all. So it is not possible that those photos are in the cloud or something.
by TekMol - I use Ente photos [0] without logging in, just as a local gallery. Since their backup solution is E2EE, it does everything on-device – face/object search, map view, memories
[0] https://ente.com
by speedstyle - And I use Google's own Gallery app instead of Photos. Like for others, the backup notification is what renders Photos unusable for me.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
by distances - Older people (seen it at 65+) will just click the nag without knowing what the button does and end up beaming up all photos to google cloud with no ability to disable the nag (it keeps showing up after a while) even when dismissed. If you are concerned about your data privacy, you may want to check on what photos of say your kids your parents are beaming up to google without their or your knowledge.by dt3ft
- I like this example of brigadingby BLKNSLVR
- It is worse than that. It fills up your accounts cloud storage, where your Google docs, sheets, drive files etc are stored.
Once full you are caught in their trap: pay a monthly fee to the mafia or delete your data!
This flow is intentional and they have set up everything to bring you there. The Photo-Backup popup (and arguably the whole photo feature) helps to shovel users more quickly to the end of the monetization funnel.
by nom - We (wife and I) de-googled ourselves about a year and a half ago, moving half a TB of photos to Ente and canceling our paid Google subscription (while still keeping our gmail addresses). We set up our (Android) phones to back up photos to Ente and everything was lovely.
Then I started noticing my wife's Google Photos storage use growing again. Somehow her phone had been switched to backing up on Google again. I turned it off. Then it happened again. And again. She couldn't explain how it happened, but I suspected she was the victim of a scary prompt warning that her photos weren't getting backed up.
This wasn't happening to me because I had switched my phone to LineageOS, but hers was still a stock Pixel with Android.
Lately, I have run across a different example of Google locking in its services. As part of our process of leaving Google, we moved our email, contacts and calendars to mailbox.org. I set up her phone's calendar app to use the new server but to my dismay every new appointment was defaulting to use the Google calendar service! I switched her to the Etar calendar app (which is the default app on LineageOS), disabled the default calendar, and asked her to use Etar instead. Everything was great until I began to notice that her new appointments were showing up on Google again! I look at her phone and see that Etar is completely gone and the only calendar app available is the default Android one.
This calendar fiasco only just revealed itself the other day, so I haven't had enough time to figure out how or when it happened but it feels like it might be the same Google Photos tactic of sucking people back into Google.
by vertnerd - Google's workspace features are almost hilariously transparent in how they do this. I have to use it for work and have chosen to do so on a single device also for personal use because I don't want two devices. I don't have Chrome installed on this device, but if you click a link from any Google app, it will still popup a selection menu with Chrome as the default and a generic "this device's default browser" last option with no distinguishing name or icon, unlike every other app I am aware of that chooses the default browser by default because that's the entire point of having a default.by nonameiguess
- How did you effectively download 500GB of photos? Did you just use Takeout?by eitally
- I think you should let your wife use Google, as it doesn't seem she's very invested in your degoogling.by ASalazarMX
- My work uses Google. Many websites now have a popup 'sign-in with Google' to keep you using their ecosystem.by OptionOfT
- I have another, similar example, though not quite as insidious. I switched to GrapheneOS and it's been mostly great. Unfortunately Graphene's stock camera creates drab shots compared to what the hardware supports. OpenCamera is available, but due to OS restrictions it doesn't work with hardware controls. In other words if you want to take a quick shot you have to unlock the phone and select OpenCamera. Bummer if you're into wildlife shots.
Graphene recommends installing google's pixel camera and sandboxing it, which, fine, I did and it takes beautiful pictures. However the pixel camera locks in google photos for it's gallery. As a result going from the camera to the gallery requires going back home first and then selecting the gallery.
Glad to hear about experiences like this because it was getting tempting to install and sandbox google photos as well.
by troyvit - This exact issue was the final straw for me ditching google photos! I had previously been using syncthing to sync & backup the photos, same as other files on my phone and laptop.
I now use Immich [1] (mentioned elsewhere in this thread but without the proper link), having purchased a single-payment lifetime family licence. There is, as I understand it, no benefit to me to purchase it. After a month of use it was clear this was going to stay in use for quite a while, and the author(s) have done a fantastic job. So feel free to give it a shot, alongside google photos app on your phone, and see how you feel.
It's not for everyone though, as I have an old computer at home running as a 'server' that can host immich. There's a certain nerd level requirement (that this forum should be full of) to get it set up. For users though? It's so far seamless -- my partner uses the app on her phone and likes it just fine. The backup works for her and there's a single button to click to clear space on her phone that just deletes things immich knows are on our home server already. Very useful.
I still open google photos app to edit videos occasionally -- it's better at that, and I do still use the google built in 'camera' app, so I'm kind of using google photos while I take pictures if that makes sense.
by hiisukun - The thing that is needed is a cloud storage API that is mandatory by law and is required to be honored by the OS. The OS vendors create a virtual cloud storage layer which has a backend that can be implemented by any cloud storage provider and then all the apps use these abstractions when loading, saving, and so on their data to the "cloud." Which can be anything from a third-party online service to a self-hosted solution. It should be implemented in all apps that support cloud-based content, music, books, movies, home environmental data, medical data, exercise history and the like. Silicon Valley has developed an arrogance, and they need to be reminded that they are subject to laws and regulations like all of us and that it could be much worse for them if they continue to be wankers.by wang_li