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.
While this is a great idea to tell people to self host and I self host myself. I think it needs to also be mentioned how laborious backups are.
Photos aren’t something that is only inconvenient like movies to lose WHEN your drives die. They can be devastating because you will likely not get them back.
Backups are a lot of work to maintain, it’s not just simply copying the data to another array but also testing the backup regularly and making sure that they work and continue working. Backups are almost like a secondary job and many that self host are probably not interested in how much thought goes into it. Sure the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this that most people don’t think about.
The vast majority of people that read this will set up a server and have no backup. Many of them will eventually lose their data if they didn’t also keep a cloud service.
> the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this
They minimize it but don't take it away. A content creator must personally place their creation into multiple storage solutions, regardless of whether those solutions are cloud apps or local disks or anything else. In a world where disk failure is the only failure mode, sure, you can outsource the work of disk redundancy to a company, but it's not. The person you outsource to could decide to deny you access! Losing your cloud account (credential theft, alleged ToS violation, bankruptcy, etc.) is also a very real failure mode, albeit far less frequent than disk issues I suppose.
It's definitely still a lot more than the zero work required for Google Photos, but I feel like even even a semi-technical user can test an Immich backup without a ton of hassle. Start a new/empty immich instance in an empty directory, and follow the wizard for restoring a backup (and copy of your photos folder) taken from the non-empty instance.
I moved my 565GB photo library to immich about a year ago and haven't looked back. Unfortunately, convincing my wife has been a bit harder, as she has real network effects of many shared albums across a large family (30+) that all aren't going to switch the immich app so they can join her album and sync the photos.
Nonetheless, a positive move in the right direction!
I always wonder what people do with these photos. For me photos are utilitarian. I take a photo and immediately send it to my wife or friend, or upload it to my website for an article, or post it on Instagram or whatever, and then I no longer have any use for the photo on my devices. Once a year or so whenever my storage gets full, I just bulk-delete anything older than 6 months and if it hasn't been saved elsewhere for a specific purpose, then it's just gone forever. I don't miss it, because I already did what I wanted with it, so there's no need for me to keep it around.
What do you actually do with half a terabyte of photos?
Now I'm trapped just like most everyone else. Every photo is just "okay" in the moment but .. five years later the difference is so big.
99.999% of these "precious" photos are dumped in a hole and never looked at again. It feels silly to bother keeping it when I know I'm not going to sift through it.
All those hour-long videos of little-tyke sporting events shot from a million miles away... hahaha... still can't delete'm.
I am the designated family photographer. Many of those are raw files (30MB each), so admittedly a portion of them will never be seen again. Storage is cheap though, especially local storage I don't pay a cloud subscription for, so it hasn't bothered me.
And as the other child comment mentions, my rate of photo production has increased exponentially since having kids.
What's your setup like? Do you host it on your own hardware or the cloud? Is it exposed to the internet?
I have a homelab setup with my media server stuff and frigate (for security cameras), and they're only accessible via tailscale if I'm not at home. It would theoretically be easy enough to throw immich in there as well but I don't know how the app will behave when it can't reach the server half the time
I run a 5 node kubernetes cluster as my homelab. It has both public and private DNS for local upload (faster) and for remote access and sharing (via a Cloudflare tunnel).
> I don't know how the app will behave when it can't reach the server half the time
Immich has automatic URL switching, so it detects which network it's on and select between the internal and external URLs. When I'm not on my home WiFi it switches to the Tailscale URL. Tailscale must be connected for this to work obviously.
If you run DNS at home (even just dnsmasq) and you bridge your home 192.whatever to tailscale, you can make the same domain name resolve both at home and via tailscale.
I just installed Immich this weekend to try it out - it is pretty good! Face grouping, semantic search all seem to work well.
I find it better than google photos already in some ways. For example, to add photos to an album google forces you to scroll slowly through all of them so the thumbnails load, before you can multi select them all. Immich just let me select the top picture, go straight to the bottom and select all of them. Makes a difference when adding over a thousand photos!
I use immich too, on my home cluster. I did it as a "backup" to google, in case my account gets flagged by an AI with no immediate recourse.
PS: I used to be an employee, and there was a time i needed an account help for an old account who was clearly definitely mine, and they were of no help. Good for security, terrible if you get flagged.
You know what I wish I could ditch but cannot due to their firm grip on it, Google Wallet.
Every other time I open it, it shows a pop-up asking "Can we use your payment data to show you more relevant ads?" which is annoying but what's more aggravating is the choices: "Yes", "Remind me Later".
If I leave the house, I need my ID, which is in my wallet, which also contains my debit cards. Perhaps your workflow is different, but I would gain nothing from using a wallet app, so I don't.
Not the original parent comment but for my life I don't need to carry a wallet most times, my ID is also digital, I leave the house with only my phone the vast majority of times.
I only carry my wallet with my physical ID card when I know it will be needed: doctors' appointments, traveling to other countries inside Schengen, etc.
My Google wallet replaces not just my debit card but 3-4 supermarket rewards cards, gift cards, gym pass, train & plane tickets, some car parking tickets, and can be used to tap on and off buses and tube trains. It's surprisingly convenient not to have to have my wallet with me whenever I leave the house.
I used to be in the camp, until I discovered how fast it is to tap my phone at transit vs taking out wallet, taking my card out of it, tapping and putting the card back and then the wallet back, especially if the phone is already in my hand.
I find it a bit dystopian to imagine that everyone has to carry ID all the time. I know lots of countries do it, but I've never had to and I'd like to keep it that way.
(I'm aware that some places I've been to require foreigners to carry passports at all times but luckily it's never been an issue.)
To be clear, I live on a farm 12km up and down small mountains from the nearest town of any consequence, and 21km from the town with a supermarket I can afford to shop at-- so if I'm leaving for anything but exercise, it's in a car, and the fine for not being able to produce my license if demanded by a cop at a traffic stop or checkpoint is around €50. They're actually not allowed to randomly check ID for no particular reason on the street in Ireland.
Even so, I think I'd prefer to keep my fondleslab and access to all my money as separate concerns. For example, were someone to grab my phone and run (in Dublin, perhaps), I would still have everything else. If I got mugged, well then, I'm getting mugged for everything either way. Plus I prefer cash whenever possible.
Yeah do that. I’ve just started doing this again. I have an iPhone but Apple Pay crapped put and I couldn’t remember my debit card pin. This was on holiday in Germany so I was up shit creek. Turns out wallet apps help make you stupid.
This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.
> "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."
I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me. Did you find a way to make the integration decent?
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.
there are already protocols for exchanging files between computers. The cloud is just someone else's pc.... administered by mostly incompetent buffoons (or forced to act like incompetent buffoons by their higher ups). A "cloud" protocol doesn't make sense. Since a "cloud" could be any of a ton of wildly unrelated things, there is only one sane standard protocol that could be shared. It's called IPv4 (or v6)
Not just some cloud protocol, but an abstraction layer at the OS for the apps to talk to so that the cloud storage back-end can be replaced with no knowledge, participation, or consideration from the applications that a user uses.
I take my shiny new phone, go to settings, then cloud provider where I specify Acme Cloud Bit and Bobs Inc. And now everything just works with Acme Cloud. I switch it to Globodisk Corporation and everything just continues working. Maybe the OS does a nice one and asks if I want to migrate all my storage from Acme Cloud to Globodisk and performs said migration. And the apps never know or care.
But it would need to be mandated by some large political entity as no tech company would do this and give up the lock in that they desperately want.
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.
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.
It takes up quite a sizable amount of the screen, too, so anything in the corner is effectively hidden without interacting with the popup. These pop-ups have been the bane of my life.
There was brief time when Pinterest automatically logged in Google account users if you made the mistake of clicked an image in Google search results. Popups sound downright civilized and principled by comparison
This happens exactly because you're not on Chrome. For some reason the sign in with Google pop up only triggers on non-chrome browsers. Especially on Firefox.
It looks like the pop up is part of the browser UI in Chrome, and displayed as part of the website if using non-Chromium browsers. I block ads and don't use Chrome, so I don't see any version of this often.
It's not a matter of "letting" her do anything. She can choose to use whatever service and hardware vendors she wants, as long as she can take care of her own tech support.
Obviously I didn't mean it as her asking for permission, but as him not questioning her if she wants to go the Google route. People will make sacrifices for their significant others if they think that'll make them happier, out of their own choice.
Who would even honestly interpret it that way nowadays? This isn't the 19th century.
Remember to choose the `tar` version, not the `zip` one, unless you like downloading ten thousand zip files one by one. The tar files can be up to 50GB, the zip ones are much smaller.
The zip files can be up to 50GB as well, but they recently changed something on the backend so that if you do use the zip option you may still get however many 50GB files then maybe a 1MB, a 7kB, and a 1GB file, I assume because of the way they parallelize the tasks. I don't know if the tar option behaves in the same way.
Did the same. One issue was the links had some # of retries you can do before they become invalid. Solved it first by exporting them to google drive instead :D
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.
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.
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.
It’s even worse than that! There is no delete all feature! So if you have 100k photos and make the mistake of saying yes to Google Photos just once, it will fill up all your storage space, block your email until you pay for extra storage, then force you to delete all your photos manually, one page at a time, before you can stop using it. I think that trap is the sleaziest thing I’ve seen Google do.
They actually did build a way to undo enabling backup that removed all the photos added from the enabled device. I guess that's a tacit acknowledgement that people are likely to enable this accidentally.
I remember there being a mini scandal about this feature being limited to 3 uses or something, but can't seem to find the story right now.
This was even more annoying when they started including whatsapp backups in your quota and sent a load of people over quota. And as far as I know there's no alternative for whatsapp backups apart from plugging in a USB cable and hoping Whatsapp don't change the method between now and when you need to restore it
It is possible to back up the WhatsApp folder if using Android, with the likes of total commander or any other file browser.
It can then be decrypted with a simple access to the _sim card_, i.e. a way to receive a message, meaning that anything backed up to Google drive should not considered safe from a dedicated state actor (even if the other party did it). It is quite easy to demonstrate with a new phone or an emulator.
I have doubts on how much the US gov needs to break the Whisper protocol when they have such easy to get side attacks.
I was under the impression that to backup the encrypted whatsapp you need to enable your own encryption key, which presumably makes it more secure but of course that's trusting Meta's implementation
The Whatsapp's restore process if you're not on Google Drive is unreliable too. I keep a separate backup but also have to keep the Google Drive backup on because it's too risky now I've seen it fail to restore and was only able to rescue it using the Google Drive backup I had also. If it just had my backup I'd have lost the lot.
Are Google Photos stored in Google Drive? Because Google Collab has access to Google Drive so you can write some nifty Python scripts to move your data between Drive accounts and do mass renames/deletes etc.
No, I've never seen Google Photos reflected in any Google Drive interface (web, OS integration, etc.) which on the one hand makes sense (think of Google Photos more like a database-driven black box app than a hierarchical filesystem) but on the other hand Google Drive does show gdocs, gsheets, etc. (which is also sort of a black box app, as the "files" seen in GDrive are merely lightweight stubs).
Only in storage quota views do Photos and Drive (and Gmail, etc.) commingle.
I guess the hopeful one, "Google always kills its products", suggesting that the bad product in this thread is also doomed. I hold this same hope, almost entirely unironically, about so many things.
I've said "no" to this popup at least 100 times. Under what notion of obtaining consent would it be considered acceptable to ask me again the 101st time?
I've never once cleared the cache on this app, and you can trivially find hundreds of other people complaining about this same behavior. Why make such an assumption and write it in such an insulting style?
Please don't let it become acceptable to be yelled in the face every few minutes of the day by ads, commercials, notifications and other attacks on our perpetually overstimulated brains, most of which we have no control over at all.
To have a healthy relationship with technology requires holding manufacturers and service providers responsible for our mental health.
It's also not hard to just connect your phone to your laptop, copy your photos off every month or so, and clear the phone storage. I actually can't believe this isn't the normal way people do things. People pay to let Google keep copies of all their photos?! And I mean, setting up your own self-hosted storage for all your photos is neat and stuff, but seriously, seems like overkill. One folder a year on my laptop / backup drive is sufficient for me. I've got "photos_1998" all the way up to "photos_2016". It's a useful test to see if I remember the order of events in my life, when or if I go looking for something.
>connect your phone to your laptop, copy your photos off every month or so, and clear the phone storage. I actually can't believe this isn't the normal way people do things. People pay to let Google keep copies of all their photos?! And I mean, setting up your own self-hosted storage for all your photos is neat and stuff, but seriously, seems like overkill. One folder a year on my laptop / backup drive is sufficient for me.
Your suggested alternative of moving all photos to a laptop doesn't work for the people who prefer having all their photos accessible from their smartphone. That's the usable UI that the constant sync to cloud services gives them. The tradeoff is the cloud storage subsciption costs.
Also, transferring all photos to a laptop creates a single-point-of-failure if the laptop dies. Recovering photos becomes even more complicated when the internal SSD is encrypted with macOS File Vault or Windows BitLocker. Yes, photos in cloud storage isn't really a "true backup" in the 3-2-1 best practices sense but it's still more durable against catastrophic data loss than a single laptop.
The self-hosted Immich photo server is just one way to enable smartphone access to all photos and avoid paying for cloud storage. That's the reward for the "overkill" setup.
Fair enough, I guess if you want access to your entire lifetime photo collection through your phone that makes sense. As far as backups - I mean, that's just a general question of keeping your laptop backed up. I use Arq (highly recommended!) to maintain a remote encrypted backup on a VPS, along with Time Machine to an external SSD.
I hate Google and their dark patterns as much as the next guy but I agree: Having the pop-up once or twice or even three times is reasonable. A lot of people value the backup more than their privacy.
But after saying no three times, it really ought to leave the user alone...
storing important files with google is risky business anyway. you could lose them for any other stupid reason, and im sure there is nothing you can do but blame yourself for trusting them.
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
Force close the app and clear the cache, your photos will come back.
Or clear data completely, then open the app "for the first time" and immediately log out.
It'll work, but as you've discovered, google made sure that it isn't the happy path.
Also no search (not even by file name), no albums, some editing functions won't work (even though they're local), and a few more annoyances. but also no more backup prompt...
I closed the app, stopped it and cleared the cache. Then restarted it.
The UI is surprisingly sane now. My first impression is that it is much better than before. Everything is neatly layed out in a series of albums, for each the latest images are shown and I can click on the album name and it displays them all.
So I do see my albums. Those seem to be just directories in /Pictures/ which it seems I can edit with the files app?
Am I missing out on anything this way? I don't need search.
All the usualy edit functions like cropping, adjusting colors etc also seem to still be there.
I switched back and forth between "with account"/"without account" a few times now and it seems to work just fine. I stay with the no-account state, as it not only removes the nags, the interface is actually much cleaner and more logical
No idea about Lens, because I never used it. Aren't there webapps or web services for everything these days? I do everything that I do only occasionally via webapps. Barcode parsing for example.
> For me, I want to use Google Photos exclusively to see my past backups but never back anything up again.
Get out while you still can, it's only a matter of time before your account gets locked by their automated "abuse" systems. Cloud only is not a backup.
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.
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 videos
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...
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
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.
Correct, but there are no better non-root alternatives as far as I know. Would love to be proved wrong. There are some workarounds to use NetGuard with a VPN based on a work profile or something, but I haven't personally tried them and cannot attest to them working.
And when you get at ~90% of space full is even worse! I stopped backing up photos to Google and use my local Immich instance (+ B2 remote backup) but I still haven't cleaned up the old ones from GPhotos/GDrive and it nags me in every possible way to buy more space!
You can store 2TB for $14 per month; to fill that with photos you'd have to shoot 0.5GB/day for 10 years.
You can spend less - Google Drive and iCloud will offer 2TB for $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.
> You can spend less - Google Drive and iCloud will offer 2TB for $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
I have 850GB in B2 across all the backups I store there and I pay around 7$ a month. Any better price from any underdog provider? I'm definetely not going to pay 10EUR/month for Google One's 2TB.
I still need to check if I can optimize B2 costs by using different tiers (I mean, these are mainly disaster recovery backups so I dont care about fast copy times)
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).
Every iPhone and Android device can be cloned in a few minutes with physical access. Others with standard base-band cell LTE/G5 modem devices are remote tapped in seconds without user knowledge.
The fact is technology can never fix legal policy, privacy protection, or societal issues. =3
There are companies that are specialized in cracking phone logins with unpublished zero-click $370/unit product exploits. An LLM will not help you kid.
The only indication of a remote-compromised system is apparently a slight drop in battery life, and higher than normal background data. Privacy is dead. =3
Wow, you've developed such a crazy allergy to seeing a colon that you're becoming one.
I'd say "have fun" with the solipsistic world where everyone who disagrees with you on the internet is a bot, except that in the long term I know you won't.
Maybe, a rickety stack of volunteers relying on uncoordinated hobby projects may have regression tested coding standards above a multi-billion dollar market-cap corporation.
Or... is relying on installation obscurity for security theater.
Both options are likely to have kernel and other exploits published. A disposable phone for traveling into hostile territory is still recommended. =3
Is it actually a backup though or only a cloud sync?
Given how the other major provider behaves I have to assume that it's a cloud sync, not a backup, and that your photos will no longer be yours but instead stored on someone else's computer.
Somebody in my family who generally doesn't pay that much attention to prompts and modals was repeatedly telling me their Gmail doesn't work because it's full and - surprize - it was because Google Photos was harassing them with the backup prompt, which in a hurry, they just re-activated every time I turned it off.
After a while and much convincing (and changing Immich to be the default gallery app), we're pretty happy. Immich has been very good, it's fast enough to not be bothering, and running it on TrueNAS has been quite hands-off. I have a mirrored 6TB drive and do off-site backups to a Hetzner storage box.
Previously we were using OneDrive and the Photos archiving was horribly slow for everything but the most recent months. It was literally unusable beyond a certain date, with the UI locking up, tabs crashing, huge amounts of memory consumed by the open tab, etc. The mobile app was only marginally better, but still very slow. Immich doesn't have this problem. I scroll back years of photos and they load almost instantly from HDDs.
I personally can't trust OneDrive to handle my irreplaceable data, switching on silently, takes your data if you try and turn it off because it swapped out your files for "online only" stubs, randomly files just end up not coming back down silently, sync fails silently.
I have it off. Although not backed up I see the image sorta AI scanned where, for a moment it outlines, segments people for a brief moment. Anyone notice this and what is going on?
That runs locally as far as I know. I have backup turned off and I can still search for simple things in the photos (like "dog"), but nothing more complex than that. Only when you enable the backup and it gets uploaded to the cloud do they run more advanced models on it.
Not been a proponent of OSS, but started using more of them hosted in my private VPS because of subtle/explit dark patterns in big company services.
Things are easier to host now, and big companies are now good for infrastructures.
We can simply create and use bespoke services ourselves thanks to AIs
I use Google Photos on GrapheneOS, and Google Photos is blocked from network access (via the network permission exposed on GOS). That must prevent this popup from occurring, because I've never seen it.
I have a similar question: how do I stop Google photos asking me to update every time I open it?
"You're missing out
Update your Google photos app for the newest features"
... I have zero interest in updating. I'm not missing out on anything... other than being able to browse my photos without this annoying message getting in the way.
I recently started using fossify's photos app to get away from this popup annoyance! The app SO DESPERATELY wants to backup my photos that the app is no longer usable.
I checked on my phone. I don't have Google Photos so maybe I uninstalled it or the phone came without it. It's a Samsung so it has Samsung Gallery but I'm not logged in into a Samsung account. Photos are local. I installed Aves Gallery [1] and that's my main photo app. Backups are through Syncthing which of course is not a mass market app, but I'm a software developer and being able to use niche alternatives is one of our privileges.
There are reasons to remain on Google Android for now, though. For example, QuickShare compatibility with AirDrop[1,2], or compatibility with certain banking apps[3].
Also, those of us who don't use Chrome have to periodically put up with the "It's better in Chrome/The Google App!" popups on all their properties (even when using a Chromium based browser), to make matters worse the popover has the "yes, let's get Google/Chrome" option as a blue button with the "maybe later" having a transparent background meaning if you absent mindedly tap the "natural" option you're annoyingly disrupted even further.
I honestly think I've been trained to ignore the "natural" button across all computer/phone usage because of how common this dark pattern is. Over the years it's switched my brain to first look for the greyed-out text, haha.
If you pay for an Amazon Prime account, Amazon Photos is included. You get unlimited photos storage
If you pay for a M365 license, you get 1TB of photo space on OneDrive
I get these aren't free, however if you are already paying for a service which give you photo storage, why pay Google. Also, let's face it, most people have an Amazon Prime account or pay for a M365 account to use Office.
My goal is to move to LineageOS by the end of the month since Google is being such an asshole about "sideloading" (installing) applications. Losing this antifeature will be a nice bonus.
So... What's the modern equivalent of gallery.apk ? Looking for just a simple image viewer that shows the "collections" view by default and preferably is GPL and does not attempt any sort of internet connection.
Use the website and block the popup with uBlock Origin. Using websites will always have better UX than apps, despite what devs will tell you, even on mobile devices.
Using the website means the photos are backed up in the cloud which is precisely what they don't want. And in the first place, you shouldn't have to use an ad blocker to turn off something that you should be able to turn off with a setting.
Also huge disagree on websites having better UX than native apps; it may be true more often on PC, and it may also be true on mobile for some apps that are particularly bad, but otherwise I observe the exact opposite of what you're saying.
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.
[1] https://immich.app/
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