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.
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.
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 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 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!
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.
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.
> "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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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?
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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 $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.
I have 850GB in B2 across all the backups I store there and I pay around 7$ 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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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].
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://immich.app/
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.
All very true! Immich, unlike a lot of apps, does have a pretty friendly UI for managing/restoring backups, though: https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/
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 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 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!
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.
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.
> "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 "solution" is to run a patched version of GCam that allows you to select a different gallery app, e.g. https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev...
Or if you are using an alternative os you can use a fake google photos app.
It used to use your default gallery app, I see it as another anti-competitive choice on googles part
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.
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".
This should be deemed as illegal - this isn't a consent choice but coercion resulting from the tiredness of being constantly harassed
I mean, is it that much of a hassle to carry a debit card with you?
No, but it's incredibly convenient? Same way I don't carry a camera because my phone has one
You can put the card in the phone case and use it almost as if it’s Wallet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gone back to physical cards.
> I mean, is it that much of a hassle to carry a debit card with you?
In order to be exposed to targeted advertising? That seems excessive for the end goals (not mentioning the fact that you cannot opt out).
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.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/405321957?hl=en&msg...
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
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.
I wrote some JavaScript and paste it in my console to automate this when I left Google Photos. The “data avarice” is astounding.
Mobster tactics from google. Nice.
Just remember that Google always kills its products, and they are an advertising company.
I'm joking, I hope, but Google ain't what it used to be.
Which part was meant to be a joke?
Careful, don't cloud deletions sync, i.e. remove the previously offline-only files from your devices?
This is true. it happened to a lot of people that i know
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.
Eventually all those valuable pics they take will be lost if GP is disabled and phone is lost or screen damaged.
And someone will complain - you can't even have sensible defaults.
I understand you perhaps have hatred for google but hosting immich or ente is not for everyone.
It is far easier for average Jose to pay for GP or some cloud.
Unless you plan to setup at least some free cloud don't bother to lecture others
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 use Dropbox to sync my photos, I still have to tell google not to backup my photos probably 2-3 times a week.
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.
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...
It's a ubiquitous dark pattern. Instead of having a "Yes" or "No" option it's now "Yes" or "Ask Me Later."
Gmail uses the same storage space for a few years now. Fill it up and you can't receive emails any more.
Even without Photos plenty of users complain in Gmail forums and subreddits
- wtf gmail is full
At some point people should take self responsibility for their accounts.
I like this example of brigading
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...
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...
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.
Here is a open source OS to allow you to self host immich with 1 click https://www.olares.com/docs/use-cases/immich
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
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
Oh, that looks good!
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.
Is google lens still available? That's perhaps the only cloud feature I sometimes use, in order to translate Chinese text to English or similar.
Also is it possible to undo (in case there's something I don't like?) Is it just a matter of adding the app back to your account?
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.
Does Big Tech understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask me again later
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
Feeding all your photos into their AI models for free, really showed them bud!
I love you.
Alternatives to Google Photos and self hosting:
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.
In short, uninstall google photos. It has a bunch of other undesirable behaviours, the prompts are just one irritation.
I don't get it. I'm also a paying customer and I have never seen this prompt. My google photos album goes back to 2006.
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!
How much data do you have ? Isn't B2 expensive at certain size ?
For photos, it's kinda fine?
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 $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.
<goes to check notes...>
I have 850GB in B2 across all the backups I store there and I pay around 7$ 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)
Another +1 for migrating to Immich.
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.
OneDrive is so unfit for purpose to handle your irreplaceable data.
Plenty of horror stories out there, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408794
It also never takes "no" for an answer: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/331890/hell-free...
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.
Is this to select them, or make stickers out of them?
On web I use an adblocker to block annoying google popups, including the Gemini one in gmail.
Immich is an amazing alternative. People should give it a chance. One click install: https://malmo.network/store/immich
The answer in the thread (which is quite hard to find) is to use the Google Photos app without an account.
The app has some very nice features that are locked behind account access though.
I didn't realise you could do this but it's worth a try, it'll probably just change to nagging you to sign in instead now.
It's under your profile icon in the top right.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/256212140?hl=en&msg...
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.
[1] https://github.com/deckerst/aves
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.
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.
This is exactly why I don't use it and have it disabled. The arrogance of that message is stunning. I use Aves and it works just fine.
One benefit of having a Samsung, you can uninstall google photos and still be able to use your camera.
Benefit of having a Pixel, you can install Graphene OS and get rid of all of the BS and not have a second layer of Samsung's shit all over it.
The amount they make Android insecure can not be overstated.
Which one is the "they"?
Samsung. Graphene is outstanding. Far and away best in class.
Probably meant Alphabet and Facebook ad marketing telemetry service embedding. =3
Currently there is a guy in court for giving a duress-password to border guards. From nuisance to a real problem in 30 seconds. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU
he would be in same issues with Samsung and not giving the password
let's blame the tool, not the person using it, I assume you also think cars kill people, not the the people driving the cars...
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
> Every iPhone and Android device can be cloned in a few minutes with physical access.
Misleading: The data can usually be copied quickly and easily is the encrypted version.
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.
Also the joke meme: https://xkcd.com/538/
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
you can do that on any modern Android phone, just install Shizuku + Canta and "uninstall" whatever Google app you don't like
This is another argument that we need more phone OS options, not just Android and iPhone. (Graphene isn't really a proper option yet).
I wonder why google locked it..
because it's a feature, not a bug. wontfix
For pixel owners: the Google photos app cannot be uninstalled, but you can disable it using adb.
The only reason to buy a pixel (new or refurbished) is to run Graphene or Lineage anyway :)
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].
[1] https://www.android.com/quick-share/with-iphone/
[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6550
[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps
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.
solution: self host immich