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.
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.
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.
The creator must be the fork in the road.
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.
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.
And as the other child comment mentions, my rate of photo production has increased exponentially since having kids.
Reminisce when you get old(er). Especially if you have children.
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
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 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!
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.
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".
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.
(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.)
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.
Gone back to physical cards.
In order to be exposed to targeted advertising? That seems excessive for the end goals (not mentioning the fact that you cannot opt out).
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?
It used to use your default gallery app, I see it as another anti-competitive choice on googles part
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.
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.
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.
> These pop-ups have been the bane of my life.
Adding the below in Ublock Origin->My Filters helps with this:
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
winget install -e --id=eloston.ungoogled-chromium
winget install -e --id uazo.cromiteIt 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.
Who would even honestly interpret it that way nowadays? This isn't the 19th century.
I have noticed that the tar files toward the end tend to be smaller, but they still typically weigh in at multiple gigs apiece - 37, 14, etc.
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.
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...
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.
Only in storage quota views do Photos and Drive (and Gmail, etc.) commingle.
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.
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
Never it asked.
My guess is this happens to overzealous privacy people that often clean cache etc.
If you are that ana l then why not
press and hold app. Disable.
Or even leave Google and install something like lineageOS
To have a healthy relationship with technology requires holding manufacturers and service providers responsible for our mental health.
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.
But after saying no three times, it really ought to leave the user alone...
- wtf gmail is full
At some point people should take self responsibility for their accounts.
[0] https://ente.com
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
- click on the account icon
- choose switch account and pick use this application without an account
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.
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.
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?
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.
However -some way or the other- it decided to only show pictures from 2024 and older. Something is messed up in that respect and thus I switched back.
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.
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...
Occasionally though, I want to share or save a photo. Having this (small) button is quite convenient.
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
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask me again later
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...
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 $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.
rclone works very, very well with Google Drive:
I have 850GB in B2 across all the backups I store there and I pay around 7$ 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)
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...
The fact is technology can never fix legal policy, privacy protection, or societal issues. =3
Misleading: The data can usually be copied quickly and easily is the encrypted version.
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
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.
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
Do people still make actual money competing with Slop clips? I wonder how often Alphabet actually cuts a meaningful check for long-tail content. =3
Than that is approximately 100k to 12.5k views to see even $100.
That exposure incurs around a 1% psychopathy rate for approximately 125 to 1000 users that would have no problem stealing your stuff.
I find it unbelievable people would actually sign up for that experience. =3
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.
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...
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.
Plenty of horror stories out there, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408794
If you could run OneDrive with debug level logging I can only imagine the flood of errors they must be ignoring.
It also never takes "no" for an answer: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/331890/hell-free...
The app has some very nice features that are locked behind account access though.
It's under your profile icon in the top right.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/256212140?hl=en&msg...
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
Setting up backups: Ja. Just setup rsync between a couple computers, good to go.
Immich is an amazing alternative. People should give it a chance. One click install: https://malmo.network/store/immich
"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.
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.
[1] https://www.android.com/quick-share/with-iphone/
[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6550
Do you want to do <x>?
- Yes
- Maybe later
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.