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What I Use Instead of Google

kiramclean.com

21–30 of 215 posts

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#21
Every time I try to get out of google they (my colleagues) pull me back in. They share documents in google docs and google drive. I have no choice but to keep my google account.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#22
post #20

I did something similar a few weeks ago and found that https://rclone.org/ worked for me to automatically port Google Photos data to a Nextcloud instance with WebDAV. That being said, it cannot pull the original quality images, only the compressed version.

Perkeep devs built a tool to grab the originals: https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp#gphotos-cdp

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#23

> I suspect means it [DDG] would be a perfectly fine replacement for most people I suspect otherwise. DDG is as good as Google in certain topics, especially programming-related topics. But otherwise, not so good. Sometimes, it feels like it simply has indexed less pages than Google. But I still use DDG as much as possible, only !g when the results are unsatisfactory. I don't know how much it actually help DDG, though…

Localisation as well. DDG lets me pick the UK but almost all results are US centric.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#24
post #21

Every time I try to get out of google they (my colleagues) pull me back in. They share documents in google docs and google drive. I have no choice but to keep my google account.

Would they accept you using a work-related Google account?

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#25
post #24
post #21

Every time I try to get out of google they (my colleagues) pull me back in. They share documents in google docs and google drive. I have no choice but to keep my google account.

Would they accept you using a work-related Google account?

I always make a “work” google account if the company isn’t already using GSuite.

Never use my own Gmail account for work. Or my own FB account for that matter!

I don’t need FB locking my account as it’s connected to some clients dodgy FB ads :-/

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#26
Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org. Set up Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different commands which work with many different cloud storage systems e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE filesystem, do two-way sync, etc.

[1] https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#27
As an aside: As more and more techies repeatedly fail to decouple their digital belongings from Google‘s infrastructure, it should become clear how strong the lock-in effect of cloud services is in general and in particular their proper UX.

EG.: one of gmails main selling points always was the „available anywhere“ web interface and its quick, and useful search.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#29
post #26

Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org . Set up Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different commands which work with many different cloud storage systems e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE filesystem, do two-way sync, etc. [1] htt…

Beware that using rclone with google photos may result in lower quality images and missing metadata. Below is taken from the rclone website:

Limitations

Downloading Images

When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.

The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort Downloading Videos

When videos are downloaded they are downloaded in a really compressed version of the video compared to downloading it via the Google Photos web interface. This is covered by bug #113672044.

Source: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#30
Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things.

Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. FastMail seems to be the worst of all. Migadu seems to be good but an extremely bad value for your $.

Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.

I'd rather be in iron clad hands of Google's engineering and security practices than a 30 people company with no fricking clue about security. This is often not part of the discussion.

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