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 clea…
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.
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 clea…
> "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?
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
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
Careful, don't cloud deletions sync, i.e. remove the previously offline-only files from your devices?
No, but it's incredibly convenient? Same way I don't carry a camera because my phone has one
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.
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).
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…
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.
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