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How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

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Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#101

Post by cube00 »

dwedge wrote: post #70
JimDabell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#102

Post by cube00 »

novafunc wrote: post #90
lowleveldesign wrote: post #42

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. Cloud only is not a backup.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#103

Post by cube00 »

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...

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#104

Post by 360MustangScope »

hiisukun wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#105

Post by zbentley »

360MustangScope wrote: post #104
hiisukun wrote: post #14

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…

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 ba…

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.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#106

Post by cube00 »

dotdi wrote: post #89

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 de…

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.

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...

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#107

Post by thrownaway561 »

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.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#109

Post by vertnerd »

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.

Re: How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

#110

Post by barrkel »

close04 wrote: post #74
ozyschmozy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.
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