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Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

One solution is to remove Google out of your life as best as possible.

Personally I now use...

- iCloud.com instead of Gmail

- DDG for search though I do have to !g like 20 to 30% of the time for things like driving directions (from X point to Y point), local movie times nearby and flights.

I still use

- YouTube

- Google Maps some as its great for getting distance between X and Y

- Google News (is there a better substitute)

- Google Photos (is there anything that compares)

Hoping in time to rely a ton less on Google products.

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I'm in the same boat, friend. Expelling Google from my life.

Apple Maps works for me. I appreciate that's not the case for everyone, but it's come a LONG way. I sincerely use Apple news (on iOS) and have been loving it, but appreciate it's not for everyone's use case.

Google photos.. yeah wow. There really isn't much like it. I've resigned to storing my photos myself on a private server and slowly making albums/things come together. But I have to NOT use google photos. It's too scary.

Gmail was easy

Youtube I use a fake gmail account that's not linked to me in the slightest and only use it on 1 iPad, else not logged in.

It's a quest. But I'll get there. Someone really ought to make a Google Photos competitor though, there's nothing that has the same level of polish right now.

Not a solution in this case - the problem is that companies like Cloudflare use these captchas to slow down your visit if you are using Tor or a VPN. In fact being logged in to google probably helps you bypass these checks

What is it in particular about GPhotos you find incomparable?

Do you have any alternatives? Something that works on most platforms and allows you to automatically backup photos as they are taken.

Dropbox has had automatic photo backup for ages and is available on most platforms.

No, I don't, I was just curious -- I used to use Picasa and it's facial recognition was far superior to anything else I could find.

Flickr app has auto upload from Android at least, I'd guess Flickr as Google photos closest competitor?

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