Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

For a few years it seemed to me that updates to Photos on Android would silently flip the quality setting down from Original to "High" as in "compressed", so I was never sure if the images I wanted to backup in original actually were backed up or not. I never set it to "High" but it kept flipping back to that.

I raised, flagged, liked and did everything I could on the support forums to get the Photos GUI to report somewhere whether an image was backed up in Original or "High" quality. It went nowhere. And last I checked it was still impossible.

I now treat Google Photos as a last resort approxi-backup and do all my own offline backups to a HDD because I can't trust the metadata. And I'm one of those idiots who even pays for Google One.

(seriously, would a tag like "quality:original" stump the engineering team?!)

Edit: Ha! It's set back to "High" for me AGAIN!

This definitely sounds like a bug worth tracking down. If you're interested in using your account as example, it would be helpful to file in-app feedback including at least the following two things:

1. "I grant permission to look at my account metadata to debug this issue"

2. An easily searchable tag like #OriginalSetting

Will this result in the problem getting addressed?

Google likely assigns these preference quirks to be low priority bugs, which when combined with an under-resourced, unprofitable/breakeven service means it will be eternally neglected.

That's a lot of speculation. Why wouldn't Google care about losing user data? Especially for such an important setting.

Because not caring is the default?

The shipped has LONG sinced sailed on my expecting Google to fix Photos in this regard. I've spent literally YEARS dealing with this Photos shortcoming. They have all the information they need.

And even if they fixed it, I've already spent the hours sifting through my repeated Google Take Away downloads and hacking Python scripts to dedupe / etc the issue. Seriously, the support channel reps were saying things like "Oh, just delete all your images then upload again from originals". But what about tagging, meta data, albums, and so on? And how do I know which of the thousands of pictures need this rough handling? "Shrug!" They don't CARE! It's just another data-bucket to them.

Summary: Anyone who cares about the fidelity of their images has long ago stopped using Google Photos. So, as I say, use another photo service and treat Google Photos like a cruddy, light-touch 'microfiche' of your pictures: better than nothing.

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