Hacker News Reader

Comment by distrill | Hacker News Reader

I understand the risks of this approach, but I just dumped everything into google photos and I'm very happy with how it's working for now. I do not miss the days of keeping track of those devices at all.

View on HN

The thing about Google photos that explodes my brain is that if I use albums to share with family members, Google prioritizes the use case of the recipients _joining_ the album and _adding_ my photos to their own albums. Google is trying to use me as a way to get my family members signed up for Google photos.

Then my family is confused about where photos live, etc.

Yeah, I made a Google Photos album to send a link to various potential contractors to show where I want some work done on my house, and since the Photos app for Android has the relevant URI registered, the link gets opened with it instead of just the browser, and the first thing the app does is a very prominent "join" CTA. Then the next person to view the album sees them as a member, gross. It works great incognito though, where the browser doesn't hand off links to any apps regardless of URI registration.

Might try something like this instead.

“Open this link in incognito mode” is a tall order for my family, much less a contractor.

Oh yeah it's totally not happening. I'm going to play around with framing or reverse proxying it so the URL in the address bar isn't a registered one.

That was my solution since 2011, but just a few months ago I bought a nas that came with a Google Photos clone and moved everything over to that. Too scary knowing that Google can and will lock me out of my account at any time and forever.

I did the same, but with Apple Photos. I have a hard drive that holds an offline copy of the library too, which is nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com