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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

Only tangentially related but I just checked the Google Photos iOS app to see if any of mine are corrupted, and it won't even allow me to view my cloud photos without giving it full permission to all current photos on my device?! Isn't this against the app store policy? You can't deny me access to one feature just because I refuse to grant permissions to a different feature.

But because it's Google I'm sure they can break whatever rules they want as long as it doesn't involve trying to avoid Apple's 30% fees.

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Each passing month I am more and more convinced that I should urgently get a) my mails out of my personal (non paying) Gmail account and b) get my associated photos out of Google Photos, mainly because of baby pictures which I cannot fathom to lose.

But then I think about the convenience of my 2TB Google Drive and I can't do it.

And I think, too, of the Polaroid pictures my parents took and gave me in a box once I got married and are now fainted. Mayhaps algorithms deciding that it's time to let go of your own data is just the modern form of yellowing.

> I should urgently get a) my mails out of my personal (non paying) Gmail account and b) get my associated photos out of Google Photos, mainly because of baby pictures which I cannot fathom to lose.

I highly recommend it. It feels like pure freedom, putting a price tag on my personal data. The migration is something done in two steps: set up your alternative service, but also keep the old one (gmail/gdrive/calendar/...) running. Then start to use the new email service, while keeping the old one.

There are enough affordable options and you do not have to migrate everything at once. I started with my emails - gmail is still running and forwards all incoming emails, so I wont miss anything. I already updated all my accounts/logins to the new email address.

The next step was copying all my files from Dropbox, GDrive, and so on to {service I am using}. The data in the other clouds are still there, but I am going to delete it all soon.

There are things that are not perfect - like accepting appointments, which I still want to show up in my Google calendar. To those mails I still have to respond in google mail. But I am getting there, one step after another. The win so far is much bigger than the loss/pain.

I'm going through the process of switching off of Gmail and onto a Fastmail account under my own domain. I'm loving the freedom of having my own domain that I can switch to another email provider whenever I want. Also, Fastmail with a custom domain has some nice features that were unavailable with a Gmail account (aliases, masked emails, automatically snoozing certain emails so I get a bunch all at once, etc.)

As for pictures, I do use Google Photos, but it's not my primary photo video store. It's more for the app that lets me lookup pictures.

For storing original versions of pictures/videos, I sync from my phone to a home computer using Syncthing, and store backups of my files on AWS S3 using Restic for encrypted backups.

If I lose Google Photos, no big deal. I still have local and cloud copies of my data.

This is definitely not a plug, but I'm actually working on an alternative to email, cloud storage, authentication/authorization/sso/etc. solutions from Google, Microsoft, etc. and one of my specific focuses is to allow free personal use and free smaller company use. It is refreshing to see I'm not building this in a vacuum. I started the project for no other reason except Google yanking out their free accounts. I absolutely do plan to commercialize it, however, I would still be happy with the result even if it failed, since under Google's pricing, I'd pay more than $1,000 a year vs. less than $10/year with my own solution.

Please share more info about how we can follow your current or future project!

How does it work exactly? This sounds pretty cool

As mancerayder says below, why can't you back them up to an external USB drive? I rsync my 'archive' partition (photos, videos, music, programs, etc) daily to several external 4TB USB drives. Those are dirt-cheap these days. The process takes maybe 5 or 10 minutes depending on whether or not there have been any new files to transfer in the last 24 hours.

I refuse to relinquish my files to some insouciant third-party. And what recourse would you have if they lost them?? Very probably them saying "Sorry. Not our problem."

I take periodic backups of my Google data using Takeout, primarily for the GMail backup. When I took one a few months ago, I noticed that the Drive part of the backup had some mangled filenames that the backup from a year ago didn't have. I don't remember exactly what it was but it was something like long-filename.pdf got truncated to long-file~01.pdf, like back in the 8.3 DOS days. Luckily I already have a local copy of the Drive contents so I didn't need to rely on it, but anyone else should be worried.

You can put those on a service like AWS Glacier for next to nothing, the only challenge is keeping your billing details current.

a) was very freeing. I didn't realize there were services so much better than Gmail. Even ones I pay a small amount for and get as many custom domains as I want. b) did this a long time ago. Glad I did. I can sync any file I want too, not just photos. Really been liking Seafile + AutoSync (android) for this.

Mirror them to a external 2TB hard drive?

Burn everything important onto some old CDs or DVDs, that should be good enough. Filecoin seems cool too, but you have to pay in filecoin.

Most writable optical media use organic dyes that aren’t stable for more than a couple years—if you can still read the contents 10 years later, consider yourself lucky.

M-DISC use a more stable media, and should last much longer, but are (much) more expensive and require more recent burners. There are dual-layer M-DISC with higher capacities, too.

I did a bunch of research on long-term data archival and wrote it up here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

>But then I think about the convenience of my 2TB Google Drive and I can't do it.

Why not sync them to a cheap external drive on a regular basis?

Or use any of the hundreds of alternatives.. it’s not like a cloud drive is a distinguishing feature.

Pcloud is pretty great, lots of festures and lifetime plans.

Second this. Several years of use with nary an issue, plus Linux support.

Speaking of which, as an aside there's no excuse for big tech to not support the Linux desktop (I also use macOS and Windows 11 so not a die-hard fanboy). It doesn't matter if the userbase is tiny. Linux enables massive profits in the cloud so any cloud provider that supports multiple platforms but not Linux, whilst also generating huge profits from it, is doing a very bad thing. And that includes MS, Apple, and Google - full support regardless of the (comparatively small) cost as thanks for the profits they generate from it.

Smugmug pro my friend. Not even paid to shill, but it's reasonably priced for complete photo -freedom for me

This is an engagement hack. Get the user to give max permissions at the start so that any future call to action will have less friction and/or not require a modal.

It’s less about Google wanting to scan your data today and more about Google’s stingy strategy for photos plus Google’s lazy engineering (too many other interesting games to solve). Google Photos was born out of Google Plus, and is under heavy revenue efficiency pressure.

Yes, I ran into this issue after I switched to iOS a couple years ago. Google demanded full permissions to even open the app. I promptly downloaded my image library on the web, and also, related to OP's post, some of my images had artifacts. Some were even corrupt. I moved everything over to onedrive, and restored the corrupted ones that I had local copies of (gradually, it took a lot of work) with local copies I have. I now mirror in "the cloud" with both iCloud and OneDrive. I also have a local copy and a couple of USB sticks with a backup handy on my keychain (solely for if a fire breaks out and I remember to grab my keys).

And it will spend its spare time analyzing every single photo in your library.

Google doesn't scan photos that don't exist on their servers.

... currently.

Trusting a dubious central authority up until you get burned is a bad heuristic.

Especially when Google has said "we won't do thing X", then been caught already doing it, or just silently starting to do it.

Just location tracking. The lies. Over, and over, and over, and over again the lies.

Institutions of that nature are incapable of following through on nearly any promise made to the public at large; every promise is a lie, whether they break it or not, because they can't be said to have the intention to uphold it.

I see no reason not to believe that Page and Brin sincerely desired Google not to be evil; but it's the institution decides to do evil, not any individual, so they did not have (or could not maintain, as the organization scaled) the power to guarantee this. No one does.

What's the difference? Potentially apple itself can fecide to scan all your photos on the phone....

I don't use an iPhone, and I use an aftermarket Android ROM.

I agree, which is why I don't pay for cloud storage.

It immediately presented me with a screen with the choice to "save originals to cloud or save a compressed version to the cloud" (I don't recall the exact words) with no option to not upload to the cloud, and then immediately started uploading my library.

I scrolled back and checked some pre-2015 photos, they look fine, and then deleted the app.

> water stain with massive discoloration

Maybe they store physical photos and the albums got soaked in water. Sadly it happened to all our 90s photo albums during a flood. Some of the photos were stained really bad.

I'm not sure I believe this _at all_.

I uploaded a photo to google maps. A week later it found some random picture of a local park and offered up a notification suggesting that I upload this photo to the destination it had located in the maps app.

How on earth are they doing this without "scanning" the photo? Seriously, please tell me.

A typical feature of these cloud drives is automatic uploading of pictures from the camera roll, that’s the legitimate use case for demanding access to all pictures. Who knows when Google whoops! accidentally makes that the default. You know, it’s optional, you can just turn it off!

How do you know? With full access, it's basically impossible to tell.

Which is why it’s obnoxious to ask permissions for all photos.

Fun fact, Xiaomi does by default on their stock OS.

Who would allow the CCP to scan their device?

There wasn't anything to deny. There's no way to opt out.

What difference does it make anyway at this point? Everybody does it.

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