Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos
blog.google
blog.google
Google Photos used to be one of my most favorite apps. Now it's some testing playground. I'm sure some new startup is approaching this area so the cycle can repeat.
"They" could be just about any major software vendor as of late, it's hardly specific to Google.
I feel that everywhere, not just Google. Windows is probably one of the most egregious with copilot being jammed into every app.
None of this "AI" stuff feels integrated or even thought out at all. The whole thing is just bolted on and it feels like the only reason is so they can say "see, we have AI too! Now give us money" to investors.
Seeing copilot shoved into Notepad of all things was probably the worst
we have entered a new epoch: The Ensloppocene
I use zero of the new AI tools, but they took away the one tool I really want.
They claim they'll bring it back...sometime.
"Perspective tools – Our team is working to restore these"
Simple cropping is difficult, now.
On my pixel fold, it undoes zooming, when cropping, making fine crops impossible.
I've complained into the ether, and even the Feedback feature is broken. The screenshot part shows a black screen. It's a nightmare of regressions.
All this is an attempt of feeding more and more data to AI to make it as strong as possible.
If photos used your pics for training you can claim "i don't use any ai feature then why my photo is sent to ai"
Now that everyone has ai by default you cannot make that claim
Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop. Pull out, track right. Stop. Center and Pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and Pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Gimme a hard copy right there.
It does not erase A LOT of things it used to.
So hey, you take a selfie, 3 MB. And now you want your selfie to show yourself posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon. OK, now you've added an additional 12 MB.
Do that often enough, and you'll have to buy another block of Google One storage, which is MRR for Google.
Google photos offers a save as copy / save as original feature when editing photos and videos. Removing the save as original button would be cheaper and significantly more effective.
I think it's more likely that they're doing it because they think it makes their product better, increasing sales that way instead.
Every product at Google is being pressured intensely to put AI everywhere. The focus is on velocity, not well thought out product experiences. This sort of photo editing interaction is not novel so it doesn't require a ton of out of the box thinking to decide to add it to Photos.
Google is worried that other companies are going to steal their lunch and their approach is to try to throw every AI feature they can into their products as fast as possible.
https://github.com/simulot/immich-go is what I used to import ~300gb of photos from Google Photos to Immich. Not sure how well it works for iCloud.
There is also https://ente.io/ which is a private & secure photo backup app that you don't need to self-host.
iCloud Photos stores originals (assuming you're using "Download Originals to this Mac") in the "originals" folder of your .photoslibrary package.
If you don't sync your originals, use iCloud Photos Downloader (https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...) to get them.
I ended up going with Ente and have been pretty happy with it.
I might also just switch over to Ente so I don't have to deal with the self-hosting. Price for Ente is about equivalent for what I'm paying Hetzner right now.
I also use Immich, but on a local server (using tailscale to reach it from outside)
I’ve previously experimented a bit with encrypted volumes that I manually decrypt over ssh, and even full disk encryption that I manually decrypt over ssh.
My experience with Hetzner has been good. It is really rare that the servers go down on their own. Reboots are usually my own doing, so I am already “around” to decrypt encrypted volumes.
I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years. But I’ve had offsite backups in place since day one, so I never ultimately lost any important data. Had to deprovision the broken server, reprovision a new one and restore from my offsite backup. Which is a bit of a hassle, but no biggie because the only one that relies on my servers is mostly myself. A few days of downtime because I am too busy to set up a new server right away is therefore also ok for me, with how infrequently it has happened.
A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos or other data you cannot afford to lose. But that applies to any host really. Not unique to Hetzner.
Hetzner (or any vps provider) should not be a place at all to store ANY copy of your photos, unencrypted.
I agree that they respect privacy a lot, they're probably the best of all the service providers when it comes to your data and that there are data protection laws in place etc etc
but in the end, it's your personal photos, I wouldn't be willing to upload it to any provider unencrypted, good that you're encrypting
Also, check this out (not my project): https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs
How do they handle such situations?
I think there was a form asking for reason for cancelling the server and I ticked something like “other” and left a note for them saying that there was hardware problems. So I would assume they have a look at it, replace the bad components and then rent it out to someone else.
Monitorering is then your responsibility. They have no login/account on your host.
For any hardware issues I have had I have simply created a support ticket. They have always been really fast at responding and fixing for me. If you report a disk and serial number it gets swapped in no time.
They have managed offerings as well. I have never used those.
No, it's really a temporary solution. My ideal setup will be having it on a local server w/ encrypted backups to Hetzner (or Backblaze or whatever) but I need to acquire the hardware for it and got fatigued with de-Googling so I put the project on hold as "good enough" for now.
If anybody does manage to get a hold of all of my photos... I won't be too heartbroken about it. It would be creepy for somebody to have them but there's nothing incriminating in there and it's literally 90% pictures of dogs and cats (and 9% landscapes/flowers, 1% people)
I don't use arch but this looks cleaner than whatever Debian or fedora (both of which I use) have going on
Also when I have it on my private DNS stops working, which to be fair I haven't put a huge amount of effort into solving yet.
I love it for things like ssh to a server at home, but for things like hosting a service I prefer something like cloudflare tunnel or a self hosted reverse proxy. Though tailscale funnel looks promising.
It's a good idea to have backups/multiple copies regardless of what system you're using.
But just telling it "remove the shadow from this image" would be great.
Personally, I've begun moving my photos off of Google in anticipation that this is the next step (or if it's already happening, to prevent more of it).
I'm a very private person. The only place online that I keep my personal photos of family, friends and my memories is in Google Photos and I don't trust them not to use these assets for training. I (maybe daftly) trusted this as a sort of private vault for my photos, and don't want my likeness or that of my family, wife, or friends being used to generate AI content.
It is interesting, though, that Google's products have suffered so much regression as AI has advanced. In the past I could search my images with "Subaru" and reliably get photos. Now it's clearly a subset.
Same with Google's voice assistant which was actually more capable 5 or 6 years ago.
I get it. It's probably easier to maintain with a general purpose LLM or diffusion model behind the scenes or whatever. It's just a pity that the PMs and engineers who made the good stuff have either lost their positions or have changed their minds.
It's terrible now.
I uploaded a selfie with a kinda-sorta '80s haircut and it completely changed my gender.
But new features like these is what scares me, I am afraid the Photos team will do something crazy one day that affects all my photos
I do take regular backups every quarter, thanks Google for Takeout, but the fear is still there
It can geotag, you can install the separate Recognize app to have a local model recognize faces, which it does quite well.
I can also, if I wish, just look at the files.
Terrible update. Frustrating, missing features, slower, fiddly UI that's too small even on pixel Fold.
Failure.
Part of the reason I switched to an iPhone was for all the on device stuff that Google insists you use the cloud for.
Most recently I took a photo of my grandma and me, asked Gemini to make it a cartoon, asked Gemini to make the new variant into a birthday card.
My grandma loved it! I was happy to make her something custom. Buying people cards just never felt right to me. Writing was also never my strongest suit - so this new form of expression for me has been enhancing :)
The only remaining thing I need to do better is getting the card printed! I wish that also was only 12seconds of work.
Google ads for camera/Google Photos features were marketing the ability to change the content of the moment being captured, remove things in the background, fit people into the photo who weren't there, add details, change the weather and background.
It made me imagine in the distant future, I would be looking back at false memories. If I made a bunch of genAI photos now and ended up with a neurodegenerative disease, I would be able to fondly look back at memories of myself landing on the moon, winning gold at the olympics etc.
Honestly surprised to see such a quick turn around on what was a Pixel 10 exclusive feature. I guess they did that for Circle to Search too.
So now am i back in a dark room fumbling around for commands. So I have to guess what the secret rules are, and guess what the magic words are, and I don't even know what your program is capable of?
..no, I never made it out of the first room in thgttg.
Not to mention the dark patterns that attempt to trick you into backing up your entire photo library, over and over again.
Or the inability to exclude folders from the backup process.
Maybe get the basic expectations of a Photo app right before adding features nobody asked for.
- Pan right and pull back. Stop.
- Enhance 34 to 46.
- Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop.
- Enhance 57-19.
- Track 45 left. Stop.
- Enhance 15 to 23.
- Give me a hard copy right there.
I love this being quoted here because while it superficially seems that this interaction is interacting with an AI in a conversational way, it shows tool use that is at the opposite end of what interacting with modern AI tends to be like/what AI marketing wants it to be.
In this scene:
- the user is guiding the tool step by step to a desired outcome, rather than giving a broad vague result that the tool gets to arbitrarily
- the user knows intimately the specific technical capabilities of the tool
- every command is phrased to be unambiguous and lead to a deterministic result
Imagine if instead all of the above, Deckard just gave a broad request, eg “can you help me find who the killer is by analyzing this picture”?
Turn left, no other left, no the left after that left. No, damn it stop the car.
/s
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What I dislike the most about "prompts" being the default input for AI models thesedays is the inability to "browse" its featureset to see what it's actually capable of. I don't want to spend minutes/hours throwing different natural-language commands at it to seeing if it understands chroma-keying from chromatic-aberration - or if it can do lossless JPEG block-level transformations. It's when something stops being a useful tool but a hinderance or even a toy (perhaps even with Achievements and microtransaction unlockables).
What I did find was many, many different buttons and icons that start some kind of AI magic enhancement crap.
But I would never have guessed in my life that there is a "pull up" gesture there.