Please don't fulminate or post ragey flamebait on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, I agree. Google Photos is super confusing.

Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web? It doesn't make any sense.

And if you don’t pay the subscription they hold your gmail hostage.

I put the effort in to move off gmail, was worth it. Now gmail is just my spam inbox

Google's Photos application is intentionally designed in such a way to hold people's files hostage. It will ask to back your stuff up on startup without the user being able to permanently disable it, with only the classic "Not now, I'm sorry my digital overlords, ask me about it next week" option being available. What will happen is that people that don't know better accept it to get it out of their way, have all their personal pictures uploaded to Google's servers where they are abused in all sort of ways (including getting a father reported to police for CSAM and permanently blocking his account for taking a picture of his son to send a doctor), and because the free plan has a limited space available but won't be respected during upload, they'll start panic-bombing the user with "All your pictures are going to be deleted if you don't pay up or clean". This is all intentional, of course: Google and its developers know the vast majority of its Android users don't know or care about all of this and will exploit that. The Gallery app doesn't have the same Google Drive constant reminder and is what I usually install when I see the above repeatedly happen on other people's devices, which is well over a dozen times now, but Photos cannot be removed, of course.

I actually switched from using Google Photos to OneDrive because the latter keeps photos as files on my system and I can view them normally in explorer rather than forcing a bespoke cloud service.