I've been using Google Photos for ten years, and it is far and away my favorite of all Google's services. Yet as much as I like it, I have these nagging doubts about privacy and the way the whole deal has changed over the years, which make me think it's time to move on to something else.
Why I Love Google Photos
When Google Photos launched a decade ago, it revolutionized how we manage photos on our phones. It was free and had the promise of unlimited storage, albeit with a crucial compromise that we'll get to. Most importantly, it was easy to use. It required minimal setup. Other cloud services could already automatically back up your pictures, but a photo-centric service was far more suited to the job.
There are so many good reasons why people love Google Photos .
It's easy to browse your photo library and share images. The search function has become increasingly powerful, letting you find images by describing what's in them rather than needing to remember when they were taken.
Editing has also gotten better over the last ten years. The standard editing tools are pretty solid for quick image tweaks. And though not all the AI editing features are useful—Photo Unblur rarely works—the best ones, like Magic Eraser, represent some of the most practical uses of AI on a phone right now.
Google Photos is, for me, the best of all of Google's services. I use it almost every day and have thousands of photos stored in it.
But It's Not Perfect
As much as Google Photos has improved, it has plenty of annoyances. There's still no easy way to delete duplicate images, for instance. And if you shoot in RAW on your phone, the app will back up the files, but doesn't let you edit them. You need another app, which then creates another copy of the image. All of this clutters the library and eats into the storage.
But my doubts go deeper than that. There are privacy and security factors. Like all Google services, using Photos requires a trade-off: you get lots for free but have to give up something in return.
From day one, the photos you uploaded to Google Photos were used to train Google's AI services. The company says that the images aren't used for anything outside of the Photos app, but it's still not exactly clear how they're being used and what they're training. Who knows what's coming next? We can't assume that all the AI features will be benign and useful, like Magic Eraser.
This was easy to ignore when AI seemed like some futuristic technology. Now it's the reality, I, like many people, am starting to give much more thought to how my data is being used.
Along similar lines, I'm becoming wary of getting too tightly tied into the services of any single company, for a variety of reasons. Recently, I've taken to mixing things up and moving some of my online activities away from Google. I've switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine , for example, and use more open-source Android apps .
It isn't so much being locked in that I'm concerned about, but being reliant on one company for a number of important services. Losing access to my email would be inconvenient; losing my photos would be disappointing. Losing access to my Google account for any reason would cost me both.
And then there's the feeling that while Google Photos has improved as a product over the years, the deal has most certainly gotten worse. The original launch proposal was that you would get unlimited storage if you backed up your images in Google's proprietary "high quality" Storage Saver format. And then in 2020, Google decided to cancel the unlimited storage promise.
The upshot is, I've now got loads of lower-quality uploads in my library. The still images are fine, and I keep original backups of anything I shoot on my dedicated camera anyway. But the video quality is definitely inferior, and since I only shoot video on my phone, that quality is gone forever.
And it's not even free for me anymore, because my storage filled up a long time ago. I have to subscribe to Google One . So the deal has gone from free and unlimited to very much paid and limited. Which brings me back to my privacy concerns. There's the old saying that if a product is free, it means that you're the product. Now I'm paying for it, and nothing seems to have changed.
Where Next?
Google Photos is a fantastic service. I still recommend it to older relatives and non-tech-savvy people who need a simple set-and-forget photo storage solution. But for me, it's time to move on.
Where to go next? Self-hosting is an option , but it's not for me. I still prefer the simplicity of Google's approach. Amazon Photos has some of the same concerns as Google, so instead, I'm going to take a look at the open-source Ente Photos to see if that can be the new home for my photo album.
