Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world Interstellar_1 @lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 mo. ago

This Google Photos popup

It appears every few times I open the app and the usual android back button doesn't make it go away, and there is no cancel button. What you have to do is toggle the toggle, then the button will change to "do not back up" and then you can press it. It annoys me how easy this makes it to accidentally turn on backup.

66 comments

google's android camera app is designed to open google's gallery app. Google built an OS that has support for user selected app launching. They built a system that lets an app request the user's preferred gallery app to view photos, but then chose to not use it to force anyone using google's camera to also use their photos app. fuck google
- Was super disappointed to figure this out after installing a different gallery. And AFAIK, there's no alternative camera app that actually works properly, either.
  
  I've always liked Open Camera. Of course YMMV depending on your device.
  
  edit: it's also on F-Droid if that's your preferred store.
- Ya, ran into this one recently. Had to install gcam instead of stock camera on my OnePlus just so I can use alternative gallery. Android is not truly open source project anymore.
  
  And then if u try using alternative roms - half the cameras your phone has and banking apps are not going to work - Google intentionally castrated the functionality like this.
it's EXTREMELY INFURIATING, my relatives always accidentally enable backup on google photos and the following day have their google account blocked for data overuse, and need to choose between pay for google one, or waste a day deleting the data on google photos making sure that it doesn't delete the ones on the device

for me i use aves, but they don't like it, they aren't used to it...
- and then every month or so, again "why u no enable cloud backup??" I already disagreed to it!
  
  This and the monthly reminder from whatsapp to give all my data unencrypted to google and LEOs as a "backup" on google drive
- Oops I installed Google photos and now my Gmail is full. Sooo dumb.
- pay for google one
  
  LOL, that's the idea all right! I pay $99 year for 2TB of storage, so I'm a happy camper. My Windows libraries, movie storage and such is backed up offsite in addition to local backups.
  
  Same. My whole family uses it and we still have half left. I got a ton of 4k video in there too. Not sure what all these people got on their phones to use up all the storage.
I've accidentally turned on backup this way and lost a ton of storage. Definitely an obnoxious way to push your product.
- Couldn't you delete them if you need the storage?
  
  The biggest problem is that deleting them from cloud deletes them from the phone automatically.
  
  So you need to backup the photos manually on your phone, then disable the Google backup feature for the photos, then delete them from the website, which will still show a very worrying warning that photos will be deleted on the phone too
I'm always conflicted on this kind of thing, because for every person annoyed that it's asking there's a bunch that are complaining that they lost all their photos because their phone was stolen or something like that, and had no idea that they need to backup their stuff.
- Having a notice that doesn't occupy the whole screen and can be dismissed temporarily or permanently is a much better and less predatory solution to this problem. This isn't looking out for the end user, this is urging them into a system where the host can profit off of the user's data, that also happens to provide a benefit to the user.
  
  Maybe, the average user really doesn't understand backups though and would be more likely to ignore it then.
- I didn't realize that I had turned it on on my prior phone. Welp, my phone absolutely died one day and would no longer power on. I was really sad about losing my photos and videos, but then when I got my new phone I was happy to find out that at some point I turned on photos cloud backups.
I was feeling smug that being on LineageOS and now GrapheneOS for almost a decade I've never seen this.

..then I remembered my fucking iMac seemed to turn on iCloud photo backup last week after updating and next thing I know all the obsolete iPads I get from work are telling me how my iCloud storage is full

Seriously this iCloud shit is on by default, predatory ass tech companies. I'm pretty sure I disabled it on that iMac but it's so possible that my own device can gaslight me that I'm left unsure. It's off now and I spent an afternoon removing all those photos.
- Rapist mentality
- I recently picked up an iPhone as a secondary device, pretty much immediately disabled iCloud and installed Mobius (Syncthing) so the photos get sync'ed over to my fairphone's SD card.
  
  Now i'm second guessing whether it's actually disabled, or if I'm going to get an iCloud full warning in a couple of months....
  
  It's ridiculous, its enabled by default on any new device you set up and sign in to. I could have missed turning off iCloud on my iMac, but I didn't have any problems before updating it, and then after I updated it I had iCloud full notifications, so I'm pretty sure it was off.
Why would you use Google photos as your gallery if you're not using the backup feature? It's like the only reason to use it over a different gallery.
- This is auto backup of a certain folder. You may not want every photo you take. I turn it off so I can manually select them.
  
  it's the other way around. you turn on auto backup and turn off specific folders. it doesn't ask you to turn them on.
  
  no it's not, it's for the entire device
Asshole Google is doing asshole things. Before switching to Lineage OS this thing annoyed me so much. A few days ago I saw this prompt when using my father's phone and I couldn't believe that this thing is still happening. Google is so stubborn.
- 100% asshole design to fill up cloud storage and taking gmail "hostage" - pay for google one or all your emails will bounce back
  
  I believe they want to process photos and videos to train their AI.
Honestly I'm done with Google Photos, I mean I get that it was free and that I shouldn't complain about that, but I already pay with my privacy, so why pay money and have my data abused everywhere I go?

I now have a home server (second hand mac mini m2) with PhotoPrism installed
I switched to Immich and will never look back.
- I love the idea.
  
  My old server wouldn't run it in docker for some unknown reason..
  
  I'll have to give it a whirl again.
- I've got both going for dual cloud backup. Immich is hosted local so I've got a backup at home, and I pay $5/month for 500GB storage with Google
  
  For me the main issue with that is giving Google money. I'm already paying with tons of my data, that's enough to me
  
  I prefer paying someone else
  
  Also: in this way when you delete something from a backup it doesn't get deleted on the other
- I can't wait until the immich photo editor gets enabled and hopefully it eventually duplicates all the google photos editor features because that's the only reason I keep around the google photos app.
Toggle the toggle?

Toggle the switch?
- Toggle the toggle switch
  
  Next you guys will tell me you need to itch an itch.
It used to be even more annoying. Until a couple of months ago, after you tapped the No option, it would bring you to a full-screen screen where it asked you to select specific photos you'd like to backup anyways.
- I know, and then they did switch over and you got both popups for a bit.
Can you tap outside the popup to make it go away? Or maybe swipe it down? Agree that Back should be enough, how annoying!
- No, you cannot.
  
  Ugh.
- What if you close the app through drawer, and then relaunch it?
I used to be annoyed by this. I'm running GrapheneOS so I denied Google Photos access to the network but it didn't stop it from asking every few times I started the app. Sometimes it even ignored my response and tried to connect to the network anyway.

I just uninstalled it and installed Fossify Gallery instead from F-droid. Haven't looked back since.
- Ever had issues with FDroid getting stuck during updates, it would get stuck for me every day or 2 until I just uninstalled it. I don't install apps enough to bother with it, so I figured I'd reinstall it when I eventually need it again.
  
  Use droid-ify, it's a much better fdroid client where you can enable Izzy's repository much easier
  
  Never had that issue
I used this feature for the longest time back when Photos storage didn't count towards your free 15 GB if you used the compressed option. And then they went and made it so everything counted towards your 15 GB, no matter what quality you were backing up at, and suddenly my account was using too much storage space to keep receiving email. I go into Google Photos to clear out some of the largest pictures and videos to get a few gigabytes back, and it tells me that if I do that it's going to also delete those photos stored locally on my phone. So now Google Photos is uninstalled because if I ever let it back on my phone it's going to delete all my pictures.
- Yeah, I had a photo album back when I regularly used Photos, and for some reason the photos would be backed up and the older ones would stop loading on my device? Which was a problem as I don't have any cellular data. It still happens for some reason, even though I no longer have backup enabled.
There are open source alternatives to Google photos, a good example which uses material 3 (you) is fossify photos
- fossify photos
  
  Fossify Gallery?
  
  Yeah, forgot the name
- Yeah I use aves, it is much nicer then Google photos, but photos has a locked folder so I use it occasionally
  
  😏
  
  I tried to install aves but as I opened it, it told me "this app doesn't support the latest Android version" or something, so I just uninstalled. 🫤
- Immich!
Disable the network access to the app.
Google also has an app called just Gallery which doesn't pull this crap.
If you don't use cloud backup there's much better gallery apps
Do they use backed up photos to train Gemini? Could be they do and hence need all the user photos they can get their hands on.
I was surprised to find ads in my phone and realized it's shitty google again... Of course.

You can go into notification settings and turn off all notifications for this app, and problem solved.
Ran into this asshole the other day, got me because I needed to show someone a contact card for them to scan. Fucking google.

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