22 January, 2020

Good Riddance, Google Photos

After 10 years, I've given up on Google Photos and It. Is. A. Relief. At this point, it's one of their abandoned projects on life support, like Google+. Hoo boy, remember that? Why you should leave Google Photos too:
  • I can't upload anything from iOS. What's the point? Ok, strictly speaking, there's a workaround: I can upload things to no album, then force restart the app, then move them to the correct album.
  • Speaking of no album, their organisation is still a mess. What a pile of crap. You can't see which photos don't be long to any album.
  • You can't see what albums a photo belongs to. At this point, albums are basically tags. You can see what tags a photo has, right? Why (*$^ not albums?
  • Sorting within albums is crap. The option to rearrange photos is hidden in edit mode. YOU CAN'T EVEN SORT BY FILENAME!
  • You cannot sort albums on the website. You cannot change album sort to descending in the app.
  • The interface is useless and there are a bunch of hidden albums. If you try and export your photos using Takeout, you'll see lots of albums with a date as the name.
  • We're still using that ridiculous tile interface that doesn't let you count photos at a glance?
  • No other display options. No different thumbnail sizes, no list. I can't even see filenames to quickly compare backups.
  • It STILL can't handle burst photos on iPhones. Basically, all it sees is the one single photo iOS chooses as "best". Choose another photo? The entire burst disappears. Convert the burst to individual photos? Nope, still only one photo.
  • You used to be able to trick it into seeing the other photos in a burst by duplicating them, and they've "fixed" this solution.
  • You cannot filter and see photos that have/haven't been backed up
  • I see they've helpfully removed the "not backed up to cloud" icon on photos, so now it looks like all your photos are backed up, when in reality they only show a "backed up to cloud" icon now.

Update 6 Feb 20
Another reason why:
"Google confirms it sent private videos to people in Google Photos"
https://www.techsaa.com/google-confirms-it-sent-private-videos-to-people-in-google-photos/
Google sent people's private videos to strangers by mistake.

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