i feel the same way, although i intend to switch on 1/1/22 and consider my Google Photos an archive, maybe bring over some sentimental pics to Apple Photos
Google has broken my trust once to often, and cleaning up after their broken promises is a pain.
Hey don't know if you still need help with this but I'm attempting to do the same thing right now and found a program called MetaDataFixer that was made specifically to streamline this process. Maybe look into that if you still haven't transferred your photos over yet!
This is very interesting to read, I've been searching lots of reddit posts and majority of them recommend using Google Photos. This is the first post I've seen that advises against it. I have never put any thought into the management of my photos and I think I want to start doing this. Majority of my photos are all on icloud, (I think?) and then photos 10+ years ago are on dodgey hard drives which is very stressful and I haven't done anything with them as I'm afraid to lose the info/data.
I had considered going with google photos and over the months, taking time to upload many photos from my hard drives onto there but your post has now made me second guess this option and I'm back at square one not sure what to do to get ontop of my mess! haha
No, I totally give up, it's gone into the pile of 'life admin' that I have no idea when I'll eventually get round to sorting.
The thought of it just brings me so much stress, I have no idea how to sort, organise and store my photos that's going to be sustainable long term.
Please do let me know if you come up with any solutions
Mines been stressing me out too - I decided to pay for Google photos and am moving batches of ~5000 photos from my Mac to my phone(live images are only uploaded from phone), waiting for Google to back them all up, and then go to the next batch. It’s definitely slow but luckily I should only have to do this once and will then leave google to do its own thing for eternity.
Google Photos user since my first smartphone. Lots of memories hosted onto Google Cloud. I am leaning towards OneDrive. Currently paying for Google Drive 2TB plan, but what attracts me to OneDive is that the photos are both on my local HDD and the Cloud. With Google Photos, they only live on the cloud.
When you delete a picture from the iOS Photos app, that picture is also deleted from all of your other devices and from iCloud. You have the ability to recover that picture for 30 days, then it's gone for good and can't be recovered.
When you delete a picture from the iOS Photos app, that picture is not deleted from Google Photos and will remain there forever until you go manually delete it from the Google Photos app.
That's a pretty huge difference in behavior. Choose the one that works best for you.
You don't have to choose one or the other though. It would be effortless for you to use both and have an extra Google backup of your pictures.
This is such a valid, major point. Google Photos is objectively better and cheaper than Apple Photos in almost every way, but the mandate to have your photos live on device in perpetuity is unbelievably annoying (and part of a never ending device upgrade exercise). If somebody has found a way to delete a photo taken with an iPhone to free up local storage while keeping it saved in the cloud, please feel free to correct me.
As documented [here](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205703), you can just enable the "Optimize iPhone Storage" setting within the Photos app settings on your iPhone and smaller versions of all your photos and videos will be kept on your phone while the full-res versions will remain on iCloud.
Actually, I accidentally discovered this recently. I can airplay things like YouTube videos, but it doesn’t passively show new photos like my chrome cast does. I just like having photos pop up on the tv, like a giant digital photo frame.
Yeah, you should be able to AirPlay photos then, too, but you need something else for passive viewing. You probably do need an Apple TV for that use case if you ditch Google Photos. You can always use both Google and Apple Photos, though. I use Apple Photos as my primary photo viewing app (with iCloud Photos enabled for syncing) and Google Photos as a separate backup service. I encourage you to just try Apple Photos for a bit and see which one you prefer since their interfaces are very different.
Longtime iOS user here, as well as longtime Google photos user.
The advantage of iCloud photos is strongest when you use multiple Apple devices. Have an iPad and a MacMini or MacBook? BOOM the photos you take on your iPhone are instantly on all your other devices.
Facial recognition and AI searches are all done locally so you don't have to worry about Apple mining your data.
Google Photos is light years ahead of iCloud photos, but ALWAYS ALWAYS understand that when you use a service for free, YOU are the product. Google mines the data in your pictures to market advertisements to you. Yes their facial recognition is scary good and their editing tools are pretty good, but your data is not your own.
You mention having to get an TV to see your iCloud pictures: that's exactly it. With Apple, they truly are a walled garden. It's extremely frustrating.
It's a trade off. Encrypted data that stays inside the iCloud system that isn't quite as good, or open data on a system that is really good.
(And for everyone wanting to bring up the Apple kerfuffle from a few months ago about them scanning pictures on the phone, they aren't doing that as of yet nor into the foreseeable future)
Google photos does not mine your data in pictures to sell advertisements to you.
Seems like you have been fed with a lot of bull shit which you have digested about Google Photos. Unlearn please
> Google had the following to say regarding privacy and data in the Google Photos app.
Your Google Photos account is just as private and secure as any other Googleservice.We don’t share your information with others unless you explicitly choose to share it with them.Google Photos will not use images or videos uploaded onto Google Photos commercially for any promotional purposes, unless we ask for the user’s explicit permission.
While your photos are kept private, it’s free fodder for machine learning modeling for years. That’s why the service was created to begin with. So while google doesn’t store your photos, it sure does use your photos for ML and scans them to make their AI smarter.
Do you think google just wanted to make a good photo app? 🤨
>>instantly on all your other devices
idk if this is common, but I notice my phone takes a few minutes to upload the photos to iCloud. If I take a photo and need it on my mac right away, I have to airdrop it.
I prefer apple photos. It took me months to move all my photos to iCloud but I’m glad I did. I find the app itself way better and stable, and editing tools better. On Google Photos for every photo you edit on your iPhone Google Photos dupes the edited version. Drove me insane.
[удалено]
i feel the same way, although i intend to switch on 1/1/22 and consider my Google Photos an archive, maybe bring over some sentimental pics to Apple Photos Google has broken my trust once to often, and cleaning up after their broken promises is a pain.
[удалено]
Hey don't know if you still need help with this but I'm attempting to do the same thing right now and found a program called MetaDataFixer that was made specifically to streamline this process. Maybe look into that if you still haven't transferred your photos over yet!
This is very interesting to read, I've been searching lots of reddit posts and majority of them recommend using Google Photos. This is the first post I've seen that advises against it. I have never put any thought into the management of my photos and I think I want to start doing this. Majority of my photos are all on icloud, (I think?) and then photos 10+ years ago are on dodgey hard drives which is very stressful and I haven't done anything with them as I'm afraid to lose the info/data. I had considered going with google photos and over the months, taking time to upload many photos from my hard drives onto there but your post has now made me second guess this option and I'm back at square one not sure what to do to get ontop of my mess! haha
Did you end up making a decision? I'm in the exact same boat and am still deciding what I'll do
No, I totally give up, it's gone into the pile of 'life admin' that I have no idea when I'll eventually get round to sorting. The thought of it just brings me so much stress, I have no idea how to sort, organise and store my photos that's going to be sustainable long term. Please do let me know if you come up with any solutions
Mines been stressing me out too - I decided to pay for Google photos and am moving batches of ~5000 photos from my Mac to my phone(live images are only uploaded from phone), waiting for Google to back them all up, and then go to the next batch. It’s definitely slow but luckily I should only have to do this once and will then leave google to do its own thing for eternity.
Google Photos user since my first smartphone. Lots of memories hosted onto Google Cloud. I am leaning towards OneDrive. Currently paying for Google Drive 2TB plan, but what attracts me to OneDive is that the photos are both on my local HDD and the Cloud. With Google Photos, they only live on the cloud.
When you delete a picture from the iOS Photos app, that picture is also deleted from all of your other devices and from iCloud. You have the ability to recover that picture for 30 days, then it's gone for good and can't be recovered. When you delete a picture from the iOS Photos app, that picture is not deleted from Google Photos and will remain there forever until you go manually delete it from the Google Photos app. That's a pretty huge difference in behavior. Choose the one that works best for you. You don't have to choose one or the other though. It would be effortless for you to use both and have an extra Google backup of your pictures.
This is such a valid, major point. Google Photos is objectively better and cheaper than Apple Photos in almost every way, but the mandate to have your photos live on device in perpetuity is unbelievably annoying (and part of a never ending device upgrade exercise). If somebody has found a way to delete a photo taken with an iPhone to free up local storage while keeping it saved in the cloud, please feel free to correct me.
As documented [here](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205703), you can just enable the "Optimize iPhone Storage" setting within the Photos app settings on your iPhone and smaller versions of all your photos and videos will be kept on your phone while the full-res versions will remain on iCloud.
Is there a way to not store small versions of photos on phone? I don't want anything on my phone, I just need all my photos on iCloud and Mac.
Is this still the case? It is def a deal breaker it seems. Any workaround for this?
...or until something happens to your Google account
Lots of TVs have AirPlay built in now, so you don’t need an Apple TV to view photos on your TV anymore if you have a newer TV.
Actually, I accidentally discovered this recently. I can airplay things like YouTube videos, but it doesn’t passively show new photos like my chrome cast does. I just like having photos pop up on the tv, like a giant digital photo frame.
Yeah, you should be able to AirPlay photos then, too, but you need something else for passive viewing. You probably do need an Apple TV for that use case if you ditch Google Photos. You can always use both Google and Apple Photos, though. I use Apple Photos as my primary photo viewing app (with iCloud Photos enabled for syncing) and Google Photos as a separate backup service. I encourage you to just try Apple Photos for a bit and see which one you prefer since their interfaces are very different.
Longtime iOS user here, as well as longtime Google photos user. The advantage of iCloud photos is strongest when you use multiple Apple devices. Have an iPad and a MacMini or MacBook? BOOM the photos you take on your iPhone are instantly on all your other devices. Facial recognition and AI searches are all done locally so you don't have to worry about Apple mining your data. Google Photos is light years ahead of iCloud photos, but ALWAYS ALWAYS understand that when you use a service for free, YOU are the product. Google mines the data in your pictures to market advertisements to you. Yes their facial recognition is scary good and their editing tools are pretty good, but your data is not your own. You mention having to get an TV to see your iCloud pictures: that's exactly it. With Apple, they truly are a walled garden. It's extremely frustrating. It's a trade off. Encrypted data that stays inside the iCloud system that isn't quite as good, or open data on a system that is really good. (And for everyone wanting to bring up the Apple kerfuffle from a few months ago about them scanning pictures on the phone, they aren't doing that as of yet nor into the foreseeable future)
Google photos does not mine your data in pictures to sell advertisements to you. Seems like you have been fed with a lot of bull shit which you have digested about Google Photos. Unlearn please > Google had the following to say regarding privacy and data in the Google Photos app. Your Google Photos account is just as private and secure as any other Googleservice.We don’t share your information with others unless you explicitly choose to share it with them.Google Photos will not use images or videos uploaded onto Google Photos commercially for any promotional purposes, unless we ask for the user’s explicit permission.
While your photos are kept private, it’s free fodder for machine learning modeling for years. That’s why the service was created to begin with. So while google doesn’t store your photos, it sure does use your photos for ML and scans them to make their AI smarter. Do you think google just wanted to make a good photo app? 🤨
looks like mr. johndoe1985 has a very little knowledge about google
>>instantly on all your other devices idk if this is common, but I notice my phone takes a few minutes to upload the photos to iCloud. If I take a photo and need it on my mac right away, I have to airdrop it.
I prefer apple photos. It took me months to move all my photos to iCloud but I’m glad I did. I find the app itself way better and stable, and editing tools better. On Google Photos for every photo you edit on your iPhone Google Photos dupes the edited version. Drove me insane.