Recently I became more aware of security issues and worry about how free google services are not really free. They are collecting my info and sell it to advertisers. Almost all websites and mobile apps that has ads, those ads are served by Google. Although you may hate these too much ads, that web site or app will get the blame and google will always have the money without any blame! That was not little money, in 2022, it was 224.47 billion dollars, see: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/
Most Google service are well done and convenient, but I think Google knows about me more than everybody knows collectively including myself! It is scary to feel your are exposed like that.
So recently, I decided to move away from Google services. Here are some notes from my journey with Google Photos.
First, I used Google TakeOut to export all my photos. It was more that 10 years of photos.
Note: Google TakeOut service is making it easy to get all your data from all Google services. Deleting data is another issue.
After the export, I used Windows Microsoft Photos. The photos appeared ordered properly. For some photos, the timestamp was of export date wrongly, but generally that was for a few photos.
I prepared a flash drive with 256G, and used Microsoft robocopy tool to backup all my photos. It is a command line tool but was easy to use.
There are many switches to control the robocopy backup process.
Then, I went to Google photos and wanted to remove all photos. After some research there were no easy way. I had to select first picture and scroll 10 pages or something, then select another image but while holding the shift key. In one short between 1000 and 2000 are deleted. I repeated that until all photos are removed. Then I removed the mobile apps.
On the Android mobile I just used the built in Photos application. Every week, I connect the mobile and sync photos from mobile to Desktop and then run the backup command to get all my photos on the Flash drive. Although I went back to depend on my own storage device, I feel I got my photos back.
While syncing your photos with the Google Photos cloud, If you were using “high quality photos” instead of “Original Quality”, you may lost original quality of your images unless you have another copy somewhere else.
For old years to be visible on my Android mobile photo app, I just copied all old years to the Photos folder and it became visible on the mobile, that simple.
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