I want to quit Google Photos, but these features make it difficult

I’ve never really forgiven Google for the bait-and-switch it pulled when ending unlimited Google Photos storage and forcing many of us to subscribe to Google One after becoming reliant on the app under its previous promises.

But years later, it’s the fact that there’s no option to opt out of AI model training that has made me even more frustrated. Not only does this encroach on the privacy of our data, but we’re essentially paying to have our images and videos used to train models which the company further profits from.

It’s what drove me to try out Immich, a Google Photos alternative, earlier this year. But as impressed as I am with the open-source, self-hosted option; there are Google Photos features that make parting ways with the app feel daunting.

Immich has a decent machine learning algorithm that can recognize objects, animals, and even the faces of people. But it isn’t able to identify different pets, which Google Photos can do.

Of the tens of thousands of pictures I have in Google Photos, the majority, at least nowadays, are of my pets. As they both get older, I want to capture as many memories of them as possible. It’s one of the reasons I now care about smartphone camera specs.

In Immich, one of my workarounds was using searches for terms like “black cat” and “white cat” to find pictures of my cats BV and Loxi. However, these results aren’t always that accurate, sometimes bringing up other animals.

But since Google Photos automatically recognizes and groups pets, it easily creates collections with them and can use these pictures for highlights. It is pretty accurate when it comes to recognition, only occasionally misidentifying a pet or grouping the neighbor’s cat in with mine.

Google Photos’ ability to recognize individual pets also means that I can search for images that include both of my cats by searching for “BV and Loxi”, which brings up the rare photos I manage to capture of them sitting near each other.

Google Photos screensavers are one of my favorite Google TV features, even though it has nothing to do with streaming. It has added a personal touch to my TV that many other screensaver features have lacked and has allowed me to rediscover gems that I’d forgotten about.

This simple integration between Google Photos and Google TV would definitely be something I’d miss if I quit the photo backup service. I considered just manually loading the images onto my TV box, but when revisiting my screensaver settings, I realized there’s no option to do this. I can only choose between Google Photos, art from specific sources like NASA, and AI-generated images.

My self-imposed deadline for finding a Google Photos alternative is when I reach the cap of my 100GB plan. Right now, the plan costs a small amount each month. But the next tier will start to eat into my budget.

I could keep the screensaver feature if I offload my main backups to another service and just keep specific albums in Google Photos. But I also balk at the idea of being locked into a company’s ecosystem because a simple alternative feature isn’t available.

Immich does have a memories features, which I was rather impressed with when I tried out the service. But it runs a lot less smoothly than Google’s version, often requiring me to manually queue the task.

On the other hand, Google Photos’ memories are completely automated and even provide generated slideshows around specific themes or trips. There are days where the notifications feel a bit excessive, or when Google surfaces memories I’m not always fond of. But in general, I really enjoy the feature.

I have been meaning to revisit my pictures to save my favorite ones to albums so that I can find them more easily. Memories come in handy though, because they often find these great moments I forgot about. Just today I was delighted by a memory showing my cat wedged between two pillows on my bed.

I use a smartphone to take images for articles, so Google Photos has found its way into my workflow. The fact that Photos syncs so quickly to the cloud means that I can take images on my smartphone one minute, and then access them and download them on my PC the next.

A self-hosted solution like Immich also allows syncing across devices, but the process isn’t as seamless because it takes place on your own hardware. In my case, it’s a NAS with limited RAM and HDDs instead of SSDs. This slows down the upload process.

If I’m using a different phone to take photos, signing into Immich also isn’t as seamless. I need to link the app to my home server, which means setting the IP address and port. Then I still need to log in with my credentials. With Photos, all I need is my Google account — no custom server address.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s worth sacrificing a little bit of convenience for extra privacy. But besides the concerns about how a less responsive server will impact my workflow, I also worry about reliability. If you’ve ever self-hosted anything, you’ll know there’s a lot of troubleshooting involved.

And that’s the unfortunate reality about the trade-offs when it comes to self-hosting. Your own hardware is a lot less stable and more prone to downtime than the servers of massive companies like Google.

Another area where Google Photos excels is its ability to create accurate location-based albums. I’ve found that the locations generated by other apps are either overly general or a bit inaccurate. This happens even with the local gallery app on my phone.

However, Google Photos regularly creates albums for specific suburbs that other apps miss. It is also able to identify these locations more accurately, whereas Immich has occasionally placed an image in a nearby suburb.

I’m honestly not sure why this is the case. My camera app has location permissions, but my gallery apps and Google Photos don’t have this permission. Either Google is able to better parse the metadata available in my images, or it is pulling the location from other sources.

It’s not foolproof though, as it does occasionally tag images as belonging to a very large location like Table Mountain National Park. But overall, I find that it’s able to pinpoint locations a lot more accurately than other apps I’ve tried.

As much as I love these Google Photos features, as well as the general reliability of the service, they definitely don’t rule out the possibility of leaving it completely. Just a few months ago I couldn’t imagine using a different browser, but I managed to ditch Chrome. I’ve also started using a self-hosted app for checklists and quick notes to move away from Google Keep.

But I’d be lying if I said there wouldn’t be things I’d really miss about using Google Photos. At the end of the day, it is a great app. However, my frustrations with Google’s practices have dulled a lot of the enthusiasm I had in the early days.