Daniel Barca

Tag: cloud

  • Google Photos Takeout uselessness can only be attributed to malice

    Yesterday I was reminded of how impressively useless Google Photos is. During the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of choosing services that take their own disappearance into account, or the fact that I may want to stop using them.

    For software services, I try to go for open source alternatives, regardless of wether they are free or not. For example, I’ve chosen Bitwarden as my password manager because it’s built on an open source core, but I pay the premium subscription because of the advantages it provides. I like the peace of mind of knowing I can choose to export all my information and go to another service at any time.

    A few years ago I decided to choose Google Photos as my photo storage service. I happily uploaded decades of photographs into it and was very happy with the result. Google Photos has a great user experience and a very nice UI… unless you want to leave.

    As my photo library grew larger, I started reaching the 200GB limit that I was subscribed to. The price of increasing the storage on Google’s cloud services was just unacceptable for me, as I realized the system wouldn’t scale properly if my library grew even more.

    So I decided to get a NAS system and leave. But leaving Google Photos is not so easy. Due to some European laws, Google is basically obligated to provide some sort of download system so users can download their own data. If we decide to download all our pictures through this system, we get a bunch of compressed files with all our pictures. Next to each picture, Google includes an additional JSON file containing the metadata information for that picture.

    If we want the library to be usable, we need to process the whole thing through custom scripting programs that are found online, and are extremely complex and unsafe for non-programmers.

    There is not a single good reason not to include the metadata information within the picture itself. The only reason for Google to include a file type that only programmers understand is malice: they know a user is trying to exit their platform and are trying to obfuscate the process. I’m sure Google has a thousand excuses for something like this, but a massive company like this spares no resources on the dumbest imaginable details. There is just no way this can be attributed to incompetence or lack of resources, it is a business decision.

    To further make my point, there’s another step in the transition that Google intentionally tries to make not hard, just impossible unless you have a tiny library. Now that we downloaded all our pictures, how do we liberate our existing Google Cloud storage so we can stop our subscription?

    If we decide to stop our data subscription we must delete all our pictures, because if the standard 15GB of storage are full, we risk Google’s most important service to stop working: Gmail. Gmail is often not just important for people, it’s essential. It grants access to every other online service and it’s where we receive all kinds of information like government notifications or bank movements confirmation details.

    Since Gmail is omnipresent we’re pretty much Google’s hostage and they know it. They will use this to force us to keep a subscription fee that we don’t want or need, and thus they make the deletion of the photos library impossible.

    The only way of automatically deleting our photo library is by inserting a very specific piece of code while the Google Photos library is open. Again, just like happens with library processing programs, this is an extremely complex and unsafe procedure for non-programmers, leaving them the only alternative of deleting the pictures selecting them one by one.

    This kind of behavior from Google is why I decided to entirely ditch their whole ecosystem, swapping GMail for Fastmail and my own email domain, and their search engine for Kagi search, and Google Photos and Drive with my own NAS system.

    I’m convinced that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior with this, and I’m surprised that no government entity has decided yet to step in and force Google to make this process usable.

    The kind of modifications that need to be made to make the system reasonable are extremely easy to make for a company like Google, and I bet that they actually already have them somewhere in their codebase, just disabled for end users.

    I’m ok with companies making it inconvenient to leave their ecosystem, but it has to be done by the sheer quality of the service itself, not by adding artificial barriers around it. Photo libraries are an extremely sensitive and personal matter, and companies shouldn’t be playing with people’s lives like this.

  • Marrying a company

    On 2015 I was really happy to move all my photos library onto Google Photos.

    Google Photos was perfect, and it’s still probably the best cloud photo library out there. It has a great timeline, excellent album and classification features, as well as sharing capabilities.

    The problem? Because of how Google’s business model is set up, they will do everything in their hand to keep you from leaving their service. It makes sense for them to make their product as good as possible so you don’t feel the temptation of leaving, but at some point Google implemented some practices that made me feel uneasy having my photos in their service.

    First of all, they make it as unintuitive as possible to download your photo library. To do so, you need to access an obscure configuration site in your Google account that lets you download all your data, select only photographies, and select a few options about the download that only tech-savvy people will understand.

    After downloading my pictures, I realized that Google has literally no option letting users delete their pictures automatically. The only alternative is to select them one by one, or go nuclear and delete the whole account (something that they well know nobody will do, since it’s tied to their email service as well). If downloading pics is for tech-savvy people, deleting them is out of reach for anyone without a notion about programming: I had to use a Javascript script that would automatically select all images and delete them, and disable CSS rendering to make the process quicker.

    It’s clear to me that Google wants you to marry them. Not only that, they want to be like an abusive husband: leaving you no other option than to stay with them.

    If I have to marry a company, I want it to be like my wife, who makes sure I have as much freedom as possible, so as I will stay with her because of how much I love her and how much I get from our relationship.

    During the last few years, I find myself giving lots of thought into what companies I choose for things that matter. I pay lots of attention into businesses that include an exit plan, not only easing how you start using their products, but also how you stop doing so.

    For example, I chose Bitwarden as my password manager and plan to keep my subscription for two reasons: their product is built onto open source software, so if they decide to just shut their business, there’s a good chance someone else will come and keep the service going. And second, they have really straightforward export capabilities that let me do periodic backups of my password library and will allow me to go somewhere else if for some reason I’m not happy anymore.

    I also chose to host my own cloud using a Synology NAS, where I keep my current collection. They might stop providing support and updates to my device one day, but as long as the NAS is running its software and the services that come bundled will keep working as expected. My pictures are just in a folder that I can just drag-and-drop into another service if I want, and with a second device for backups (in a different location) it’s, although expensive, just as safe as Google One.

    In the future I will continue to choose freedom and stability over convenience, even if that means paying a higher price.