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.
Daniel Barca 