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Google photos on ios is literally a hostage situation. Remove key functionalities like copying an image or editing an image unless you give them full unrestricted access to your entire photo library. (The holy grail of surveillance capitalism data). Data extortion masquerading as a service.
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That’s what you get for using a Google product.
Stop using Google trash. Google is evil.
>Uses applications from the most privacy-destroying ad agency in the history of the world
>Is surprised that they don’t respect privacy.
Isn’t the point of google photos to back up your entire photo library?
speaking from experience, I could do without 700,000,000 memes saved since 2012 in with sentimental family photos
So do you want to give Google Photos access to only specific folders or something?
I think the use case of google photos is to just back up all your photos. If you want something more granular, you probably need a different app.
Pretty sure you can select the folders in google photos too
Ah, but if you run out of space in your backup, you might think “I’ll just delete some of those photos from my backup”.
And then you go back to your device to find it’s deleted them there too!
I see that. But this is more of a use case issue than a google photos has too much permissions issue.
The irony of complaining about unreasonable requirements from an Apple user isn’t lost on me.
I don’t know if the format really applies. Complaining about one corporation stealing your data while using another’s product that does the same seems a bit pointless, especially when there are cheaper, better alternatives. The putting a stick through your own bike tire format seems more appropriate.
Anyone that claims Apple is stealing their data is drastically misinformed to the point where it feels like a rationalization.
Google does it, Facebook does it, Apple does not. Ask any engineer who works at these companies and they can confirm it.
It is frustrating to Apple engineers with how heavily restricted user data is. There are literally committees at Apple who default to No for any request. They do not profit off your data, they profit off the mark up on hardware and services.
Thinking it’s a both/all sides thing is how much be enabled bad actors. The GOP is an example and anyone who falls for the corporate version is no smarter than anyone who falls for the political version. Luckily, it’s not a lonely place to be.
Common sense is no longer common. Feelings have trumped all logic on the majority of Americans as well as the world population at large.
Apple absolutely does collect personal data from its users and uses that data to target advertising. They openly disclose this in their policy statements.
Stating that
They do not profit off your data
is unjustifiable when Apple makes BILLIONS from advertising.
They also have been fined by European regulators when their practices ran afoul of privacy law.
Just because they’re not as bad as Google (quite a low bar) it doesn’t mean they’re as good as they try to sell you on.
If missing the point was an Olympic sport you’d be a gold medalist.
What’s the point? criticising me for complaining about an issue that is on my grandma’s phone that I encountered?
Like yes we get apple is shit, so is android. My grandma is 90 and not loaded with cash I can’t just put her on graphene os.
This is a real way she’s having her data mined. Because other parts of the family insist on using google photos for the “family album”.
The what did you expect with apple as if everyone is a tech savy person with enough free time to maintain a custom rom and money to just straight up buy a new phone when they learn there’s isn’t perfect just ends up dismissing valid criticism.
Couple things here
You made a criticism, other people are allowed to criticize what you said.
Using the excuse of “not loaded with cash” is one I’m confused about. New or used, Pixels (Or some Motos if the Pixel is not available in your country) are cheaper than iPhones.
You seem tech savy enough to use Fedi/Lemmy, why not help them transition to a better solution for their privacy by either buying an ente subscription where they manage hosting and you dont have to worry about that, or using (free) Immich which you have to host yourself but is well worth setting up. You can even import all of your google photos albums and photos 1:1 into Immich as they are on GPhotos.
It is valid to criticize apple. They are a company who likes to taught “privacy” when they are not any better than any other phone manufacturer, no one has denied this. You just seem to find it impossible to be able to criticize both Apple, and consumers who seem to know better (You seem to be aware of Custom ROMs, as you brought it up first).
No one is trying to attack you or your family here. The OP commentor made a joke out of an observation. A valid obervation, as why would you expect Apple or Google to take your privacy in consideration. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it should change, but that change is not going to come from continuing to get fucked by them. You dont need a custom ROM to use Immich or ente. You dont have to allow companies to fuck you. The longer you let them, the harder it is to get out.
Also personal tangent, theres no “maintaining a custom ROM” unless youre building your own ROM. Most recommended custom ROMs auto-update, and dont need any more “maintainence” than an iPhone or stock android.
Technically it’s Foxconn that pays their wages and taxes. The comic obviously has a point though. Minus the Fairphone (overpriced for its spec and likely going to get shorter software support than any iPhone since the 5 it 5S), the options are all shit and include some form of modern slavery. IPhones just get the most attention while Samsung literally runs a country. We can’t just all stop owning modern electronical devices altogether.
Similar situation with WhatsApp on Android: you can’t share images or videos without giving the app full access to your entire filesystem. You also can’t video or voice call without giving the app full phone permissions.
Other apps happily let you do all of those things. You can just Share an image from some other app. But nope, WhatsApp just refuses.
I have WhatsApp on Android and have restricted its access to my photos. Every time I want to share an image I need to first select which new photos I want to give Whatsapp access to, then select the photos again to send them. Next time I tap to share an image I won’t see any new photos in the options no matter how many new photos are in my gallery.
I can also share to Whatsapp from my gallery, which will prompt again the permission for this individual photo thing. Same.
maybe they’re serving different versions of the app to different regions or something. I am 100% sure this doesn’t work for me.
That is a an Android feature. A user can select the media they want to share without giving full access to the media folder. It was introduced with Android 14.
And apps have to support it, which WhatsApp doesn’t
Edit: I was wrong, see below
I don’t want to talk you into accidentally allowing access to all your photos. But I believe if you tap settings there, or if you long press your app icon to go to settings and then navigate to permissions, you will find the screen where you can choose never allow, always allow, and allow limited access which is the one you want.
Well what do you know, it worked! Thanks!
I allowed limited access and then selected nothing. Now I can send images and videos by sharing them from elsewhere.
Not sure about that because I can use it with WhatsApp.
And with GrapheneOS, I can even scope contacts
Preload vs play store version?
play store. what’s preload?
So a many oems load on versions of apps from Meta and other developers as preloads on the phone so they are there day one when you first launch the OS. These versions of the apps are not subject to Play store policy restrictions around permissions and other data privacy things, and are generally far more privacy invasive than their Play store equivalents. I usually advise people to disable or uninstall preloaded versions as much as possible and try to get the Play store versions instead.
WhatsApp is awful with permissions. I couldn’t find a way to use it without giving it access to all my contacts. I installed it on the work profile and uninstalled it as soon as I didn’t need it anymore.
In many countries around the world it’s the only way people communicate. If I want to keep in contact with my family (and I do), I have no choice but to use it.
I’ve tried to get them on Telegram or Signal, no luck.
Why even install this crap?!
People don’t know. Researching good image backup/sharing options is beyond most normies. Privacy invasion isn’t even a known problem for them to care about.
My parents certainly won’t be able to comprehend this. My brothers are tech savvy, and it’s taken years for them to come onboard with self hosting since I’ve started advocating it (one still can’t because his wife finds it difficult to move away from Google photos).
If you’re on iOS you have to actively install this. So either they or someone else chose this. Plenty of options to move away from Gagle. It’s 2025.
What other option is there for automatic backups, image editing and touchups, and index and searching for photos?
This is a dupe from above btw. I just added this in an edit for clarity. I’m asking the same question of both.
The basic photos app on iOS does all that on device
They follow the same privacy standards as Google in the USA. Sure they don’t sell ads but the real issue imo is warrantless requests for that info for the government.
You can literally disable iCloud and still use it all. No privacy standards will matter, it’ll stay in your device.
That’s not what I want. I want it infexed and searchable, backed up, and easily shareable.
I’m currently in the process of learning to set up Immich on a home server. That will take care of automatic backup and indexing and searching. My family won’t engage to use this though, so they’re still going to send me Google photos links for sharing.
For touchups, I do that on device with an image editing app it needed. Although I never need to edit really.
By indexing is that by fine name and meta data or does it do face and location matching like Google. I know I’m moving goalposts but that’s the real killer feature IMO.
It’s meant to have facial recognition, etc with a locally run AI
Interesting I’ll check it out.
Easy way to backup your photos, create shared albums and it has nice “this time year ago” memories stuff.
Just like the standard app. Again, no added benefit.
And do your friends who use Android use the standard app too?
Just because it’s super easy and well known I would assume
What other option is there for automatic backups, image editing and touchups, and index and searching for photos?
Ente.
The standard iOS app?
They follow the same privacy standards as Google in the USA. Sure they don’t sell ads but the real issue imo is warrantless requests for that info for the government.
Apple does keep the photos and metadata encrypted in flight and at rest which I would assume is better than what Google does, but I haven’t seen Google’s policy in a while. Apple Photos Legal Page
Maybe don’t use services by the worlds largest ad company?
Out of curiosity - are there any companies offering to host Immich for you and provide backups and stuff?
I’m tempted to self host it for my family, but my biggest concern is losing data that I self host (and time spent managing this).
In your situation, Ente would be better. Handling a VPS for Immich is asking for a headache.
Ente supports a family plan, handles hosting and backup for you, supports all your usual media files and imports them cleanly from Google Photos. But it’s private, encrypted, and you can take out your data at any time with a single click.
Ente does seem pretty much exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks!
Anybody have thoughts on Ente? Am I going to find out later that they’re a horrible company who will steal my data and have to migrate again? 😅
https://elest.io/open-source/immich
No experience with them so can’t at all vouch for them, but it looks like there are providers who will do this.
I self host Immich with an off site backup (=raspberry pi at in-laws house, all over WireGuard). Can’t recommend Immich enough!
Not that google isn’t capable of epic evil, but have you considered they the might just be completely fucking incompetent at IOS apps :)
No, they have infinite money and are a prestige job for developers. The chances that they were unable to hire talented programmers on the singular most popular smartphone is essentially zero.
I didn’t down vote you but I’m also not saying they didn’t do it on purpose.
I was talking about the device, not the OS.
Apple is the largest smartphone manufacturer and so it stands to reason that Google has heard of them and hires talented people to work on the software for their devices. So statements like:
have you considered they the might just be completely fucking incompetent at IOS apps
Is just nonsense completely divorced from reality.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. If you write software for Apple mobile devices, you’re creating it for iOS. If you write for basically any other smartphone, which represent nearly 75% of all devices worldwide, then you create for Android.
In the US they probably have a huge number of potential customers on iOS, so bringing experts and designing for their iOS experience makes sense, as you point out. But saying that platform is the most popular worldwide would be factually incorrect. You don’t write apps for hardware (there might be some small tweaks to take advantage of available hardware like on Pixels), you design for the platform.
Also, it appears that the design for iOS is sound, and OP just fundamentally misunderstands how to share specific sets of photos with Google Photos.
None of this is to defend Google’s data collection policies.
Is this real?
I’m so used to computer-things being files I edit sovereignly on my device that I find it hard to understand the serfware.
I’m so used to computer-things being files I edit sovereignly on my device that I find it hard to understand the serfware.
I like your framing and terminology!
It is real. Even granting limited access to Google photos will lock down key functionality. I was on Android until just recently with a decade of content I still want to access on an iPhone.
I need to follow these instructions but haven’t made the time for it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120924
I can believe that, even on android their functionality has been declining for years. Can still edit (poorly), and copy on my slightly outdated version, but overall the experience is worse than before.
Android is not good either. Google Calendar requires access to all my contacts to run. Nope.
Android isn’t really that hard to like 90% de-google, you can replace most google apps with FOSS alternatives, then disable and deny all permissions to almost all google apps, even uninstall many… you can do that all without root, without even ADB.
To get to 100%, yeah, you’re gonna need ADB and root and some kind of replacement OS… but you can do a lot without it.
I might be on an old enough version that it still functions as intended without that permission (its from 2021 lol). Photos on the other hand nags you to update and eventually completely stops you from using it unless you “update”. Thankfully I can disable both apps so it’s not a big deal for me
Yup, literally went through it today. When helping my family member with their phone.
Currently working on a better script to import all my Google Takeout images into Immich. If anyone wants to help, I can publish it on GitHub. I’ve currently got it sorting all the photos correctly, and now I need to combine the still and live versions into one photo.
I’m doing this because the current import project doesn’t work well. It goes on basically filename alone, which has a lot of problems with a big complicated library like my own. I’ve used all of iCloud, Google Photos, and Immich at different points and together, so there are tons of duplicate files.
This is a particularly hard problem because Google Takeout names files in the most convoluted way. You might have a photo called Photo1.jpg and a metadata file called Photo1.supplemental-meta.json, which is fine, but then a photo called MeAndTheWifeAtTheBeach(1).jpg and a metadata file called MeAndTheWifeAtTheBeach.supplemental-m(1).json. Then you could also have a live version that doesn’t have its own metadata file. And these might exist in different folders. The current import project doesn’t take any of this into account.
IIRC, Ente has a working Import for Google Takeout correctly joining the Live Photos. Maybe it’s with taking a look at that for some inspiration.
So happy I went the NAS route for photos solution… sure it costs more and takes some knowledge of how to do it, but it’s not its only purpose either.
my nas save me on cloud storage cost, since i got a tons of pictures and videos, so it pays for itself
Another hostage situation here is when migrating from android to apple, you can’t view your old Google photos without giving it access to your Apple photos. I’ve explicitly partitioned those photos and Google doesn’t need access to my new photos to allow me to view my old photos.
I’m on Android and turned off all Gemini features on my Google accounts. Now it refuses to let me do reverse image searches, claiming I “don’t own” the images I’m trying to reverse search. It looks like (I haven’t checked) they want me to upload the images to Drive and give Google permission to access everything again before they’ll agree to do a reverse image search for me.
Fortunately, there’s still TinEye and Yandex.
