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Ask HN: Google Photos users: What will you do if your Google account is banned?

10 points by 0goel0 ↗ HN
So I've been thinking about this for a while and diversifying services as much as possible (mail, drive, docs etc) but Photos is one service that I can't replace.

Of course I take backups of the (super messy) Takeout, and use the API to make (incomplete, lower quality) backups of photos.

None are ideal though. So, here's my question, what's your contingency plan if you lose access to your Google account?

15 comments

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ycombonator
Just my personal opinion. Don’t use Google Services for “critical” use cases like storing personal photos. If they have the ability to ban/ shutdown your Google Account without recourse, I wouldn’t be using their services for anything other than searches, junk mail account for newsletters. There are plenty of companies out there with very reliable products that serve customers with respect for a tiny fee.
sergiotapia
What should I use if I want to pay for a secure storage that detects faces and automatically backs up my wife's pictures?

Since switching to google photos I haven't had ONE single tech support request from my wife. That's priceless to me and worth the $100/yr alone lol

mrfusion
Does Apple offer some thing like that? Or is it only for photos you take with their devices?
voltaireodactyl
I had this question for a long time and the two options I came up with are this:

1) Apple Photos -- obviously only works on macOS/iOS devices (although not only with photos created by their devices -- I imported everything from way before ever getting an iPhone, for example), but it's damn near flawless in my opinion, and even creates nice little presentation slideshow/videos called "memories" all on it's own, about one a day (highlighting specific people, events, or places).

2) A Synology NAS using their PhotoStation package + their mobile/desktop uploader apps (or PhotoSync on mobile, which is a bit more rock solid). Face recognition isn't as good as Apple/Google, and there's no automated AI stuff like Apple/Google either, but it works much better than I honestly expected, and I have no complaints from my mostly-tech-clueless family. Plus you own the hardware.

I ended up opting for both.

duiker101
I asked myself the same. My conclusion was "don't use Google Photos".

I know it's probably the best service out there and it's hard to replace. But it's not worth the risk.

You say you can't replace it. Why is that? Maybe there are some alternatives that you don't know about?

0goel0
What other service do you use?

I use it mainly because I have a Pixel and the integration is great. I love at AI search/tagging.

duiker101
I use a bit more a homegrown system with Resilio. It's great and costs very little. You can find a guide here https://www.danielandrade.net/2017/07/22/roll-your-own-secur...

It take a bit to setup and get used to it but I really like it.

To organize the photos you can use whatever you want on Desktop (I use Digikam) and on the phone I use F-Stop Gallery.

I know the integration might not be as smooth as Google Photos, but I feel comfortable with it and it's pretty fool-proof while giving me a lot of flexibility. If I want to migrate to something else I literally just need to copy-paste my files.

The biggest challenge was actually re-organising the files after using Google's takeout functionality. They come out a hot mess.

ggoo
I don't use Google photos anymore, largely for this concern. But when I did, I shared my albums with someone else in the unlikely event of this happening.
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URfejk
Buy an external hard drive and put your photos there from now on.
brudgers
To me the more likely problem is Google sunsetting the service and/or migrating it to something that doesn’t do the same things. Because probably at some point Google will have extracted all the business value from the old photos and they will just be dead weight on its servers and switches. More importantly all those pictures are a legal liability because of copyright violations and pornography. This is the ordinary fate of all picture hosting services in general and Google in particular has a track record of shuttering services low revenue services after a few years.
deanmoriarty
Could you expand on why a weekly/monthly Takeout backup is not ideal?
sangli
I periodically download photos to my external HDD.
speedgoose
I would write a blog post about it and hopefully reach the HN frontpage so someone from Google can do something about it.
emilburzo
Probably be slightly annoyed for a day, then... nothing, since I have a local copy of all my data.

I actually started a wiki page[1] about how to backup data (automatically) from Google services when this scary article[2] hit here on HN, if anyone knows any other tools that could be helpful, please let me know.

Back to the topic: you can use https://rclone.org to do it for you.

I have it setup to run automatically every night, that way you can still use Google Photos (because it's just really well done) while still sleeping peacefully knowing that you always have a local copy.

[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972554