Comment by x0x0
4 days ago
A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.
Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.
Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!
It's the most Apple thing.
I like Apple photos in this regard on the mac. If you have the storage, you can just set it to download full copies automatically, now all my photos are stored locally on my mac almost as soon as I take the photo on my phone.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
What do you think Photos should do instead?
1 - Not deprecate the api that allowed people to run incremental backups. They took positive action to intentionally break this. If they feel the need to break the api for ginned-up security excuses, provide a working solution for incremental backup.
2 - Fix takeout not to be entirely broken and hostile to users on 2 axes: usability and reliability. Usability: emit photos once only with a separate json specifying group memberships. Like, you know, competent engineers. Because that's how they store it internally.
2a - Either (i) fix whatever brokenness in their system regularly causes zip downloads to fail; or (ii) figure out or build a reliable alternate solution. Forcing users to wait hours to a day or two to access zips that they can't download is nothing more than a symptom of total disdain for their users while checking a compliance checkbox.