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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.
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.
Immich and Gimp. There are tons of alternatives but people don’t bother, expecting something at least as good and as “cheap”. That’s a losing mindset.
We have to use and contribute, paying or not, to actual alternatives even though they are not 100% equivalent otherwise incumbent keep on imposing their rules.
Stopped reading at gimp. GTFO 🤣
Just clueless nerds everywhere expecting people wanting to deal with editing hundreds of photos. Get a clue.
Blocked. I don’t need this kind of low quality interactions, even less while genuinely trying to help others.
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.
It is indexed and searchable locally, you can share with the share button to anywhere you like.
It just won’t be backed up to iCloud.
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
https://immich.app/docs/features/ml-hardware-acceleration/
Interesting I’ll check it out.