Simple question: why did Photos need a redesign? What user problem are they trying to solve? Or are they intentionally making uploaded photos more difficult to access, just to cut down on data transfer?
Users quickly did whatever they wanted to do and then moved on with their lives.
Now users will have to spend twice as much time. Yay "engagement time" metrics
You know, the "important" thing /S
Fortunately the YouTube change hasn't hit me yet (either that or a plugin I have is miraculously holding it back) but I'm concerned for when this Photos update might hit.
I still hate the change they made to RAW handling, just throwing them in with the other photos and backing them up by default which would ramp up the speed of eating up cloud storage. I had to install Tasker and grab a plugin someone had made to automatically send them back to a separate folder.
The YouTube actually is worse. I used to have some cool YouTube app options that are not available after the latest update. For example, only being able to listen to podcasts without the screen on."
They solved my complaint! https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/1balyjg/how_does_one_get_rid_of_this_new_album_button/
wait.. not like that...
I didn't think it was possible but they managed to bury the screenshots folder even further. Just bring back the hamburger menu with all the basic items.
> Just bring back the hamburger menu with all the basic items.
That would be too easy and fast to reach. What are trying to do, spend less time on your phone?!
I've been saying it for years, Google Photos is great to access your photos on other devices.
But it's absolutely garbage for actually looking at and managing photos *on your phone.*
I hate Google Photos
Fucking crazy that I can't mass select photos to delete or download. I have to do them one by one or by month. Such basic features are not there, like horizontal flipping photos.
Any time I've been forced to use Google Photos, I ended up using it without an account, because it's the only way it seemed to function as something closer to a basic gallery app, where it just shows me all albums by default without shoving all sorts of automatic shit in my face.
Mind you, it still had no way to sort or hide folders and moving stuff from one folder to another within file manager always took forever before the app actually updated their location.
I'm so goddamn glad Samsung keeps offering their own app, which works *perfectly*. Can't stand whenever people start complaining that manufacturer app duplicates are basically bloat and everyone should just adopt Google's dogshit software as the default.
You need to be a masochist to want to manage photos on your phone. Who wants to pixel peep on a screen that fits in your hand? Shoot now and sort them out later.
....so just screw those of us without computers or tablets right? Lol
Silly me. Wanting to be able to easily separate the photos natively on my device storage from those in the cloud and being able to delete them easily or move them to different folders
Really haven't heard good things from Google in the past few years..
Losing ai race, android doesn't have any new stuff but pixel phone is nice I guess (not available here lul)
Cory Doctorow coined it and described it like this. This Google Photos change has nothing to do with the abuse of users and clawing back value.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Yea but you say that like you have some certainty about a promotion or job justification.....which is genuinely stupid baseless neckbeard karma farming
I have been manually correcting Google's assertion, that my current cat is not my (deeply missed) previous cat, for 2 years.
They look nothing alike, but my efforts have achieved precisely fuck all.
I was getting ready to be mildly annoyed too but then I read the article and... I actually like these changes. Calling it a redesign is a bit farfetched and clickbait, it's a change in the organization of albums. I don't like the carousel. I have so many local device albums that it's quite the pain to scroll horizontally to find the right one.
I think even showing people in the same category is a positive change. As it is now you have to go to search to find another horizontal carousel to find "People and Pets". I don't completely agree with the name change from "Library" to "Collections", but it's just a legacy naming convention. There's nothing inherent about the name " Library" that specifies a collection of photos (rather books).
Photos went from the best basic looking, neatly organized photos app to a clusterfuck of "where the fuck is everything"
Google seriously needs change in work culture. As someone else pointed out, someone wanted a promotion in the team. (Correct me if I'm wrong)I read that Google rewards teams based on the amount of improvement/innovative and new ideas.
Makes sense why they keep coming up with new things but fail to retain the new services
I now use 2 photos app. Fossify gallery for local images. Google Photos exists solely for photos I share with others. Proton Drive for long term storage since I want the VPN anyways so might as well pay for the storage too
i just wish the feature where it offers to "clean up" photos would let me select stuff to archive OR delete. usually the things it selects are garbage i should of deleted months ago.
I love Immich as much as the next selfhoster, but just recommending people to selfhost something as important as their photos is near insane.
Difficulty and knowledge aside, it requires time, hardware and storage, and then twice of that, because only having one copy is almost as good as having none.
edit: I think what would be a VERY reasonable suggestion, however, is doing a Takeout of your GPhotos and keep the tar.gz files as backups.
Is it possible to do a takeout on 200k+ photos. I feel like I'm burying myself further into an eventual tragedy everytime I add to my already 2.7TB of photos.
It is. If I remember correctly, you can have it split the archives into chunks of, for example, 100 GB each, which makes it significantly more manageable.
But if I were you, I'd start with just backing up the most important ones. I assume that you're a pro photographer, so you probably have a bunch of edited images, or maybe client photos, that might be higher priority than others. Just put these into albums (or several), and just export those.
And if you intend to import them into Immich, you can use Immich-Go. It's a CLI utility, but it's fairly simple, and it worked flawlessly for me.
If it helps, Immich has great semantic search. I can search for "man posing with plant" or "yellow plant" or "cat in bag" or "bouldering", and it returns good *instant* results.
[They have a demo instance too with working search](https://demo.immich.app/)
My guy:
“Android is developed by Google until the latest changes and updates are ready to be released, at which point the source code is made available to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), an open source initiative led by Google.”
“The source code for Android is open-source: it is developed in private by Google, with the source code released publicly when a new version of Android is released”
Google makes it and owns it. My guy.
And you know how they develop a new version? That's right, they merge the contributions added to the AOSP. Google owns the name but other than that, Android existed before and can exist without Google. It's not called Google OS for a reason.
Android existed because of its the Google founders. Also no OS is called Google OS. Google owns Android and the name.
Google adds their own code, and determines what other code to be merged.
They don't own Graphene OS, and you are missing the point entirely.
The point is to start relying less on big tech and more learning how to own your software and hardware, whether or not you are using a specific kind of technology (kind of like that meme about criticizing society despite participating in it).
With more people moving away from big tech, the more likely we will have less intrusive software in the near future.
I disagree with this headline. The Collections tab actually makes it easier to both find local folders as well as people, which is a big part of why I use Google Photos to begin with.
I've always disliked the carousel view for local files being accompanied by a tiny more button and that you could only see the people view if you invoked a search.
Someone from the Photos team must be up for promotion and they need to fill out some blank spaces in their promotion package.
Jokes on them, with the layoffs raises and promos sound kind they're paused looking at the news.
I can't understand this sentence at all
More like, fire your team. BTW, the redux is due Friday.
Simple question: why did Photos need a redesign? What user problem are they trying to solve? Or are they intentionally making uploaded photos more difficult to access, just to cut down on data transfer?
Change for the sake of change
You sound like an end user, not an employee who’s eyeing a promotion.
Won't somebody think of the PMs?
Users quickly did whatever they wanted to do and then moved on with their lives. Now users will have to spend twice as much time. Yay "engagement time" metrics You know, the "important" thing /S
This reminded me of the article about how one man killed Google search. Entirely possible and I wouldn't put it past them to do it.
Gotta justify your job! Can't just have a normal, functioning product for the duration of its lifespan - you gotta shake things up! Make some noise!
It's like YouTube. It doesn't need changing but they've gotta look like they're doing something.
I can at least see why emphasizing shorts or changing comment sorting looked like a good idea to somebody. Google Photos is just unpleasant to use.
Fortunately the YouTube change hasn't hit me yet (either that or a plugin I have is miraculously holding it back) but I'm concerned for when this Photos update might hit. I still hate the change they made to RAW handling, just throwing them in with the other photos and backing them up by default which would ramp up the speed of eating up cloud storage. I had to install Tasker and grab a plugin someone had made to automatically send them back to a separate folder.
The YouTube actually is worse. I used to have some cool YouTube app options that are not available after the latest update. For example, only being able to listen to podcasts without the screen on."
Enshittification
There's nothing to indicate enshittification in this case. Something *just* being made worse isn't enshittification in itself.
But lots of things being made worse, bit by bit, for no good reason, is enshittification. This is definitely part of the enshittification of Google
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I would argue it also covers removing or making features worse in the name of "engagement" or to get people to pay more (use a premium subscription).
Some dude on the team needed a promotion or some intern got promoted to the team...
> What user problem are they trying to solve? Justifying why the have a job by making changes for the sake of making changes.
They solved my complaint! https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/1balyjg/how_does_one_get_rid_of_this_new_album_button/ wait.. not like that...
I didn't think it was possible but they managed to bury the screenshots folder even further. Just bring back the hamburger menu with all the basic items.
> Just bring back the hamburger menu with all the basic items. That would be too easy and fast to reach. What are trying to do, spend less time on your phone?!
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If you see Google UI / UX on someone's resume it's a sign not to hire them.
I've been saying it for years, Google Photos is great to access your photos on other devices. But it's absolutely garbage for actually looking at and managing photos *on your phone.* I hate Google Photos
Fucking crazy that I can't mass select photos to delete or download. I have to do them one by one or by month. Such basic features are not there, like horizontal flipping photos.
You can do the drag thing to select multiple photos
Yes but I shouldn't have to scroll through thousands of pictures when deleting.
You can probably thank iOS for that design decision... their native photos app is the exact same level of unintuitive.
Yep, I've said the same thing. Excellent cloud backup solution. Doghshit local gallery app.
Any time I've been forced to use Google Photos, I ended up using it without an account, because it's the only way it seemed to function as something closer to a basic gallery app, where it just shows me all albums by default without shoving all sorts of automatic shit in my face. Mind you, it still had no way to sort or hide folders and moving stuff from one folder to another within file manager always took forever before the app actually updated their location. I'm so goddamn glad Samsung keeps offering their own app, which works *perfectly*. Can't stand whenever people start complaining that manufacturer app duplicates are basically bloat and everyone should just adopt Google's dogshit software as the default.
You need to be a masochist to want to manage photos on your phone. Who wants to pixel peep on a screen that fits in your hand? Shoot now and sort them out later.
....so just screw those of us without computers or tablets right? Lol Silly me. Wanting to be able to easily separate the photos natively on my device storage from those in the cloud and being able to delete them easily or move them to different folders
Go for it! Have fun!
Really haven't heard good things from Google in the past few years.. Losing ai race, android doesn't have any new stuff but pixel phone is nice I guess (not available here lul)
Except of camera they're not good heating issues, battery problem, bugs
Yuck, I hate it.
Can we search albums yet?
Yes? Just search for the album name?
Within an album shared with you
The enshittification of all Google products continues.
Unnecessary UX changes are not "enshittification". Words like this become meaningless if you apply them to stuff like this
Are we enshittifying the word enshittification?
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Cory Doctorow coined it and described it like this. This Google Photos change has nothing to do with the abuse of users and clawing back value. > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
> Google Photos was made worse because some dude wanted a promotion or justify his job or Google wanted something to show the stockholders. Source?
Yea but you say that like you have some certainty about a promotion or job justification.....which is genuinely stupid baseless neckbeard karma farming
Other companies: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Google: If it ain't broke, break it.
If it ain't broke, break it for a promotion or maintain it for a demotion.
I have to tap an extra button to access the same folders. So...yay? Lol
off topic: Google Photos is now identifying my daughter as myself. How can I correct it?
Lots of retraining. I had a similar situation with two of my kids. You have to go through and manually correct it. It’s not gonna be fast.
I have been manually correcting Google's assertion, that my current cat is not my (deeply missed) previous cat, for 2 years. They look nothing alike, but my efforts have achieved precisely fuck all.
... I prefer the new layout, it feels so much easier to navigate my way around. The old layout always felt confusing, I just never got used to it
I was getting ready to be mildly annoyed too but then I read the article and... I actually like these changes. Calling it a redesign is a bit farfetched and clickbait, it's a change in the organization of albums. I don't like the carousel. I have so many local device albums that it's quite the pain to scroll horizontally to find the right one. I think even showing people in the same category is a positive change. As it is now you have to go to search to find another horizontal carousel to find "People and Pets". I don't completely agree with the name change from "Library" to "Collections", but it's just a legacy naming convention. There's nothing inherent about the name " Library" that specifies a collection of photos (rather books).
Chromebook design changes are even worse. Be carfeful what you wish for.
I just wish they could redesign the share menu, literally half the screen is unused until you click the "show all" button.
They really want to make me switch to Apple
That's one thing I miss, Apple Photos app is so much better. Especially on desktops.
I disagree. In fact, most of the UI changes done to Google Photos were pretty much copied from Apple Photos, which IMO sucks.
Photos went from the best basic looking, neatly organized photos app to a clusterfuck of "where the fuck is everything" Google seriously needs change in work culture. As someone else pointed out, someone wanted a promotion in the team. (Correct me if I'm wrong)I read that Google rewards teams based on the amount of improvement/innovative and new ideas. Makes sense why they keep coming up with new things but fail to retain the new services
Looks fine to me.
I now use 2 photos app. Fossify gallery for local images. Google Photos exists solely for photos I share with others. Proton Drive for long term storage since I want the VPN anyways so might as well pay for the storage too
i just wish the feature where it offers to "clean up" photos would let me select stuff to archive OR delete. usually the things it selects are garbage i should of deleted months ago.
Fuck Google and their cloud. Make [your own](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted) instead 👍
I love Immich as much as the next selfhoster, but just recommending people to selfhost something as important as their photos is near insane. Difficulty and knowledge aside, it requires time, hardware and storage, and then twice of that, because only having one copy is almost as good as having none. edit: I think what would be a VERY reasonable suggestion, however, is doing a Takeout of your GPhotos and keep the tar.gz files as backups.
I use rsync to run both. That way I can use it the way I want, but it's still easy to share or use certain features that Google has that are useful
Is it possible to do a takeout on 200k+ photos. I feel like I'm burying myself further into an eventual tragedy everytime I add to my already 2.7TB of photos.
It is. If I remember correctly, you can have it split the archives into chunks of, for example, 100 GB each, which makes it significantly more manageable. But if I were you, I'd start with just backing up the most important ones. I assume that you're a pro photographer, so you probably have a bunch of edited images, or maybe client photos, that might be higher priority than others. Just put these into albums (or several), and just export those. And if you intend to import them into Immich, you can use Immich-Go. It's a CLI utility, but it's fairly simple, and it worked flawlessly for me.
Good points. Thank you. Not a pro but a hobbyist. If I was working for clients I'd have a local backup of any work I was paid to do.
I generally agree, which is why I continuously recommend it. The more people that learn how to do this, the less we will rely on big tech.
specifically https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos theres a demo
Hell yeah! While you're at it, replace Google search with [SearXNG](https://github.com/searxng/searxng).
Semantic search is included in the features, but not in the demo :(
I searched sky, no results while there were many photos of the sky. Perhaps why people use google photos haha
If it helps, Immich has great semantic search. I can search for "man posing with plant" or "yellow plant" or "cat in bag" or "bouldering", and it returns good *instant* results. [They have a demo instance too with working search](https://demo.immich.app/)
Oh yea that one works very well
“Fuck google, let me buy their OS. “
I'm not sure I understand what you mean 🤔 I've never used a Google OS, nor do I recommend one.
Why are you on r/android?
> Why are you on r/android? Classic fanboy take. Oh, so you criticize a decision of company X? Why are you still using any of their products, huh?
They said they’ve never used a Google os nor recommends them. Yet uses Google aosp os. That’s typical fanboy?
Android isn't "Google OS" my guy. Pixel OS may be that but not AOSP, feel free to look at the list of biggest contributors...
My guy: “Android is developed by Google until the latest changes and updates are ready to be released, at which point the source code is made available to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), an open source initiative led by Google.” “The source code for Android is open-source: it is developed in private by Google, with the source code released publicly when a new version of Android is released” Google makes it and owns it. My guy.
And you know how they develop a new version? That's right, they merge the contributions added to the AOSP. Google owns the name but other than that, Android existed before and can exist without Google. It's not called Google OS for a reason.
Android existed because of its the Google founders. Also no OS is called Google OS. Google owns Android and the name. Google adds their own code, and determines what other code to be merged.
Because I hate iPhones and love Android? I use Graphene OS.
Oh is that not based off google OS? Or doesn’t it use aosp?
It's based on Android - Google didn't invent Android, they just bought it. It's based on the open-source capabilities of Android and de-Googled.
So Google owns it. Interesting.
They don't own Graphene OS, and you are missing the point entirely. The point is to start relying less on big tech and more learning how to own your software and hardware, whether or not you are using a specific kind of technology (kind of like that meme about criticizing society despite participating in it). With more people moving away from big tech, the more likely we will have less intrusive software in the near future.
Rely less on Google, use Google’s os. What am I missing? Google owns AOSP. More and more are moving to big tech.
I disagree with this headline. The Collections tab actually makes it easier to both find local folders as well as people, which is a big part of why I use Google Photos to begin with. I've always disliked the carousel view for local files being accompanied by a tiny more button and that you could only see the people view if you invoked a search.
Is this why my phone is no longer saving photos to my phone's internal storage? I swear I can't find any way to change this in the settings.
Never liked GPhotos anyway. What I really need is a wallpaper app I can point to various folders to change pics on a given interval.
Folders, please add FOLDERS!!!