It appears every few times I open the app and the usual android back button doesn’t make it go away, and there is no cancel button. What you have to do is toggle the toggle, then the button will change to “do not back up” and then you can press it. It annoys me how easy this makes it to accidentally turn on backup.
I’m always conflicted on this kind of thing, because for every person annoyed that it’s asking there’s a bunch that are complaining that they lost all their photos because their phone was stolen or something like that, and had no idea that they need to backup their stuff.
Having a notice that doesn’t occupy the whole screen and can be dismissed temporarily or permanently is a much better and less predatory solution to this problem. This isn’t looking out for the end user, this is urging them into a system where the host can profit off of the user’s data, that also happens to provide a benefit to the user.
Maybe, the average user really doesn’t understand backups though and would be more likely to ignore it then.
That’s too bad for them, but at a certain point, people should be expected to have some level of understanding of the technology they are using. Giving people the information via a highly visible yet unobtrusive notification is more than enough to guide people that don’t understand. If they decide not to follow the clear instructions then that’s on them.
It’s kind of like no child left behind. In theory, it’s a good idea to make sure everyone is in a good position for success, but it’s not good in execution because it negatively impacts more than it helps.
I didn’t realize that I had turned it on on my prior phone. Welp, my phone absolutely died one day and would no longer power on. I was really sad about losing my photos and videos, but then when I got my new phone I was happy to find out that at some point I turned on photos cloud backups.
Why would you use Google photos as your gallery if you’re not using the backup feature? It’s like the only reason to use it over a different gallery.
This is auto backup of a certain folder. You may not want every photo you take. I turn it off so I can manually select them.
no it’s not, it’s for the entire device
it’s the other way around. you turn on auto backup and turn off specific folders. it doesn’t ask you to turn them on.
Can you tap outside the popup to make it go away? Or maybe swipe it down? Agree that Back should be enough, how annoying!
No, you cannot.
Ugh.
What if you close the app through drawer, and then relaunch it?
I switched to Immich and will never look back.
I’ve got both going for dual cloud backup. Immich is hosted local so I’ve got a backup at home, and I pay $5/month for 500GB storage with Google
I love the idea.
My old server wouldn’t run it in docker for some unknown reason…
I’ll have to give it a whirl again.
If you don’t use cloud backup there’s much better gallery apps
It used to be even more annoying. Until a couple of months ago, after you tapped the No option, it would bring you to a full-screen screen where it asked you to select specific photos you’d like to backup anyways.
I know, and then they did switch over and you got both popups for a bit.
Asshole Google is doing asshole things. Before switching to Lineage OS this thing annoyed me so much. A few days ago I saw this prompt when using my father’s phone and I couldn’t believe that this thing is still happening. Google is so stubborn.
100% asshole design to fill up cloud storage and taking gmail “hostage” - pay for google one or all your emails will bounce back
I believe they want to process photos and videos to train their AI.
That was in the past, it was the reason they gave free unlimited backups. Now that they have enough data, once everyone got hooked to it, they enshittened the shit out of it
I used to be annoyed by this. I’m running GrapheneOS so I denied Google Photos access to the network but it didn’t stop it from asking every few times I started the app. Sometimes it even ignored my response and tried to connect to the network anyway.
I just uninstalled it and installed Fossify Gallery instead from F-droid. Haven’t looked back since.
Ever had issues with FDroid getting stuck during updates, it would get stuck for me every day or 2 until I just uninstalled it. I don’t install apps enough to bother with it, so I figured I’d reinstall it when I eventually need it again.
Use droid-ify, it’s a much better fdroid client where you can enable Izzy’s repository much easier
I was feeling smug that being on LineageOS and now GrapheneOS for almost a decade I’ve never seen this.
…then I remembered my fucking iMac seemed to turn on iCloud photo backup last week after updating and next thing I know all the obsolete iPads I get from work are telling me how my iCloud storage is full
Seriously this iCloud shit is on by default, predatory ass tech companies. I’m pretty sure I disabled it on that iMac but it’s so possible that my own device can gaslight me that I’m left unsure. It’s off now and I spent an afternoon removing all those photos.
Rapist mentality
I recently picked up an iPhone as a secondary device, pretty much immediately disabled iCloud and installed Mobius (Syncthing) so the photos get sync’ed over to my fairphone’s SD card.
Now i’m second guessing whether it’s actually disabled, or if I’m going to get an iCloud full warning in a couple of months…
It’s ridiculous, its enabled by default on any new device you set up and sign in to. I could have missed turning off iCloud on my iMac, but I didn’t have any problems before updating it, and then after I updated it I had iCloud full notifications, so I’m pretty sure it was off.
Disable the network access to the app.
There are open source alternatives to Google photos, a good example which uses material 3 (you) is fossify photos
Yeah I use aves, it is much nicer then Google photos, but photos has a locked folder so I use it occasionally
😏
I tried to install aves but as I opened it, it told me “this app doesn’t support the latest Android version” or something, so I just uninstalled. 🫤
You must have installed it from the wrong place, you can get the latest versions from fdroid.
Huh.
I installed “aves” from Droid-ify. That’s the one that I described.
When searching for aves through F-droid Basic, I got only the Aves Libre as a result. Installing that and opening it doesn’t result in any Android version warning. 👍
Thanks!
fossify photos
Yeah, forgot the name
Do they use backed up photos to train Gemini? Could be they do and hence need all the user photos they can get their hands on.
Google also has an app called just Gallery which didn’ty pull this crap.
I was surprised to find ads in my phone and realized it’s shitty google again… Of course.
You can go into notification settings and turn off all notifications for this app, and problem solved.
Ran into this asshole the other day, got me because I needed to show someone a contact card for them to scan. Fucking google.
