Mira
Fesshole 🧻Got an email from Google that my storage space was 91% full and I should buy more for £5 a month. Spent the last week deleting 10 years of emails, files & attachments. I've now got tennis elbow, my right thumb is agony but down to 7% storage space used - I have defeated Google
Edinburgh Man@fesshole Now you're not taking advantage of all that free storage. You were winning at 91%
Snaprails@edinburgh_man
I keep my old Pixel 3A going, without a SIM or anything in it, simply because the lifetime free photo backup, which doesn't count towards your storage allowance, still works. It works for any photos I copy to it whether from my Pixel 7, digital camera, whatever.
I keep my old Pixel 3A going, without a SIM or anything in it, simply because the lifetime free photo backup, which doesn't count towards your storage allowance, still works. It works for any photos I copy to it whether from my Pixel 7, digital camera, whatever.
@snaprails I had that on my Pixel 2 XL but it's dead now. I've since mostly dumped Google and requested a takeout of Google Photos... It emailed me links to 6x50GB downloads 😮
Gavin@edinburgh_man @snaprails keep that up fairly regularly - one day it may start to fail, and you're boned. I've lost all trust in Takeout after some previous failures, so I moved all my photos to be self-hosted.
I'm currently on my third attempt of getting a <5GB Takeout archive of everything else, and thanking every fictional deity that I managed to get my irreplaceable photos out in their original form BEFORE it started crapping out consistently.
Rclone+Photos API loses EXIF data so no bueno
@_calmdowndear @snaprails Yep. All my photos are now on a self hosted Immich server (plus Nextcloud) and rcloned to an encrypted remote cloud storage.
chellomere@_calmdowndear @edinburgh_man @snaprails well, and since March 31 this year Google deprecated the photos API, so now Google takeout is the only option to get your photos. See for example https://share.google/6RUQXmaRk0TcvPXTL which is about gphotos-sync being affected by this, and it also affects rclone.
I've migrated to self-hosted Immich because of this, to get control of my data and not have it held hostage by a corporation.
@chellomere @edinburgh_man @snaprails cool, I didn't realise the Photos API was dead now; I just knew it was broken for the last....14 years? I guess it was deliberate all along.
I also moved to Immich and am (so far) pretty happy. It's a little quirky at times, but nothing I can't live with and I did my part by buying a license to give some incentives for continued improvements.
xinit ☕@edinburgh_man
I go through phases of editing my Google Photos down, removing redundant or useless photos.
I've tried working with the larger set of files, that my full Photos account has but there's so much garbage in there. The "effects" photos like animations and collages. I need to turn all that off. I wish I could have them send only the original photos. That would save some time.
Matthijs
jack@fesshole I'm at 97%... I've turned off cloud backup and use fastmail for all but my most legacy emails, and whenever I open the photo library on my phone it opens a dialog box with backups turned on again and a stern warning about switching it off. and also weekly push notifications alerting me I'm at 97%
would much rather pay fastmail for email than give a cent to Google
Richard Barrell
Keev
Orb 2069The point of the £5 is to frogboil you into paying, and paying monthly. Once they've got you on that, they'll start finding out just how much more they can get out of you.
Ultimately, the data is useful insofar as it helps them figure out how much you, and everybody else, can be forced to pay, and what you'll pay for. They haven't been giving away a phone operating system all this time as charity.
Even flogging your data off to a fascist regime is just extracting money.
Carlos SolísIt was much cheaper in the long run to go get my own home server with 2 TB storage, than it was to keep renting a server for storage in the first place.
arrakeen_urbanite@fesshole Stop giving them the ability to look at your email messages in order to better defeat them. A few $ a month to a privacy-respectin provider like fastmail is money well spent.
⁉️
lupus_blackfur"I have defeated Google"...
No. Not yet.
To do so requires divesting oneself of all things and services provided by Google...
A quest I've been perfecting for a couple of years now.
Not so hard once you commit.
🤷♂️🤷♂️
aardvark
WTL