The Risks of Google Photos | How to reorganize your life – Player.it

Google Photos (or Photos) is a very powerful and super convenient tool for storing and organizing your photos and videos. However, it is important to be aware of the risks associated with using the service.

A 10-year journey in Google Photos | what do you learn

Every year, more than a billion people use the Google Photos app to upload and store billions of files. For many the process is probably identical: you take some photos with your phone and they are automatically uploaded to Google’s cloud service. You can choose the best photo and share it on WhatsApp or Instagram, and then forget about the others. Photos join a constantly updated stream of data about one’s life, but digitally.

But let’s be clear: it shouldn’t be like that. Uploading thousands of photos and not taking steps to sort or manage them creates a number of privacy risks and makes it impossible to keep your photo collection usable and easily accessible in the future.
It’s time to stop being hoarders of personal information, you have to realize that before things get out of control

Over the past six weeks, I’ve spent a dozen hours deleting thousands of photos that had been uploaded to my Google Photos account over the past 8 years. In totalI deleted 26,774 photos and 1200 videos.

During the process (and the thousands of clicks on “delete”) three factors emerged:

• My photo collection unknowingly includes a lot of sensitive personal information (both about me and about others);
• I don’t need to keep so many photos, especially duplicates;
• managing my collection takes a huge space in terms of GB;

The enormity of your archive – you risk drowning

My photographic archive dates back to the early 2000s, when everything was captured with my first reflex camera. There are tens of thousands of photos – it’s impossible to say exactly how many – and are entirely managed by Google.
The photos were initially stored on CD then moved to Flickr before it limited collections to 1,000 images and finally landed on Google Photos around 2017.
I still remember when Google limited accounts to 15 gigabytes of storage, I started paying for more.

Within the collection, family vacation snaps sit alongside my selfies or photos with friends. Food and dog photos are plentiful, and let’s face it: what do I do with a photo of a 2014 tiramisu?.
As phone cameras have gotten better (like my samsung s20 or old p20pro) and cloud storage has become seemingly endless, it seems like I take more pictures every year, and I’m not the only one.

Think about it for a moment: Google Photos contains an unfathomable amount of data about all of us: In 2020, the company said it had memorized 4 trillion photos, with 28 billion new photos and videos uploaded every week.

Deleting thousands of photos is a manual and tedious process. Using a Galaxy Tab, I scrolled through all the photos I’d backed up in the last 15 years and tapped the ones I wanted to send to the trash. In one of the longest sessions, I deleted 1600 photos in 45 minutes. Most of the trashed photos were duplicates: instead of having 16 photos of me running along the Giulianova seafront, only the two or three best ones remained, perhaps the ones where I fall face down in the sand.

Not counting the thousands of screenshots that have been deleted, I’ve literally deleted over 6000 useless screenshots of things to show friends or “this will come in handy” – spoiler: never came in handy –

Storage space is not that infinite

Also, from a practical point of view, there is now more space in my Google account. Before starting to delete everything, I had used about 131GB of storage space; I’m now down to about 45GB.

It’s not known to everyone, but Google offers some tools that help manage photos. You can archive photos if you don’t want to delete them or keep them in your main photo library.
For example: photos can be divided into albums (it was too late for me, I spent a month filing).
Or keep in mind that storage management tools allow you to bulk delete photos and large videos and get rid of blurry screenshots and photos.
You can also free up some space on your account by reducing the size of your photos with “save quality”, especially for the photos that do not interest us much but “they have to stay there”.

In short: a summary of how to organize your photos

• Use the organization features: Google Photos offers several options for organizing your photos, such as “collections” and “albums”. Use these features to categorize your photos and make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
• Sync only the photos that are important: Google Photos offers an automatic sync of photos, but this can lead to an accumulation of useless photos. Manually choose which photos to sync to avoid filling your account with low-quality or unimportant photos.
• Use the labels to make it easier to find: Google Photos uses artificial intelligence to recognize the objects and people in your photos and to provide automatic labels. Use these tags to easily find the photos you’re looking for.
• Turn on photo backup: Once you log into the app, you can turn on photo backup from settings. You can choose to sync all photos or just specific folders. Furthermore, it is possible to choose the quality of the photos to be uploaded (high quality or space saving).
• Set up two-factor authentication, so you can keep your archive safe in case of mistakenly saving sensitive data in your account

Rearranging a life of memories taken with the mobile phone was a thrill strong, I retraced moments of life that I wanted to remember and some that I wanted to forget; the thing that left me most stunned, however, is the immense amount of Screenshots I had in my account.

My dispassionate advice is to start immediately to reorganize and insert a monthly archiving routine, such as “archive Monday” where you move your most important memories into folders; don’t be disorganized like me!

The Google photo app is pre-installed on all android devices but can be downloaded here for PC, Android and iOS.