Joe Maring / Android Authority
I’ve never really forgiven Google for the bait-and-switch it pulled when ending unlimited Google Photos storage and forcing many of us to subscribe to Google One after becoming reliant on the app under its previous promises.
But years later, it’s the fact that there’s no option to opt out of AI model training that has made me even more frustrated. Not only does this encroach on the privacy of our data, but we’re essentially paying to have our images and videos used to train models which the company further profits from.
It’s what drove me to try out Immich, a Google Photos alternative, earlier this year. But as impressed as I am with the open-source, self-hosted option; there are Google Photos features that make parting ways with the app feel daunting.
What is your favorite Google Photos feature? 14 votes Memories. 14 % Face and pet recognition. 43 % Automatic albums. 21 % Cross-device syncing. 21 % Something else (let us know in the comments!). 0 %
1. The ability to recognize individual pets
Megan Ellis / Android Authority
Immich has a decent machine learning algorithm that can recognize objects, animals, and even the faces of people. But it isn’t able to identify different pets, which Google Photos can do.
Of the tens of thousands of pictures I have in Google Photos, the majority, at least nowadays, are of my pets. As they both get older, I want to capture as many memories of them as possible. It’s one of the reasons I now care about smartphone camera specs.
In Immich, one of my workarounds was using searches for terms like “black cat” and “white cat” to find pictures of my cats BV and Loxi. However, these results aren’t always that accurate, sometimes bringing up other animals.
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