These days, I’ve been helping someone from my family with an IT issue. She has two paid Google One accounts because of Google Photos usage. The plan was to merge the account A Photos library into account B to stop paying for one of the accounts. Why did she end up in that situation in the first place? At some point in the past she changed phones and she logged in to her Google One accounts in the wrong order but she didn’t notice she could no longer see her old photos, a detail that will become relevant later.

The first issue with the plan to merge the accounts was that she was paying for one of the Google accounts via an Apple subscription and the associated CC had become outdated. The other Google account was paid for through a direct Google subscription, and on top of that, she has a paid iCloud storage. If there was a god, you shouldn’t have to try to explain to someone non-tech-savvy that this email you’re receiving from Apple about a “Gmail subscription” (no indication of which) is about one of your Google accounts, and that not doing anything about it means you will stop receiving important emails from banks, etc. There may still be a god because it could be worse and you could lose emails and photos after the subscription expires but, according to the fine print, Google doesn’t delete excess data.

Actually, no, a benevolent god wouldn’t let this happen. Every time I look for the “Google Photos” app I’m still confused about the right icon and I know there’s a difference between the two apps.

Anyways, we updated the Apple payment details. I tried to confirm that it was all good but Apple gives you no indication of when or if they will attempt to renew a subscription again. Hope isn’t a strategy but I thought about contacting Apple support or Apple forums and I shuddered.

The next step was merging the two Google Photos libraries. We tried the two methods I found online: shared albums and partner-sharing, but neither worked. Deleting a picture from the source library deletes it from the destination library. Maybe I’m doing something wrong because this feature doesn’t make much sense to me as it stands, or maybe the docs are outdated. I thought about giving page feedback to Apple but thought this would be useless, I’ve done that many times in the past with no results.

Ok, let’s drop this approach. Let’s just do a backup of library A and import it into library B.

Google told us that library A was taking 24GB of storage. Ok, that’s a lot of photos but we have space for them in library B. We then create a backup of library A in Google Takeout. A few hours later we get an email. open the Google Takeout page and instead of the seven 4GB files I expected to download, I see… 113 files. Wtf? How can a backup of 24GB take 450GB?

After some sleuthing, I remembered that Google Photos offered unlimited storage until 2021. Thank you, Google, or was it an attempt to increase switching costs? No, it’s Christmas, my cynical hat is off. Thank you, Google. Still, you could have added a very simple indicator to the storage bar to hint that the actual usage was 18x larger than what was shown…

Ok, I’m an engineer, I have solved thousands of problems so far, I can solve this.

Next question: how exactly has this non-tech-savvy non-pro-photographer person have accumulated 450GB of photos over a roughly 8 years period? 450GB at 2MB per picture is 225,000 pictures. She’s liberal with the shutter but that’s too much.

After more digging in Google Photos it turns out she had more than a hundred older movies and TV series uploaded in to Google Photos in the early 2010s. She must have had Google Drive Desktop installed and configured to scan her Downloads folder. Thank you Google for being so accommodating with storage usage, but I would have asked for confirmation before uploading such large video files.

After cleaning all that space and also cleaning unwanted pictures we got the usage below the free tier limit so she could cancel the Google One subscription. However after talking with her, it was clear she actually has no use for Google Photos other than seeing pictures from the last month or two because she prefers to use the computer to browse older photos. Great! We now have a medium-term plan, which includes automated backups, to drop her Google Photos dependency for long-term storage and reduce her risk of losing valuable pictures and emails because of an overly simplistic SaaS layer.

If you don’t care about certain data, delete it, otherwise it’s taking precious time from your life. And if you do care about the data, keep things as simple as possible, which very frequently means sticking to folders, text files, and spreadsheets, which is the closest you can be from how you would store a physical photo album. If you pay someone else to manage your data for you, you’re very frequently one credit card expiration away from losing your data, an event that is guaranteed to happen periodically, or one hacker away.

Connections

• The dangers of our energy conservation bias: every time you seek comfort and energy saving services, compare the risks of the various alternatives and fight against hyperbolic discounting. Two euros per month may look cheap and make you believe it’s fine to not clean photos and store everything, but if your account gets wrongly terminated, your accout gets hacked, or Google decides to turn Google Photos down, and you haven’t used Google Takeout ever, you might be in for a surprise.
• Constraints are liberating: unlimited storage offers the promise of “I can keep all my data and not worry about separatig signal vs noise” but what happens when you do that is that you can’t find what’s valuable anymore and you don’t exercise your mental muscle to decide what matters to you. When you have tens of thousands of pictures, it’s like having no pictures.
• Fragility of centralized systems: Over the last couple of years I’ve been moving away as much away from cloud services as I could. I don’t have data that will have value for humanity beyond my death, but while I’m still around, I prefer to own it and not rely on credit card networks, the banking system, and people who don’t really care about it.
• Attack surface: the more services you depend on, the more vulnerable you are (CC theft, disruptions.)