Google Photos comes preinstalled on modern Android, and (like with Edge etc) this seems to be enough reasons to just use it. As Google bloats stock Android to an extreme Extent, this should not be normal, but the state today poorly is, that a lot of people use a Photos app that analyzes faces, metadata, content and more.

Google Photos, as well as the other Google bloat, is just horrible for privacy, and as face-recognition got so good, its power to track you and analyze your most intimate pictures should immediately shock everyone… but it seems it doesnt.

As Photos are one of the most sensitive data, I will focus on “Google Photos”.

so how can we exchange it?

First: The app is installed as a “system app”, having more permissions as well as being uninstallable. Yes, thats insane, but thats Google. You can only deactivate it in the settings, even ADB (android debug bridge, using a second Phone with “ADB OTG” or a laptop) cant delete it fully, but thats not a problem, as apps in the system partition dont take up place you could otherwise use.

1. Download everything

Many people dont even have their data on their own devices, but stored in a cloud. As unlimited Google drive costs very little, this is motivated by Google of course.

To go on, you have to have physical access to your own photos, and this will be the case in the future. So you may need to buy an external SATA SSD, bigger micro-SD card or USB-Stick, to have all your photos offline. You can reuse a SSD or HDD from your Laptop / PC using a specific case, PC HDDs need an extra power supply for turning the disk.

You have to use the browser to download the photos, as the app is made to track you. The function is called “Google Takeout”.

2. Delete what you have offline and log out

In the Google settings there are some general Tracking data you can delete, like your History, Location history (every place you have been is stored on Googles servers…) and more. Use that, although it may not do anything, but as its opt-out and not opt-in, many tech-illiterate People dont even do it so it can actually do something without immediately eliminating Googles business.

After that, delete all your Drive data, you already have it offline. I will list some Drive alternatives, so dont worry.

If you also plan to log out from Google completely, you will have to have your contacts accessable. You can download them as a .vcf file (regular and handy format) from the google contacts website. These can be imported and exported using Simple Contacs, and stored whereever you want, not depending on googles servers. (But you wont mysterically have all your contacts on a new phone, obviously)

3. Replacement apps

Gallery

I recommend Simple Gallery Pro or any other FOSS apps from F-Droid.

It has every function a gallery needs, apart from face-filtering, location filtering etc.

There are also some other good looking ones, like Stingle Photos, Photo Chiotte, Camera Roll,… Look for some with recent updates and no anti-features and see what suits your taste best!

Sync

Google Photos has the ability to have a lot of photos online and not even on your phone. In my experience this can provoke bad usage, cluttering of double images, not deleting them at all etc. All the sync alternatives will need you to have the Images on all devices you want them to be.

Syncthing

• Best choice if you want images just be there on multiple devices
• FOSS apps for all platforms
• You can select folders to sync
• QR-Code for connecting devices
• Device-to-Device, no costs, no servers, noone to trust
• configurable sync-type for every folder

Nextcloud

• Open source Sync protocol
• Sync to server (own or paid)
• FOSS apps for all Platforms

There are also providers like ente.io, Mega.nz, Disroot, Alternative-to has an awesome collection of services with user ratings (their site is awesome for replacing bad services and apps!).

I always prefer Syncthing, as you dont have to pay and/or trust other people to handle your data.

In many cases you pay and get tracked and analyzed, which is totally insane. But Googles low prices have to come from something, dont wonder, you will pay more for alternative Cloud-Providers.

Image editing

Simple Gallery Pro from Playstore has its own image editor, but you can use an external one, Simple Gallery Pro from FDroid doesnt have the Editor, as it isnt FOSS.

SnapSeed was the best image Editor for Android I could find, Ad-Free, unpaid etc. It is made by Google, so it is a tracking risk, especially if its not the only Google app on your phone, if you have Play services for example

There are ways to deal with software you dont trust, the easiest one is just deactivating Internet, so even if it tracks you, it cant send out the data to Googles servers, this can be done without root using NetGuard. With root you can use Warden to deactivate Trackers, with LineageOS you can deactivate the internet without NetGuard.

AI-powered automatic sorting etc.

I dont think this is really nessecary. You should have a rough overview over the photos on your device, but if you really just want to use AI-filtering, tagging and face-recogonition for increased efficiency there are a few projects you can try out.

• Ownphotos (Github page) includes Face-Filtering, Location tagging, map view etc. It is in early development and self hosted.
• Piwigo (Github Site) is a Gallery program for the web, can run on your own server, so targeted toward advanced users
• PhotoPrism, Open Source, Self-Hosted or bought. It is in early stages of development though.

So concluding, it seems as there is no alternative for Google Photos intense analytics and metadata use, that is also easy to use without technical knowledge, yet…

If you want to use something like that and its a reason to switch back go Google Photos, keep in mind that you will let an Ad Company run AIs on your private photos. So letting go of the many comforts Google offers is nessecary.

Camera app

I recommend OpenCamera for anyone, it has a huge amount of features, is available from FDroid, their site and the PlayStore (AuroraStore of course).

OpenCamera also has some important privacy features like disabling location metadata.

You should keep the Google Camera (with internet tutned off) for following reasons

• support for specific camera setups
• zoom lenses etc
• some apps need it on Android 11 and higher, if they dont have their own camera API

Metadata is bundled with images and can leak private data where you dont want it to be. There are many apps to remove Metadata (EXIF data) from photos, I use Scrambled Exif.

if you want to keep Google Photos…

There are many reasons why you could choose Google photos.

• the cheap cloud prices because of googles huge monopole and extra money through targeted ads
• image editing may have advantages and better compatibility with GCam
• integrated into the seemingly perfect Google ecosystem
• you need AIs to filter your photos, because you have too many of them

Sorry to be a bit rude here, but there are important things and unimportant ones. Even if you dont care about your privacy (which I dont really think you do), every person you have photos of will get analyzed by Googles AIs…

So to prevent that, you can toggle all internet access of the app and use it in your Android work profile, which can be set up using the app “Shelter”, available on FDroid. Now the app only sees the photos you send to it through the share-dialogue.

Without internet, you can only use the App as a Gallery, no image editing. So its basically useless.

(Does Google photos work with the share dialogue? Otherwise an easy solution is the Fdroid app “Save to…”, which allows saving images using the share dialogue. Install it in the work profile and you can copy images easily.)

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Anything missing? Any good service I have forgotten? I just use Simple Gallery and Syncthing for everything, no extras, so my experiences are limited.

this post was mirrored from my Reddit account