Remember When Google Photos Was Introduced — With Fanfare?
Don’t trust the big boys with your most important data, your own photographs!
Don’t trust the big boys with your most important data: your own photographs!
I remember because I bought Google’s proposition hook, line and sinker. Central storage of all photos; fast search using terms like names, objects, and geo-location; facial recognition that would group photos of the same person; and it was Google! Google invented search and is the technical champion of internet and web-based interfaces that work!
In part, I bought the proposition because I was so pissed off at Apple. If you used Apple iPhotos (now just Photos), you will know what I mean. At least half of my photos in Photos are duplicates, created because Apple couldn’t master synchronizing between devices (when Apple started managing photos, there was no concept of fast, cheap internet storage), and couldn’t even identify exact duplicates to manage the most obvious mistakes. Then there are the duplicates where Apple itself changed the metadata; it’s bad enough that it couldn’t identify exact duplicates, so you can imagine how bad it was at recognizing changes it had itself made to the photos, either the photo itself or its metadata!
The ultimate insult, though was when Apple managed to lose about nine months worth of my photos! Completely gone. A hole in the photographic record of my life. If you manage people’s photographs, the worst thing you can do is lose them!
That was the context for when I decided to switch to Google Photos. And I did switch. I really wanted to stop using Apple Photos (of course Apple doesn’t let you stop using their apps; they just know better than you and make you use Messages, Photos, Mail, etc., even though they are often the worst performing, most memory-intensive apps on the Macintosh! (But that’s a different rant for another post.) So Apple kept synchronizing my photos anyway.
Since I did adopt Google Photos, I started out happy. It was fast. It was fun to see how many and how easily it identified people in my photos. The object and geo search did actually help me find photos. (Oh, did I mention that the biggest fail in Apple Photos was trying to find that one photo I remembered: I have wasted an hour or more trying to find that one photo, more than once, without success. Google did a better job, much better, and it was kind of fun! (Fun is better than frustrating, I think.)
Read this PC Magazine review of Google Photos to get a sense of what expectations people had for the application, after it was first introduced. This is the IOS app being reviewed by PC Magazine, so it should be pretty reliable. Also note that Google decided to only offer “unlimited” free storage for low-resolution versions of your photos, which means they would be storing low-res photos online, and I would have to keep the high-resolution photos on my computer, which leads to, yes!, synchronization. I never chose that option because I didn’t have enough photos to exceed the storage plan I had, which I had paid to upgrade. I also didn’t think that Google is any better at synchronizing data than Apple is. (Indeed, synchronizing data across systems in real time is a database problem that has been confounding the world’s best geeks for decades, even since the relational database was invented 50+ years ago and established the principle of two-phase commit, wherein the software makes doubly sure that a piece of data has actually been copied, but also slows down performance so much that many high-speed alternatives have since been designed.)
My happiness didn’t last long. Google had its own issues with duplicates, mainly because it had different storage locations for photos that came from different sources. They stored photos from Google+ (isn’t that what their failed social app was called?) as files in Google Drive. But this was not obvious when you started using Google Photos. And because their engineers tend to think they know more than their users, they decided they didn’t need to help users eliminate duplicates since they were all stored on servers and wouldn’t have the problem of synchronizing between devices like Apple; instead you just open your browser and see all the photos stored in one place. Except they weren’t stored in one place, and if you moved the Google Drive photos to Google Photos, they would be duplicated.
When Google fixed this problem last year, they promoted it as a feature! You wonder why it took them four years to figure out that it was actually a design problem that made it much harder for users to actually use Google Photos. Refer back to my claim about how Google manages products; that blog post is written jointly the product managers of Google Drive and Google Photos; do you think maybe they were more focused on the technical features and engineering of their own products rather than how they fit together on behalf of the user?
Anyway, when I imported all of my photos from Apple Photos, of course, all the duplicates were also imported, and Google didn’t offer a way to manage that problem. (In case you’re wondering there are several third-party apps designed to eliminate duplicates in Apple Photos; I did try all of them and did reduce the exact duplicates, but was not able to eliminate them, much less deal with the not-exact duplicates, so I gave up well before I made the move to Google Photos.) The two sets of duplicated photos meant that I now had about 80,000 photos in my Google Photos database, of which likely ~30–40,000 were duplicates! Even so, my photos at high resolution were “only” 1 terabyte, and I was paying for a 2-terabyte storage plan. So it didn’t really make a difference unless I was on a slow internet connection, in which case searches for anything might take 60 seconds or more to return results. Not so fast anymore.
Worse, far worse: Google already has a terrible track record of managing products, and they did the absolute worst job (IMHO) on Google Photos. The search is now SO slow that, even on a relative fast internet connection, like mine, the app has slowed to a crawl. (I keep thinking that maybe Google favors Android devices, but we’re talking about how fast the application is in returning results, which should be the same for any one internet connection.)
Net net, I stopped using Google Photos last fall. That meant that I turned off Google’s nifty little tool for copying Apple Photos from the Macintosh to Google Photos. And now, I want to take control over my photos database; Google has photos that Apple Photos doesn’t have. (Apple hasn’t felt compelled to build a nifty little tool to synchronize photos that Apple doesn’t manage! Go figure.)
Google offers a way to download (it is explicitly NOT called Export!) all of your data from any app. But whoever designed this facility must have been an intern with no experience or authority to actually make it useable.
Apparently Google can’t download more than 2GB at a time, in a zip file. I had to download 121 separate zip files to my computer. There was no way to click once and have all 121 zip files download, so I had to click on the “Download” button for each file. I discovered about a third of the way through that that button didn’t change right away to acknowledge that it had been pressed, so I downloaded two copies of about 40 of the zip files. And every time you click on a download file, the UI takes you back to #1, can’t keep track of what has already been downloaded and you have to scroll back to the one after the one you just downloaded. Yesterday, I spent ~6 hours starting at this stupid interface and clicked on about 160 files (even though I only needed 121).
When you open the zip file, you see hundreds of JPG and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) files. JPG is the actual photo, but lords know what the JSON file is and how it knows how to modify any one JPG file. How do I recombine the JPG and JSON files in a way that will at least preserve the photo database I got from Google Photos? I have a feeling that I’m going to have to figure that out on my own.
My original theory is that I would also export (not download!) all my Apple Photos and then find a way to combine both sets of photos, remove the duplicates and manage the database into a relatively compact set of resolution photos that I could import into a new Apple Photos database and go forward happy and fulfilled by my photographs!
But I am suspicious. I think this is where product management largely fails in any company. The product managers themselves live in a world of their own company’s products, technology and infrastructure. They become so immersed in their own environment, they have no concept of what their customers have to deal with living between these environments. I use Microsoft apps on my Macintosh, Google apps on all of my devices, Apple apps on my Apple devices, and so on: But none of those companies take responsibility for my experience using their apps with other companies’ apps or infrastructure. Now, given my thesis, I have no idea how to integrate all these files into a single database that can consolidate all of my photos from the past 10+ years without corrupting the files, creating more duplicates and otherwise being disrespectful of the fact that these are MY photos and not the property of the company helping me mange them!
I don’t trust Adobe, SmugMug, Flickr, even Amazon (which introduced Amazon Photos last year by promising to store all your photos, regardless of resolution, for free forever). Does anyone know where can turn to for help?