Google Photos is said to be one of the best cloud storage to save photos and videos. This helps you free up GBs of storage from your phone and keeping your photos safe, at least we think it does! Google is everywhere and whether you search an image or navigate to find a location, there is a Google app or service for almost everything whether it is Google Maps, Google Photos, YouTube, Google Play Store, or the Google search engine.
In this post, we will talk about one of the famous photo storage apps, Google Photos, which claims to be the safest way to save your photos and make them accessible anywhere you want, but is it really?
Is Google Photos Worth It?
With 1 billion user base combining the website and app, Google Photos has become quite popular and prominent choice to save your photos in the cloud. Whether it is an iPhone, Android or Windows, you can use the app or access photos using the website.
With the habit of clicking photos everywhere we go, we click thousands of photos and capture our moments as videos and save it on our phones. No matter how many GBs storage phone you have, it gets full, resulting in the slow performing phone. Therefore, users look for an option to keep their photos accessible, yet not acquiring space on your phone
With unlimited storage and seamless interface, Google Photos is indeed a great option. On second thoughts, given the history and immense capabilities Google possess, do you think, is it safe to hand over your private moments with Google? Or is it just a facade? Within four years of Google Photos’ inception, most of the users, irrespective of OS, use Google Photos.
Sure, with machine learning, you can search through your photos with ease but are you willing to pay the price? Well, never forget, if you are not paying for something, then you are the product, as nothing comes for free.
Google earns its major part of its income from advertising. It accumulates data and sifts through in all ways possible with the main objective is target ads accurately. Moreover, your images are helping to train and enhance algorithms. Using ML, Your Photos can tell about the places you visit, people you have been with, isn’t it a privacy breach? The more information it collects on your, the more money it can make from ads it sells
These free services are not so free after all, sure there are costing you a penny, but have you given it a thought, providing these services, they have your search history, email and with Google Photos, you photos collected and sold for some of their advertising benefits.
We have already discussed how invasive Google is with access to our photos, we are giving a chance to create a backdoor to know all about us, where we travel, people we meet, family and friends and more. Isn’t it dangerous?
With access to photos, Google learns more about you, shows you ads relevant to you, which seems harmless in a way but what about personal privacy. The information stored can be stolen or leaked. These tech giants can share data without our permission, Government agencies can pry, anything can happen.
It All Comes Down To One Question- Do You Trust Google?
If you have no issues with Google services and using Google Maps, search engine, YouTube collecting data, Google Photos works the same. Some think that giving access to their personal information, browsing habits is an ok price to pay when it comes to using quality service of Google. However, some think otherwise.
The question arises: Do we need to access our photos all the time? Can we not conventionally store them or use some other data storage option?
Answer: Yes, we can. We can store our photos and videos on external hard drives or PCs. Another alternative could be secure cloud storage such as Right Backup which is a dedicated platform to keep your data secured with Amazon trusted services using multiple layers of protection.
Organizing Photos
So, till now you must have decided whether you want to keep your photos locally (external drive or PC) or on the cloud. Let’s know how to keep them organized. We keep tons of photos such as selfies, screenshots, group pictures and other images on our device, therefore sorting them manually could not be an option. Moreover, no matter how popular app, Google Photos is, it doesn’t help us when we have unorganized photo collection.
That’s when you need Systweak’s Photo Organizer for Windows to keep your collection of photos neat and organized. It is a one-stop solution to help you optimize and manage all photos on your computer in a few clicks.
It enables you to do a lot more:
- Scans a folder or entire PC to locate image files.
- Sort images in subfolders based on time, the date, when the image was captured, and camera model.
- Rename photos in a batch.
- Remove duplicate photos.
- Exclude specific photos and folders from being scanned.
Once organized, you can either keep your photos in your PC or export them to an external hard drive.
So, this is the way to store your photos and keep them secured. We know, the world is moving forward with technology, people and businesses are switching to cloud to keep their data, and we are suggesting you go conventional.
Well, it is a nice way to stay out of the clutches of Google, we are not saying it is not safe, undoubtedly Google is good when it comes to privacy, but is it good enough? What do you think? Will you use Google Photos or go conventional and saves images on your hard disk instead? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.