Cover photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash.

Last week, the long goodbye finally came to an end and I finally achieved a long-held ambition: I said goodbye to Google Photos.

After nearly a decade of use and incrementally increasing costs, the annual subscription expired, and I was free.

Or so I thought, but the tech giant didn't go down without a fight.

How it started

I take a lot of photos on my phone. I also take a screenshots regularly and occasionally download images from online. The end result: 21,000 images, and a phone that wasn't made to withstand that amount of dead weight.

Luckily for the me of 10 years ago, Google had an answer in the form of Google Photos. For a small monthly fee my images could be backed up to the cloud, and they'd be safe in the event that I ever lost my phone. Sounds perfect, right? But there's more.

The dark side

Google Photos isn't just cloud storage for your phone. Once you enable backups, the app has 24/7 access to every image or video on your phone, and every single one of those images is going to be automatically scanned and categorized by Google's internal systems.

Handy if you want to quickly find back the photos you took on Crete 3 years ago, but less handy if you don't want Google's AI to use images of you and your loved ones as training data to create AI-generated images of you (source: Forbes).

Time to get out

I meant to part ways with Google Photos at this time last year, but I wasn't sure I'd properly migrated all of my images to my new (European) provider, and I didn't want to risk losing them, so I caved and let it roll over for another year.

But this year I was ready, the renewal was switched off months in advance, and last week my subscription expired, and the nightmare began.

The agony of saying goodbye

Once my subscription expired, I got an email from Google saying I was massively over the free storage they off, and that i needed to free up storage or resubscribe, else I would stop receiving emails to my ancient Gmail account.

I still get an occasional email there, so I set about deleting my photos from Google Photos en masse, one month of images at a time.

Did you know that deleting an image from Google Photos also deletes it from your phone's gallery automatically while Google still has a backup of your images saved? I didn't, but I figured it out pretty fast, and it turns out there's no simple way of stopping it. Once you give Google access, it doesn't go quietly.

Cutting off the head of the beast

The only way (or at least the only way I know) to stop Google deleting the images off of your Android phone, is to remove the permission for the app to access your gallery. Once you've done that, though, you can no longer access Google Photos without giving the permission back.

But my photos were still on Google photos, so I was still over my storage limit and still in danger of no longer receiving emails, and there was no way around it except by giving back the permission to delete the photos from my phone too.

Weird, huh?

The long road

The solution, as it turns out, was to access Google Photos via an incognito browser window on my phone, and from there I could delete the backup it had made from my phone. Which still left me over the storage limit, because it still had photos from old devices on it, which I could only delete one day's worth of photos at a time.

I was very grateful for those days on holiday where I'd taken hundreds of photos in one day.

€1.99 per month less for big tech

Despite the aggravation, and despite Google's daily emails telling me that I would lose everything if I didn't see the error of my ways and start giving them money again, it's done.

One more big tech demon exorcized from my life and from my bank account.

Photo by Heather Newsom on Unsplash.