Why rely on google photos in the first place? If you are taking photos with android devices, you can backup the device folder containing the photos/videos.
Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.
There’s a subset of users who click the takeout button, get the message saying we’ll email you in a bit and then... nothing. If you’re affected it’s not possible to get help from Google according to Mike Elgin.
I did a full export (circa 8Gb) around 18 months ago and i have around 1,000 pictures of someone else’s in my archives. I suppose other people have some of my pictures too.
It’s just under 1,000 photos of various landscapes but they’re not landscapes i’ve seen IRL and the smoking gun is the EXIF data shows they were taken on a Canon camera. I’ve only ever had Nikon or Fuji.
There’s a bunch of other small things that initially roused my suspicions that these weren’t my photos:
Whoever took the photos kept all the photos they took, there are sequences of 50+ photos of the exact same thing, I never save the extra shots, i always just choose the one i want to keep and discard the rest at import time.
It’s possible they were shared photos but my gut feeling is no. The photos date from around the time i was a heavy user of google photos, well i was a heavy user of picasa anyway and used gphotos as a backup. I would definitely have spotted these photos if they were in my collection back then.
It's simple to use and cheap. It's like comparing Dropbox and a FTP server.
Also Google Photos has a nice search feature with machine learning behind. I can search things such as "beach name of family member or "classic car" and it works.
It cannot distinguish between two black dogs (different breeds, different sizes) so if I want to filter for pictures of only one of the dogs I’m out of luck.
Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.