Looking to de-google, any way to contain google photos?

Hardware Hub Phones, Tablets, & Wearables
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Looking at tossing graphene on my pixel and shuttering my personal gmail account.

I do use an unlimited google photos account through my old university to quickly backup photo and video, almost all of which is of my kiddo. Its a lifetime account so works decently.

If I do not put google photos or restrict network access I can pull the photo folder over with nextcloud to my server and create a encrypted duplicati backup to the google drive pretty easily.

I guess the question is, do I have to do this? I’m not necessarily concerned with sensitivity of any photo or video I’m pulling from my camera, but is lockdown of photos completely necessary? I’m guessing it is, just don’t see much of this online and its one of the last pieces to figure out before I jump.

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I I understand you correctly, you’re trying to:

  • Take Photos with your phone
  • Sync them using nextcloud
  • Back them up to Google Drive w/ Encryption

to be able to take advantage of unlimited cloud backup while preserving your privacy.

This strongly depends on how much you value your privacy - and the privacy of those around you.

While I don’t think I can neccessarily answer that question for you, I’ll tell you what I think:

  • Corporations have repeatedly shown that they are willing to do anything to maximize profit
  • Governments around the World are using digital information to their advantage and even if you trust your country’s political system to rule out blunt and public abuse to the extent that it would be a problem for you, this can easily change in the future

Considering that you seem to know what you’re talking about, it should not be too much work, so why not just do it to be safe if you’re inconclusive about it?

BTW… I recommend using OpenCamera from F-Droid, it’s currently much superior over GrapheneOS’s integrated Camera App.

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Not sure if this would help, but to reduce the amount of data google can harvest from my phone, I use a combination of shelter and private Aurora store session to seperate my personal browsing from google

Aurora gives me access to the google play store, and shelter allows me to make a sandbox that prevents the apps from reading data outside. If you want google photos to sync, you’ll probably want to have the photos go to the directory of the shelter profile

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Thanks! Been using 9folders for work email and sandbox but this lets me one up that!

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Thanks guys, shelter night be perfect but if not my original solution should work too.

I’m not so much hesitant, just workshopping any hiccups along the way.

Changing emails will be kinda easy and give me a good reason to scrub bitwarden. Will probably let two thirds of my logins just vanish.

Will also give open camera a shot.

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I just picked up a pixel and flashed GrapheneOS. The built in camera seems to be lacking a some features: eg slow motion (or I couldn’t find the setting?).

Open Camera is an option and seems to have more tweaking, but the slow mo / high rate capture was producing corrupted videos I couldn’t watch for some reason, your mileage may vary.

Solution for me was to install GoogleCam via Aurora and: GitHub - lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider: App faking only the absolute necessary Apis to use Gcam without Play Services
which provides the minimal API to run without crashing. I believe I installed from f-droid, but you can grab from the github releases too.

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