Photos.app search has drastically improved ever since it started to use AI. I believe it was a search for "paper" that I did not too long ago, and which came up with several photos that were practically where-is-waldo games for me trying to find the paper.

Not concerned with handing all that data to Google?

no

You trust Google?!

Search is a mixed bag: Google configured it with low thresholds and was resistant to adding an error correction mechanism, so e.g. “cat” would match my dog and there was nothing I could do about it.

The main thing, however, is the social features. iCloud just works and works well. Google Photos UI was really clunky and notifications weren't reliable so I'd miss comments from relatives.

Workaround: install the Google Opinion Rewards app which is even available on iPhone. It will ask you survey questions about places you have recently visited. (Yes, it tracks you). Over the course of a year, you can earn $20 in "virtual" money which can then be used to purchase the 100GB/year plan.

You can (I do) earn that much without location sharing. But I've been doing it for a long time so I seem to get more surveys than I did at first. Looking at my history, I average just shy of 1.75/month.

Anecdotal annoyance with automatic face tagging: Old dog and new dog look very similar. Google keeps tagging my new dog as if he were my old dog and I haven't found a way to fix that without manually going through every single picture and untagging/retagging.

I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs, and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.

I uploaded a 4D obstetric ultrasound to get rid of the CD. Photos.app tagged it as my child. That blew my mind.

If it's broken, then it's broken. It doesn't matter how futuristic and awesome it is.

Yep, in this case it sounds like “awesome futuristic idea poorly implemented” is worse than not having the feature.

Adding a simple toggle to disable it (or even better, a blacklist of tags to never auto-add) would be the best compromise.

On the web site, go to "explore" and pick the face of either dog, it should offer a little button that says "Same or different?" that will give you an opportunity to train it.

They can train your dog?!

You can manually go and say "this is my new dog" to improve the tagging.

Maybe that's all worth $20/yr for photo and file storage?

How about privacy?

I haven't seen any of my photos given out to anyone, so what's your concern? The ToS also doesn't say anything about sharing my private photos.

> A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon

Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.

There was a free tier of photos and videos under a certain resolution which didn't count towards your storage which they're removing.

I was under the impression that was only for Pixel phone owners - I suppose I was mistaken!

Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful for most people. The point of cloud storage is peace of mind to keep your data safe... and to me that implies the original photos not reduced resolution photos.

> Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful

They are still very high resolution. They're just not the original 50 MB file. It worked perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of people.

Pixel offered unlimited storage even for uncompressed photos, but that option was also discontinued a few years ago.

It's compressed not reduced resolution for most practical cases.

Those "free" photos and videos were still recompressed.

They have also always had unlimited uploads for free at lower quality.