The main argument is privacy, both with Google as a whole as well as facial recognition and private moments being logged in Google photos.

One could argue that they are telling the truth about whether or not they ever look at your data and keep it encrypted and this and that and the other, but the simple fact is that unless it is open source or audited multiple times by independent third parties, there is no way to confirm that all of your data actually is private.

However, most people are beginning to realize that because of the overreach that all of these different tech mega corporations have, it is almost impossible to stay private, even if you do sacrifice your products for more private, generally less feature rich ones. A good example is proton mail: it is a great email service, it is truly private, but you also don't get a lot of the really nice features that Google has, like an actually good suite of integration with meetings, calendar appointments, shipping tracking, reminders, file sharing, the works.

There is a trade-off, and a lot of the tech focused people believe that the lack of features warrants the more privacy, so it is really a difference of ideology more than anything.

Imo, the main concern is that it's tied into your google account. That's a lot of eggs for one basket. What if some ML model has a bad day and bans your account? It's not terrifically likely to happen, but if it did, how much would you lose?

On the other hand, I trust google's ability to store my data more than some homebrewed app.

As usual, the best solution will vary, but will always include secure offsite backups.

This is one of my main concerns. I hope I’m somewhat more protected as I’ve been paying for google one for quite some years (so at least has some financial link to me also, and supposedly better support to go with it).

Recently the editing tools have gotten much better too. I have sometimes made photos look better(to my liking) on google photos android app than using a dedicated desktop software.

Can you get your photos back, identical to how they were uploaded? Or do you lose metadata, JPEG quality of even resolution?

If the answers are okay today, will they stay good next year?

This part is actually pretty OK. Google takeout takes time but if you have the app set to upload originals that's what you get and you can download it any time you want, so if they make a drastic change you'd still have all the old photos.

i use google photos for quick text based search, like me with clock tower or something. google photos can't maintain folder structure, so its always my 2nd backup. first one is miror in dropbox.

The key phrase that I don't trust is "download it any time you want". I wouldn't trust Google Takeout to work for a banned account, and I feel like accounts can get banned for arbitrary reasons and there is no mitigation for a false ban.

I don't trust them, I just download the takeout periodically, worst case scenario you lose a few months of photos which you still have on your phone.

www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler

they can flag and terminate your account at any time.

Yeah, a big fear of mine is having ten years worth of photos deleted in one fell swoop (or, at least, access to them removed without recourse, which comes to the same thing) because an AI thinks that a half-nude photo of my three-year-old is CSAM.

Of course, what that actually means in practice is that I should just regularly archive.

I think making sure to have a backup of your important content is always necessary. Being able yo conventiently port to another service, less so. I'm less concerend about the real risks of me flagged as some deviant, as long as I can pick up my data and give two fingers to the company that behaves in an unreasonably poor manner, im good.

realistically, our wifes and family will almost never make backups, and probably most of us hackers either, it ll stay on todo or as implemented but now broken script.