Everyone uses Google Photos wrong

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Every year, more than a billion people use the Google Photos app to upload and store billions of photos and videos. For many, the process is probably identical: you take a few photos with your phone, and they’re automatically uploaded to Google’s cloud service. You could choose the best photo and share it on WhatsApp or Instagram and then never think about the rest again. Photos join an ever-updating stream of data about life.

But it shouldn’t be like that. Uploading thousands of photos and not taking any action to sort or manage them creates a number of privacy risks and makes it impossible to maintain your photo collection in the future. Now is the time to stop being an information hoarder before it gets out of control.

Over the past six weeks, I’ve spent about a dozen hours deleting thousands of photos that had been uploaded to my Google Photos account over the past half decade. In total, I deleted 16,774 photos and videos. During the process and thousands of “delete” taps, three things have come to light: My photo collection unknowingly includes a lot of sensitive personal information (both about me and others); I don’t need to keep so many photos; and struggling to shape my collection frees up a lot of space in my google account.

My photographic archive dates back to the early 2000s when everything was captured using an eight megapixel digital camera. There are tens of thousands of photos, it’s impossible to say how many exactly, and they’re entirely managed by Google. The photos were initially stored on CD, moved to Flickr before it limited collections to 1,000 images, and eventually found their way to Google Photos around 2018. When Google limited accounts to 15 gigabytes of storage, I started paying more.

Within the collection, snaps from family vacations sit side by side with selfies. Food photos and dog photos are plentiful. As phone cameras have gotten better and cloud storage has become seemingly endless, I seem to be taking more pictures every year. I’m not the only one. Google Photos holds an unfathomable amount of data about all of us: In 2020, the company said it stored 4 trillion photos, with 28 billion new photos and videos uploaded every week.

Deleting thousands of photos used to be a tedious and manual process. Using an iPad, I scrolled through all the photos I’d backed up from the last 15 years and tapped each one I wanted to send to the trash. In one of the longest sessions, I deleted 2,211 photos in 45 minutes. Most of the trashed photos were duplicates: instead of having 16 photos of me running through a forest, only the best two or three remain. Thousands of screenshots were downed — the moment I was verified on Twitter and the news article about a goat arrest didn’t go through the process unscathed.

But beneath the surface were many images that should never have been kept. For years I kept passport photos of myself and of friends who had sent me travel booking details. I found photos of the details needed to access my bank account. I was memorizing people’s addresses and screenshots of directions to their homes. The list goes on: private email addresses, NSFW photos, screenshots of awkward conversations, common running routes and travel directions, sensitive meeting notebook pictures. Huge parts of my life have been stored in my photos. I didn’t know they were there or I forgot about them as soon as they weren’t useful.

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