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by crispinb 2433 days ago
I found it good value until they removed local syncing of Google Photos from their Gdrive client. That was where most of my data was. Making it only accessible via a web form download was a huge product downgrade that I don't think a more customer-responsive company would have risked. So I cancelled my subs & won't be going back (I'm sure they're quaking in their billionaire boots).
3 comments

This! Just look at the threads here:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/113672044

Google doesn't want you to be able to sync/backup your own photos anymore.

It's particularly infuriating because it was such a poorly-motivated change. Customers supposedly found the interaction with Google Drive confusing, so rather than improve ergonomics, they cretinously remove a lynchpin feature altogether. I still haven't found a really good alternative.
I'm running a program which downloads any new photos to my computer. I'm away from my PC right now but I'm pretty sure it was this: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
Thanks - that's new to me. I'll check it out (though on the face of it I'm not entirely keen to start paying Google again for a service they treat this badly).
I had the same feeling. I now use Dropbox in conjunction with iCloud photos, time machine and backblaze. I wasn’t a huge fan of the google drive client, but I loved insync (not affiliated, just a fan) since it worked on Mac/windows/Linux.

I tried out one drive before going to Dropbox and had huge issues withy the client on my Mac, my windows box, and just in general. The selective sync support was atrocious and kept getting into conflicts with the directories on the drive and refusing to sync then duplicating folders.

I also checked out iCloud Drive, but there’s no selective sync option and there’s some large directories I keep in cloud storage that I don’t need on my laptop.

Agree on OneDrive - I was on Windows when I tried it, and found it a terrible mess of a service: at once highly invasive and yet lacking in capabilities. Dropbox is out of the question for me for political/ethical reasons. I've half-seriously considered writing something of my own, though the impulse wears off pretty fast when I start to think through the implications.