I hate Google photos because I feel it’s too invasive with that cloud backup that you never really know if a photo is online or on device, so I disabled it in my Google Pixel.
Now Google camera is broken, says it can’t show previews until I enable Google photos again.
Is there any workaround? Tried with many other galleries, but seems it’s hard coded to Google photos…
the issue is that i want to delete all the photos that i uploaded before 2021 on the website, but at the same time i don’t want to delete them locally from the phone (delete from web = delete from all the devices)
If you’d like them out of Google, but still on your phone:
You can use Google takeout to download all of your photos. Then delete them from Google, and copy the images you downloaded back to your phone manually. Finally, use a gallery app that can access files stored anywhere on the file system to view them (Simple Gallery seems to work pretty well - it should automatically find the images regardless of which folder you stick them in).
Good god. Why is Google trying to act like Apple now? I had no idea they were building such a gross walled garden. Thank you for giving OP a way out and warning the rest of us what kind of trap the Pixel has become.
Why are people downvoting this?
Google Photos is actually a far cry from Apple Photos and iCloud. Pretty interoperable across platforms and easy to take data elsewhere.
Since I do like Google Photos integration, I’m loathe to try this, but if you disable the auto-backup then delete, would that work?