Android Showing 'Backup Photos' Request and Ignores "Don't Show This Again". Feels Scammy Hoping for a Misclick to Charge Me

This has been driving me mad for a few months ever since they started doing it. If I click backup, it's going to immediately overflow my google drive and charge me money. After enabling it, there's apparently no good way to clear photos from your drive without also deleting them from your phone, leaving you trapped in paying their fee or having to do annoying work arounds to avoid losing your photos.

It keeps popping up, ignoring "don't show this again", and they even redesigned it in the latest iteration so I'm sure it's not an accident. There's no longer even an option of "No" to exit the popup, you have to uncheck an option and then the exit button changes from "Backup" to "Don't Backup".

The first few dozen times were annoying, now it feels outright like an attempted scam to get me to click something I've told them over and over that I don't want to sign up for. If it were from any other company doing it I suspect that company would get an immediate bad reputation as attempted scammers.

I don't know if I'm going overboard, but I've just had to avoid signing up yet again, and am now wondering, is this the kind of thing which a department such as the ACCC could come down on them for, since it seems blatantly scammy and anti-consumer? Similar to when the Australian gov came down on Steam for not offering refunds and forced them to follow Australian consumer law.

Comments

  • Use without account

  • Having done some more googling, it seems a lot of people have this same frustration.

    Switching to Google Gallery is essentially the same (maybe even better) but without the constant scammy signup attempts.

  • For the same folders, or for folders newly added? If you e.g. install an app that stores its photos in a subfolder, Photos will prompt you to add that folder. My phones respect 'do not show again' flawlessly

  • +1

    Had this prompt today, always toggled On so not easy to dismiss, sickening, and confuses mum when she only wants to view or show her photos.

    https://immich.app/ - High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution.

    Features machine learning for searching known objects/people in photos. Impressed by the online demo, I read a lot in preparation to set it up, it's just getting around to learning the ins and outs of Docker - and on Windows faffing around with dependency feature installation of WSL2(?) and whatnot I can't even remember now - wishing the Immich team would add Windows build support.

    Then there is so many things to be mindful of, one must test out first before adopting and stick to a method of adding to and keeping their media safe and doubly backed up - by default I read Immich eats your original files as it imports them into its own schema.

    Think I'll just write my own webserver/backend and privately hosted site… But will miss the ready-made Immich app that auto uploads your newly taken photos to your self-hosted cloud.

    • +2

      Immich isn't stable. If you use it, you generally want to prevent auto updates to the app and server.

      You could consider buying a dedicated machine to run it. IIRC, immich is a bit easier to backup compared to other solutions.

      If it's not suitable, you could look into other solutions:
      https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

  • Not being snarky. Is $2.50/mo too much to pay for 100GB of storage and hassle free photo backup? Any reason you don’t want to sign up?

    EDIT: Can the Photos app be deleted so it cannot sync any more?

    • I'd rather not have yet another subscription on something I don't need, and barely take any photos on my phone. I already back up what I want backed up manually.

  • +2

    i also dislike the pop-up
    i only store photos on phone temporarily as they upload to my nas. so yeah maybe I'll use a new gallery app that isn't shit

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