In response to the forced iPhone update thread…
Let me preface this by asking for y’all to refrain from the plethora of smart-ass jokes and comments I’m about to tee up for you…I know it’ll be difficult to not swing for the fences at such perfectly thrown, easily hittable hanging curve balls just sitting there over the plate begging to be knocked out of the park, but I’d appreciate it if you’d just hold off on that until a later time.
Is there a photo hosting site out there that’s not owned by the tech giants and that has at a modest possibility of never selling out to one of the giants? Maybe one founded by a Christian entrepreneur with principles…as in the Chic-fil-et of online photo hosting sites? I would severely miss the convenience of my iPhone, but this latest, pre-announced back-door that they have created is a bit too much for even my tech-addicted azz to stomach, and I’m considering ditching the tech. My wife has an iPhone 7 that can’t even store another picture on, and she can barely hear anyone on a call…she hates the damn things and purposely leaves hers wherever she isn’t and would be on board for ditching the tech and going to a simple, cheap, and convenient flip phone. That said…
Unfortunately, my eyes were not open to the direction big-tech was headed way back in 2014, so when google photos hit the iPhone, I signed my entire family up on all our devices, and now there are thousands upon thousands of family photos and videos of the kids from their infancy to now being stored in their cloud. I know we are going to lose a ton of them, and I honestly don’t care, as most are duplicates or sub-par and need to be deleted anyway, but there are plenty that I’m sure Abby and I will want to keep. My plan is to choose the ones we want, e-mail them in a compressed file to our computer, and then transfer them to an external hard drive for storage. If anyone knows of a better way to get photos from google photos to an external hard drive, please let me know and walk me through it. As for why I asked about a non-big-tech photo hosting site, I often want to post pics here or on other hunting related sites I visit and communicate in, and I’d like to be able to easily post pics from a hosting site to whatever forum I want to post them to. Photobucket was great early on, but their actions have me very wary about ever trusting such a site again, so I’m searching for info anyone might have that will provide a reasonable amount of comfort about using any recommended site.
Next, I’m hoping to be able to permanently delete all of our pics from google’s cloud once we have them on a personal external hard drive, as there are a pile of photos of my kids crawling around and running around naked or in diapers, seeing how far they could piss from the top of a ladder, writing their names in the snow etc. that I know damn well will be spit out for some tech punk in California to “manually evaluate” for anything nefarious. While I certainly don’t want anyone looking at pics of my kids in their birthday suits or pissing off ladders, what really bothers me is knowing just how easy it would be for some morally-decayed scum that companies like Google and Facebook strive to hire (refer to the recent video posted in current events featuring the White House Staff’s new face for pushing the vaccine) to take any of the photos that turn them on or that they think would turn some of their like on and slip it out the door to their home computer and sell them to their dark-web buddies. My kids are at the age where they are freaked out that we have professional framed photos hanging in our hall of Abby holding them naked…except for the cute little hats they had on…in their one-week old baby photos. Please excuse me for not having faith in the leadership of these companies when they assure us there are protections in place that will keep something like this from ever happening and keep some random pic of my kid pissing in the snow off the computer of any one of the multiple known and/or unknown sex offenders that live in every town in this country.
Regardless, while I may have been naive to think that the thousands of pics shot at times when life was happening and we’d just pick up the phone and capture the moment…while I was naďve to think they would be secure on a phone from a company who built their reputation on dogged protection of their customer’s phone content’s privacy and security, my eyes are now open. And no one has to tell me how stupid I was to think that anything on my phone wouldn’t be accessed by the tech giants, I’m fully aware of just how stupid that was.
I’m simply wanting to button things up and keep my private life and personal family photos my private life and personal family photos…period.
Has anyone ever attempted to remove all their photos from google photo’s cloud service? I suspect it’s going to be at least as difficult and frustrating as it was to shut down the Facebook page I created to access a photo of a FEMA trailer my in-law was telling me to buy for a hunting trailer. I saw the photo, and before I could say oh-sh!t, I had friend requests from an old girlfriend I never want to think about again and several random people from my past that I had long forgotten and forgotten for good reason. It took me forever to figure out how to kill the account, and I’m still not convinced it’s completely gone to this day.
So anyhoo…any advice or very detailed instructions on how to do anything I’m trying to do here will be greatly appreciated, so thanks in advance.
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Originally Posted by Frank1
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