For about 30 years, my grandmother used the same hole-in-the-wall shop to get her photos developed. She loved taking pictures of her paintings, sunsets, flowers, her family, and trips. Every few weeks, she would drop off a roll of film. The shop would do that darkroom chemistry stuff and deliver back to her a couple dozen photos, usually in a little, branded album. We have many of those albums lying around the house.
Fast forward to 2025. I’m very similar to my grandmother: I like to take pictures of flowers, my art, my knitted objects, my family and my trips. I put them in my photo shop. My shop doesn’t give me the photos - there’s far too many of them for me to keep at home, they assure me, but if I pay them a reasonable annual fee, they’ll hold them for me indefinitely. Additionally, I can pop into the shop at any time to look at them. The shop also sometimes sends me cute assortments of my photos, with cheesy background music, especially around the holidays. I do really enjoy this, except when they sometimes callously show me a rosey birthday video of a dead loved one. I need to remind them to please skip those photos from the sentimental collages.
Behind the scenes, the shop uses my photos for some very cool, very advanced computer science projects. I notice that my photos start to get automatically labeled - they can tell it’s a picture of me from the 1990s, wow. I didn’t realize my photos were grist for this machine learning mill; it was probably buried in a “consent” form that didn’t actually gather consent in the typical meaning of the word. Anyway, I definitely learn about this after the fact. And I’m not thrilled about my family pics being used for science projects, but I guess the shop is good about privacy? Right??? Plus, it is amazing to be able to ask the robot shopkeeper for all pictures featuring one of my kids and a guitar. Wow, this robot is really smart! I do feel a bit uneasy that I don’t actually, physically have a copy of any of my family’s photos from the past 10 years but well hmm…
Meanwhile, I read a scary article about a time the shop locked its doors to a customer because they misunderstood one of the customer’s photos as being pornographic (it was medical). The customer was kicked out - and he wasn’t allowed to have any of his photos. My unease increases. Years pass.
One day, I decide I’d like to take all my photos out of the shop. Would this be possible, please? I’m tired of paying the shop the annual fee to house all my photos. I’m worried about having all my precious memory-eggs in one basket. I have a surgery coming up and need to take gnarly medical pictures and I don’t want to get banned! So I’d like to try another shop, please. This shop - very high-tech, maybe the highest-tech shop in the whole world - this shop that can make computers recognize my baby pics as me, using only pictures of adult-me - has only ONE way to deliver photos. No, sorry, you can’t access the photos programmatically using an API - despite the abundance of APIs in the backroom.
Here’s how I’m allowed to get my photos:
- I have to enter a different shop and tell them I want the photo place’s photos. “Ugh, fine. We’ll let you know when it’s ready at some indeterminate time in the future.”
- I wait.
- Finally, my photos are ready to be picked up. The shop warns me: “if you don’t pick these up this week, we’re going to need a fresh request!” I am deeply annoyed at this Kafka-esque runaround.
- I go back to the different shop, Takeout, to pick up my photos. My photos are bundled together in 50GB .zip files that I need to, one by one, laboriously remove from the shop and heave into my tiny cart, before wheeling it to my slightly larger pickup truck.
- I have 7 of these bundles. It takes about one hour to get one of these .zip bundles from the shop into my pickup truck. I’m something of a pickup truck mechanic/hobbyist, so I know how to do all this. But most of my normie, non-mechanic friends don’t really have anywhere to load their giant bundles; they just pay the fee and let the shops keep their photos and hope for the best.
- Also, by the way, every time I enter the shop - I need to show them my ID. Not my usual ID (a chocolate chip cookie they stuffed into my backpack on the way out), no. They want to see a key, as well as my second, plan B, just in case key. Man, they are surly, these types!
- Once I get all my stacked cartons of photos back at my house, I start to look through them. The organization is wild! Photo labels are spread out across different boxes, photos that I had meticulously organized into albums when I visited the shop have been re-shuffled in a seemingly random order. This is 10 years of my life, in photographs, and the metadata is just fucked. I am exhausted by the sight of it. It feels vindictive. Frickin’ shop!!!
Yeah. So that was my experience with getting 300GB+ of photos out of Google Photos. After several aborted attempts, over several years (!).
It’s amazing - galling, really! - how we’ve let this Big Tech monopoly get out of hand. And how completely turned around the notions of “user”, “customer”, and “company” have become. Why am I renting my own memories back from a cloud landlord? Like a digital serf? Why are my photos being held hostage for shareholder value? Like, what are we even valuing? The photo of my grandmother is priceless to me - but it’s just one more data point to Google. The way we’ve structured tech into our lives is really crazy-making. Imagine what we could do if we didn’t prioritize the corporations’ interests, but our own?
Anyway… Yeah, I’m not into it anymore. My data is mine! ✊ Once I get these sorted (thank you, open source) - programmatically! sanely! - and running on Immich or Synology Photos or just, like, my hard drive and an offsite backup, I will be VERY excited to delete them from Google’s servers. Wish me luck on the sorting-out part - I embark on that with dread.