Google Photos
Ranked 2 of 8 photo managers by recommenders
Recommended for automatic phone backup, searching photos by description or place, and organizing albums. Common caveat: pushy backup prompts and concerns about private photos being scanned by AI.
Recommended for automatic phone backup, searching photos by description or place, and organizing albums. Common caveat: pushy backup prompts and concerns about private photos being scanned by AI.
216 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 73
- criticize it
- 143
- approval share
- 34%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 73 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Automatic phone backup
“If you are full-on in the Google ecosystem, it takes no time at all. Your photos would be in Google Cloud, so you won't need to wait to download them.”
Comment from 2 Mar 2026 in “Setting up phones is a nightmare” “It's substantially easier for a user to have their photos immediately and automatically backed up to icloud or Google Photos”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help” “compared to automatically synchronizing to iCloud or Google Photos, the experience is significantly worse”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!” - Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?”
- Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”
Search photos by description or location
“I'm also a huge fan of how iCloud and Google Photos can search my photos just by a description.”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help” “I think it's really neat Google Photos lets you see all photos taken at a particular location.”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Android now stops you sharing your location in photos” “helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Apple's Siri revamp reportedly delayed again” Easy album organizing and export
“I've spent a ton of time organizing my Google Photos albums, that's a big reason I stay with it.”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “Immich v3.0.0 Released” “These make my albums feel like small blogs which really adds to the experience”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “Immich v3.0.0 Released” “You can export a whole album with Google at original quality with 1 click.”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich” Memories and photo compilations
“Something I've enjoyed more than I expected is Google and Apple photos sending me photo memories and compilations”
Comment from 14 Jun 2026 in “I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models” “Now when I open Google Photos, my timeline stretches back to the day I was born”
Comment from 17 Jul 2026 in “Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Pushy backup prompts, hard to disable
“a bit pushy about it and will ask multiple times when you run it with an intrusive dialog”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “Apple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud for CSAM” “Plastering a "Back up now" pill over the top of every photo (not a header, I mean it actually covers the photo) was always a favourite of mine.”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?” “pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “How Microsoft Abuses Its Users” - Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?”
- Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?”
- Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March”
Buggy features and broken scanning
“I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me.”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?” “it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich” “It showed a red warning message on 1/3 of the screen space and put a red "no cloud backup" marker on every single thumbnail”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?” - Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in ““It works better in the app””
Privacy concerns about AI scanning
“while that works, I don't necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine”
Comment from 26 Apr 2026 in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform” “Google created an OS that automatically sent everyone's private data to their AI server for scanning without explicit consent?”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “Apple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud for CSAM” “Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage” Confusing deletion and sharing behavior
“Google Photos is super confusing. Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web?”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files” “you have to “share” like with Google Photos and Calendar and Tasks, you lose track of what you share with whom”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]”
Other photo managers people recommend
The four most recommended other photo managers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Immich | 296 | 65 | 82% | 12 | 1 yr33 owners | Approved |
| Google PhotosThis page | 73 | 143 | 34% | 12 | — | — |
| Apple Photos | 66 | 87 | 43% | 12 | — | — |
| PhotoPrism | 10 | 4 | 71% | 4 | — | Approved |
| digiKam | 8 | 1 | 89% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 239 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“i know Google does really well at keeping my data available, which is what you want for backup”
“Photos is one of the rare Google property where the team is constantly pushing the envelope”
“Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience.”
“Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium”
“Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.”
“Google Dev are incompetent it seems. Had "highlights" for June and July in photos. Guess what is disabled in my account?”
“It showed a red warning message on 1/3 of the screen space and put a red "no cloud backup" marker on every single thumbnail”
“Sure the web applications like Google Photos are annoying but they take away all of this that most people don't think about.”
“Plastering a "Back up now" pill over the top of every photo (not a header, I mean it actually covers the photo) was always a favourite of mine.”
“It's a ubiquitous dark pattern. Instead of having a "Yes" or "No" option it's now "Yes" or "Ask Me Later."”
“you shouldn't have to use an ad blocker to turn off something that you should be able to turn off with a setting”
“I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me.”
“a bit pushy about it and will ask multiple times when you run it with an intrusive dialog”
“Google created an OS that automatically sent everyone's private data to their AI server for scanning without explicit consent?”
“Now when I open Google Photos, my timeline stretches back to the day I was born”
“These make my albums feel like small blogs which really adds to the experience”
“I've spent a ton of time organizing my Google Photos albums, that's a big reason I stay with it.”
“compared to automatically synchronizing to iCloud or Google Photos, the experience is significantly worse”
“Something I've enjoyed more than I expected is Google and Apple photos sending me photo memories and compilations”
“I'm paying about that for Google to hold onto all my personal memories via Photos”
“It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage”
“while that works, I don't necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine”
“Google Photos pictures that have been uploaded from my phone but which I haven't curated and downloaded yet”
“I think it's really neat Google Photos lets you see all photos taken at a particular location.”
“pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once”
“If you are full-on in the Google ecosystem, it takes no time at all. Your photos would be in Google Cloud, so you won't need to wait to download them.”
“on iOS I would copy from Google photos and paste in WhatsApp, now that's just gone”
“helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else”
“you have to “share” like with Google Photos and Calendar and Tasks, you lose track of what you share with whom”
“I've found Google sometimes struggles with certain things (surprisingly) like searching for a date range”
“I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos”
“Google Photos is super confusing. Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web?”
“I'm also a huge fan of how iCloud and Google Photos can search my photos just by a description.”
“It's substantially easier for a user to have their photos immediately and automatically backed up to icloud or Google Photos”
“it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge of running your own service”
“You can export a whole album with Google at original quality with 1 click.”
“Google photos isn't perfect either but I never saw these kind of issues when I was still using it.”
“it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.”
“for organizing thousands of photos, I think Google Photos has it pretty much nailed”
“But you lose the view and of course the thumbnail. Defeating the whole purpose of putting them into Photo.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.