Note: See the end of this post for an update
Posted on 10 Aug
Google recently split Photos off of the lumbering, zombied body of Google+ into a pretty slick Service. The iOS app worked great, uploading everything, storage was easy to stay under caps, the algorithms creating some interesting Stories. I was a happy user of a set-it-and-forget-it variety.
Until today.
Today, I logged into Gmail normally and saw 5 new notifications in the Google bell. Odd, I do have a Google+ account but on no day before have I had that much activity. I clicked the notification icon and see 5 new Stories for me to review from Photos. Still thought that was odd, but I did upload a bunch of old photos a couple of weeks ago, maybe the system finally got around to combing through them. My last name starts with “V” so I’m used to getting chosen late based on the alphabet (something I realize is funnier tonight than it would have been this morning).
And then it got weird. The first Story was a trip to Lake Tahoe. I have never been to Lake Tahoe, certainly never been in a proximity close enough to take pictures of the town. There are pictures of people I don’t know. There are photos from someone else’s vacation. And these photos are tagged as one of my Stories.
I click the next one, “A Trip to Watertown and Chelsea, MI”. I get a little nervous as I just moved from Chelsea, MI. I have never been to Watertown, MN, certainly not the Mayer Primary School being pictured in the Story. And then I hit the moment when Google lost my trust. The Story transitioned from someone else’s photos from Watertown to my photos taken in Chelsea, MI years ago. The Story showed a trip from Minnesota to Chelsea.
Then I clicked in my photo stream. And there were more of someone else’s photos. Lots of them: scans of old Polaroids, photos from a trip somewhere tropical, hotel rooms and restaurants I’d never been in.
Two stories have disappeared, but three Stories remain. All of them mix someone else’s photos with mine, including our pets.
So, I am now a paying customer of Dropbox, having exported all my photos from Google and transferred them to Dropbox. Now comes the decision of whether I leave the rest of Google’s ecosystem. I am having a really, really hard time trusting my data to Google right now (and yes, I know the privacy/data ownership/blah blah blah argument you’re about to make). If Google can’t get something as simple as keeping my photos separate from someone else’s, I feel like I need to move away.
EDIT (11 Aug)
Props to David from the Photos team for reaching out about my issue. They haven’t found the source of the problem, but they are looking into it. I won’t be going back to Photos, but I do want to credit the team for taking my random complaints seriously.