Apps

Day Eighteen: Personal Photos

A camera icon surrounded by a black ring
Point and Click! and ...store? (Credit: PNGall.com)

Table of Contents

Who is doing what with your photos?

Chances are you have put photos of yourself, your dog, cat, and kids all over the Internet. After all, it is a great way to share your adventures with your friends and family around the world!

But the platforms that allow you to post your photos also get to use them for their own purposes. Google and Facebook are the worst offenders, and Apple is a black box (which doesn't mean we should trust them more).

And they do! With so many photographs of faces, with photos tagged with friends's names, these companies became leaders in facial recognition. You did the work for them of tagging the data for machines to learn from. Now your iPhone records and sorts the faces and identities of people you have photographed. You know, for ease of retrieval.

This is all very convenient. But it's also very, very messed up. Because you can't control the context in which facial recognition takes place. These systems and others like them are used for policing, for tracking people, for recognizing them in public places, and so on. Keeping records of everyone you've photographed is creepy: making those records available to Big Tech is -- well, I personally wouldn't do that to my friends.

Of course, the Big Tech companies incentivize you to give them your photos. With a low storage limit on your phone, you've probably signed up for Google Photos or iCloud or something similar. There your visual data about your most precious, private, and personal encounters can sit for them to use at their leisure.

Yu give up this data because you don't have enough disk space at home or time to think about storing them. So instead, you mindlessly sync them to the Cloud. You are paying someone else to keep them there where they can do stuff to them.

Similarly, Facebook, Instagram, X, and others entice us to post photos for shares, likes, and clicks. Which means you're basically giving Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk your family photo album in exchange for a bizarre digital currency. What could possibly go wrong?

So today you will reclaim your photos. You will download them all and put them on your external drive. Then, you OWN THEM, instead of the other way around.

If there are some photos you'd like to keep online, by all means, be my guest. But you should also know about alternatives for photo storage and photo sharing in which you are the customer, and not the product.

Download your photos

The problem with downloading photos is they are hefty files. It's a good thing you have a large external drive which should help with that problem.

The other problem with downloading photos is -- then you don't know what you have and what you don't have.  We use third party photo browsers like Apple or Google Photos partly because they make it easy to catalog what we have and find what we need. We will get to this in a the second part of today's activity.

First, let's get the download and retrieval process doing. Go back to your Data Roadmap. Which of those systems and services did you allocate for photos? Which photos do you need for which activities or parts of your life? How will you distribute them moving forward?

Remember that just because you can see the photos on your phone doesn't mean they are stored on your phone. They may be stored in a cloud backup and displaying thumbnails on your phone, which the software will download or transfer in the background should you choose to look at something.

The goal here is to be sure that you have the original photo file on your computer, not in the cloud. It may be replicated in the cloud but you want the original. Look for a file name extension .jpg or .jpeg to make sure.

Direct the download to a folder on your external drive. And hopefully you have already retrieved your data from Meta's servers, including Facebook and Instagram, so that data is safe in your home.

You may wish to download in batches to store by year to make this easier to retrieve or go through. Or just download the entire shebang.

Alternative Photo Management

Sure, you can store some photos online, or post them for people to see. Just make sure it's where you have as much control over them, their access, and use for other purposes as possible.  And make sure you balkanize, so not everything is online in the same place.

You may not remember the celebrity iCloud hacks in 2014, but let's just say that automated backups that include everything basically guarantees nude photos of you will circulate on dark web sites. Whether you take nude photos or not.

That's why I suggest you be very, very selective about where and how you keep personal photos, and try to keep them off the open web as much as possible. 

Now that you are looking for places to put photos that keep them separate from your Gmail or Apple accounts, here are some options for you as you check off the boxes on your Data Roadmap:

  • Since Apple iCloud succumbed to phishing scandals years ago, it does have very strong security. You may be okay to keep some photos there. Does that save you from the above step of downloading all your photos from them? No, because I still would not keep ALL my photos there. I would put a note on my calendar to go in annually and download a whole year at a time to keep deep storage of photos under my own roof.  Especially if you also have an Apple email account and other Apple things you use, it's best to try to split that data apart if you can to make your data trail more difficult to piece together.
  • Dropbox allows you to sync and keep photos and videos online, if you pay for a storage account. You can share these photos with friends and family to view, but they'll stay private and hidden from the open web.
  • Flickr is still around, bought first by Yahoo! and then by SmugMug years ago. It's well known and loved by photo enthusiasts. You can designate privacy layers for photos as well as creative commons licensing if you want those photos out on the open web to be used. Make sure you know your settings, because otherwise your private pics will all be visible online to everyone.
  • If you're looking for an Instagram replacement, the Federated service PixelFed is a strong contender.  They've also developed a video sharing service, like TikTok or YouTube shorts but open source and distributed, called Loops.
  • There is software out there that will keep track of your photos' whereabouts offline, on your computer or external drive, allowing you to search and view them easily. You could try a service like Mylio, a small private company based in the Seattle area with only two investors at present (a China-based and a Denver-based VC firm). Another example of software for photo management is Eagle, based out of Taiwan, which has a strong privacy policy. Meanwhile, PhotoQT does something similar, entirely offline, but is open source and free.
  • jalbum.net allows you to make albums and put them online, either on their website or hosted at your own location, for a $50 license fee (there is a free trial too).
  • Remember those run-your-own-cloud services? Places like NextCloud and Sandstorm also have photo management software
  • If you are embracing data sovereignty and photos really are your thing, here are some open source solutions you can self-host like MediaGoblinPhotoprism or Immich.

This should give you some ideas and examples for what to do with all those photos. But please start by bringing your photo albums and personal snaps back home, as much as possible. And for everything you choose to stay online, be selective about where they go and how much you give away.

Make sure your choices are motivated by more than convenience.

Hopefully today's activity will lead to a nice walk down memory lane on top of a renewed approach to privacy. Enjoy going through those old snaps!