5 Google Photos features that make it hard to quit, even though I want to

Affiliate links on Android Authority may earn us a commission. Learn more. 5 Google Photos features that make it hard to quit, even though I want to December 20, 2025 I’ve never really forgiven Google for the bait-and-switch it pulled when ending unlimited Google Photos storage and forcing many of us to subscribe to Google One after becoming reliant on the app under its previous promises. But years later, it’s the fact that there’s no option to opt out of AI model training that has made me even more frustrated. Not only does this encroach on the privacy of our data, but we’re essentially paying to have our images and videos used to train models which the company further profits from. It’s what drove me to try out Immich, a Google Photos alternative , earlier this year. But as impressed as I am with the open-source, self-hosted option; there are Google Photos features that make parting ways with the app feel daunting. What is your favorite Google Photos feature? 1. The ability to recognize individual pets Immich has a decent machine learning algorithm that can recognize objects, animals, and even the faces of people. But it isn’t able to identify different pets, which Google Photos can do. Of the tens of thousands of pictures I have in Google Photos, the majority, at least nowadays, are of my pets. As they both get older, I want to capture as many memories of them as possible. It’s one of the reasons I now care about smartphone camera specs . In Immich, one of my workarounds was using searches for terms like “black cat” and “white cat” to find pictures of my cats BV and Loxi. However, these results aren’t always that accurate, sometimes bringing up other animals. Since I love to record memories of my pets, Google Photos' ability to recognize them and group images is incredibly useful. But since Google Photos automatically recognizes and groups pets, it easily creates collections with them and can use these pictures for highlights. It is pretty accurate when it comes to recognition, only occasionally misidentifying a pet or grouping the neighbor’s cat in with mine. Google Photos’ ability to recognize individual pets also means that I can search for images that include both of my cats by searching for “BV and Loxi”, which brings up the rare photos I manage to capture of them sitting near each other. 2. Google TV screensavers Google Photos screensavers are one of my favorite Google TV features, even though it has nothing to do with streaming. It has added a personal touch to my TV that many other screensaver features have lacked and has allowed me to rediscover gems that I’d forgotten about. This simple integration between Google Photos and Google TV would definitely be something I’d miss if I quit the photo backup service. I considered just manually loading the images onto my TV box, but when revisiting my screensaver settings, I realized there’s no option to do...

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