At Google I/O, people were abuzz over the new Google Photos app, which lets you store an unlimited number of 16-megapixel photos as well as 1080p videos—for free!

This seemed awfully fishy to me. I'm not buying into any "all you can eat for free" cloud storage scams. Why does Google want all my photos?

New laws being proposed in the United Kingdom would require companies like Google to turn over this cache of photos to the government by simple request. And according to Edward Snowden, the U.S. government and its data collection programs are already in bed with companies like Google. So turning over my entire photo collection to Google amounts to letting two governments fish through my media.

I'm not paranoid, but who needs this aggravation? It amounts to inviting people over to scrounge through your underwear drawer.

Google's motivation is sketchy. It has something to do with sharing all your pics with your Google+ buddies. I am not a fan of Google+, and I definitely do not want all my photos shared with thousands of strangers—er… I mean "friends."

With all that in mind, I had to try the system and see what it did and how it worked.

Let me simplify it for you: Unless you are a Mac user who trusts that the computer has good intentions and you actually are comfortable not knowing what is really going on, you will hate this service.

When I use a cloud service to back things up, I like to put stuff in some folders or already have some folders that I want backed up. Ideally I will slide those folders over to the cloud, which would be on the screen as perhaps a window or icon named "cloud."

Google wants you to run a "sync" application. It has a few controls but otherwise randomly goes after pics from all over your machine in a haphazard way, backing up photos and videos willy-nilly, with no status reporting (that I could find) to inform me what it was uploading. For all I knew, it wasn't even working.

The next thing I knew, there were a bunch of images from here and there up in the Google cloud. After finally figuring out how to find and view the cache of images, what I saw made no logical sense. It was "organized" in a flat database or what I'd call a "bag o' images."

This was no good.

For some inexplicable reason it took two batches of recent images and combined the photos to produce animated GIFs. When I shoot pics, I tend to take a half dozen or more shots hoping to catch nuances or angles or something. It's free to overshoot, so why not do it?

Why did Google Photos decide to make an animated GIF of this?Why did Google, on its own, decide to take only two sets of these batches of multiple images to produce two animated GIF files? Why do this in the first place? One was a bottle of olive oil dancing about (right). The other was some portraiture wiggling around.

Was this to show off some artificial intelligence? Was it just to be cute? "Hey dummy, look at what I can do automatically for you. Woo hoo!" And why pick these images, and why do it without my explicit permission?

Google Photos is a discomforting program that, like many of the Google initiatives and perhaps like the company itself, gives me the creeps. It's just too weird and awkward.

And here's a reminder: after you load your terabytes of images up to the Google cloud, the company might just bail on the program and shut down the service out of the blue. It's done that with a slew of its ideas. Was anyone all-in with Orkut?

The cancellation will be unceremonious. Here is the declaration by Google when it ash-canned Google Reader:

What will happen to my Google Reader data? All Google Reader subscription data (eg. lists of people that you follow, items you have starred, notes you have created, etc.) will be systematically deleted from Google servers.



Will there be any way to retrieve my subscription data from Google in the future? No -- all subscription data will be permanently, and irrevocably deleted. Google will not be able to recover any Google Reader subscription data for any user after July 15, 2013.

Imagine everyone scrambling to recapture their huge photo archives before another shutdown. It won't be pretty.

If you are comfortable with all this, by all means, jump on the bandwagon to see what happens. It does have some fascinating image search capability.

But if you want to back up your photos and keep them to yourself, get a portable hard disk. It's not free but it is cheap. And much safer.

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