They probably want to kill the reverse chronological grid because many tools to delete Google Photos in bulk rely on it. Photos is a great source of storage consumption (“let us auto back up every photo you’ve ever taken…”), and when it’s consumed you no longer receive email in gmail. Your only option out of this hostage situation is to delete things from storage or pay Google a subscription. Conveniently, it is painful to delete things en masse from Photos, so they hope this will frustrate you into a subscription.
> they hope this will frustrate you into a subscription.
Imagine a salesman trying to trick you into buying something. We immediately get wary of their behaviour and want them to go away. Sadly we have built huge tolerance for apps. They trick us into subscriptions. If not that, they trick us to use the app for hours at end so that they can show relevant ads. It's incredibly toxic behaviour but somehow we don't mind it when it's coming from app.
I got off Google Photos in 2021[1]. Even with some automation, I spent days deleting the photos. Very soon, with the new changes, the steps will likely become redundant.
Enough of my (technical and non-technical) friends have struggled with this and caved to the dark pattern that it has become a topic of discussion at dinner a few times. This probably means there is a significant amount of ARR tied up in it.
I pay for Google Drive but am slowly pulling out (after I read that Google was flagging files with just a 1 or 0 as pirated content I felt that I couldn't trust it any more).
Looking at the pricing now I'm sure they had a 200GB option but now it's 100GB and the straight to 2TB.
What happened to that whole "organize the world's data" mission? That isn't something to quit on part way through. Aww.. would Elgoog really backtrack on this?
Yeah that's stacks, not the mentioned redesign. I'm not a fan of stacks either since there's no way to select photos from both inside and outside the stack to share. In general they seem kind of buggy too, ex. https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/19dehca/shari...
If you can’t point at adding some “AI” to a feature your job is at risk, I’m sure that little stacks has some image classifier that groups them together and the team was able to say “look! we added AI! please don’t lay us off!”
I’m not joking either, I feel bad for friends there - I’m hearing horror stories.
This is why you start with a user need and find a technology to solve it, but Google leadership are doing that in the reverse…which is fucking dumb. Similar to the Apple Vision Pro in a way - yeah, cool tech, but why exactly do I need it?
Reminds me of around ten years ago when Google decided the default Android phone screen was a search bar, not a phone keypad. They quickly reverted, but it shows how out of touch they can be.
This isn't too out there of a UX change. Where are the "not particularly positive" reactions? Only the author's few unclear gripes? The conclusion at the end seems to say it's a good tradeoff design.
On This Device stuff being buried a second level isn't a big deal. Maybe they're seeing that no one uses that except on occasion. I barely open Library at all. Everything is in the main feed.
The problem with pushing opinionated changes on users that some people like is that many people will hate it. It sucks to wake up to a worse product that you use regularly. I personally dislike all of the fancy crap that Google regularly adds or changes in Photos.
For me a photo app is a utility tool. All it needs to do is let me view and share photos; the less I have to think about the UX beyond that the better. At some point I got fed up with Photos and now pay for a third party app primarily for the features that it doesn't have.
