Is Google Just Fucking With Me Now?

Yet another entry into the grim field of "Shit Is Always Getting Worse"...

So abouts mid-December, I read about a project someone was doing that appealed to me: clean up your thousands of digital photos by going into your photo library and just spend five minutes each day going into that day's history and deleting all the screenshots, shitty blurry photos, dumb memes, etc...

I liked this idea a lot. My various photo stores are polluted with duplicates and ephemeral shit I do not care to keep or ever see again, and that all makes it harder for the various "generate albums based on memories or events automatically" tools that are one of the few things I want the algos to do for me to get it right.

The gist is, you open iCloud Photos or Google Photos or whenever the fuck you store your main photo library and search for say "February 3rd".

This should, THEORETICALLY (hear that? why yes, it's the Foreshadowing Bong!) bring up any photos you took on ANY February 3rd, be it 2023-02-03 or like 2007-02-03.

This is what makes the project doable. The idea of "clean out all your photos" is just overwhelming as fuck. Even like "just go through last years" is a job of hours.

But spending a few minutes, every day, to get to a good, cleaned library a year from now? That is a doable, achievable goal.

I've complicated this for myself over the years by using both Apple and Android ecosystems at various times. So iCloud Photos is where I would prefer to keep a canonical Photo Library, but because I don't have an easy way to go back in time and upload pics taken only on Android phones to that library, Google Photos (which CAN run on iOS and therefore gets pics from both ecosystems) is where I should probably keep my MAIN historical library. Bottom line, I've been doing this project in both of those libraries each day and trying to clean up both. Belts and suspenders, and all that.

Apple Photos on the Mac has been happily playing along. I search for the date, it gives me a results panel that lets me dive into photos taken ONLY on that day throughout history. Easy-peasy.

Google Photos, on the other hand. This motherfucker...

For the first few weeks, it worked as expected. Search for date, get results only for the date throughout history, clean up the pile, move on with my day. Nice.

Then a few days ago, I noticed that it was giving me different results each day. The first return in the search results would be the date in question, but then it would give me a bunch of "nearby" dates. And intermixed way down the page, usually where I'd have to scroll to even see them, would be more photos from the SPECIFIC data I was searching for.

This is exactly NOT what I fucking want, as it makes the specific flow of this project that makes it possible AT ALL imfuckingpossible to do!

AND IT FUCKING DID IT THE WAY I WANTED FOR WEEKS FIRST!!!

Did somebody at Google realize "oh shit, somebody's using our service in a way that works specifically for them instead of the way we want it to in order to maximize our algorithmic learning and ad sales! Can't have that! Press the "fuck his shit up" button, ASAP!"?

Is it just doing this on days where I haven't historically taken a lot of photos? Like, through late December and January, we have the holidays and a lot of birthdays in my family so almost every day has a ton of pics going back over the years. Now we're entering the doldrums of February and I've noticed that there's less. Is it trying to just give me search results of ANY kind, no matter how wrong, on days where I have few actual results that precisely match my search?

If so, that fucking sucks because it's making it impossible to do this project in Google Photos. And I cannot fucking STAND the fact that it has to blatantly break the user's expectations to do this. I'm searching for specifically February 3rd (for example). Not "February". Not "Winter". Why the fuck are you giving me anything BUT pictures uploaded to Google Photos on a February 3rd at all?!?!? Stop trying to be fucking helpful or whatever the fuck is enforcing this aggravating bullshit.

Like, if you MUST show me "not exactly but close" matches to satisfy some inscrutable corporate imperative, at least a) make it clear that that's what you're doing and b) separate the EXACT matches from the near guesses in a clear and obvious way. If it just bundled all the February 3rd photos at the front of the search results, with everything else clearly denoted further down, fine, I could live with that.

But nope, I'm finding my exact search date results interspersed with a whole bunch of fucking Not Exact matches. Infuriating.

It's also been interesting to note how much quicker and less frustrating Apple Photos has been to deal with throughout this, given that I'm basically A/Bing them back to back every day. Photos on the Mac is an actual app, with all the goodness that implies. Google Photos is a fucking webapp, with all the dogshit that implies. Beyond its fucking inability to just simply do what I'm actually asking it to fucking do, it's also slower and has stupider UI conventions that go against all of the conventions of the fucking operating system I'm doing this shit on.

Can I CMD-click any pic the search results in Apple Photos to multi-select non-contiguous choices and then delete all of the selected items once with CMD-backspace, as god intended? Yes.

More importantly, can I loosely and lazily click ANYWHERE on the photo to select it? Yup.

In Google Photos, CMD-clicking a photo... opens a whole 'nother instance of Google Photos. Because it's a stupid goddamned webapp, and CMD-click in browsers means "open this in a new tab in the background".

You want to multi-select? Fuck you, and precisely target this tiny little checkbox at the top left of each picture.

Just requires unnecessarily greater precision from the user, and takes more time, and is annoying as shit.

The none of you that are still with me at this point in this way-too-long article are probably thinking "isn't this just old man bitching that things were better when he was young?" and, yeah, kinda!

BECAUSE THEY FUCKING WERE.

There was a golden era in like the mid-aughts to the mid-20teens where, even if you were manipulating data that now lived in a cloud service, you did so via a full-fat app that was native to the operating system you were running on. Even Google Photos could be managed via a frankly wonderful app called Picasa that they of course bought, not built in-house, and it had native apps for Windows, macOS, and even fucking Linux for christ's sake. AND it had an iPhotos plugin so you could manage BOTH your Apple and Google photo stores through it. It was wonderful!

MOST good services ran like this back then. Dropbox? Ran basically as a system service that just synced your shit and all of your interaction with it was through your native OS file manager. Wonderful! 1Password? WORLD FUCKING CLASS native apps for Windows and Mac. Now it's a decent-for-Electron-apps app, which means it absolutely mongs cock compared to its old native version.

Nowadays, even the biggest developers on the planet are making basically only browser apps and porting them to greater or lesser degrees of care to phones, with desktop apps MAYBE coming along later, begrudgingly, if at all. And the ports are almost always offensive, blown-up phone app garbage.

It's probably not fair to his fiction writing that Cory Doctorow is probably best going to be remembered for coming up with the word "enshittification", but it's a great word that exactly describes what I'm talking about here. Not an original thought at all, but this whole photo thing has really driven it home to me, daily, of late.