Older people (seen it at 65+) will just click the nag without knowing what the button does and end up beaming up all photos to google cloud with no ability to disable the nag (it keeps showing up after a while) even when dismissed. If you are concerned about your data privacy, you may want to check on what photos of say your kids your parents are beaming up to google without their or your knowledge.
It is worse than that. It fills up your accounts cloud storage, where your Google docs, sheets, drive files etc are stored.
Once full you are caught in their trap: pay a monthly fee to the mafia or delete your data!
This flow is intentional and they have set up everything to bring you there. The Photo-Backup popup (and arguably the whole photo feature) helps to shovel users more quickly to the end of the monetization funnel.
storing important files with google is risky business anyway. you could lose them for any other stupid reason, and im sure there is nothing you can do but blame yourself for trusting them.
I use Ente photos [0] without logging in, just as a local gallery. Since their backup solution is E2EE, it does everything on-device – face/object search, map view, memories
[0] https://ente.com
One benefit of having a Samsung, you can uninstall google photos and still be able to use your camera.
Ah, bigcorp with the Pick-Up Artist model of consent: keep asking until they relent.
I find Google Photos asks me once every update. I got a Pixel 9 with 1 year of free Gemini Pro (or whatever version it is, their offering almost feels like Windows 7 Home Enterprise Ultimate), but because of their nagging about the backup I loathe to give them money to subscribe to Gemini beyond that.
I have a Google Pixel 1 I got from eBay, with "lifetime free photos backup", sitting plugged in on a shelf. Every evening my main phone syncs photos I take on it to my NAS, and another app copies the images from the NAS to that Pixel phone, which then backs it up to Google Photos... it's my finger to Google for being the enshittfiying assholes they are
The answer in the thread (which is quite hard to find) is to use the Google Photos app without an account.
The app has some very nice features that are locked behind account access though.
I wonder why google locked it..
because it's a feature, not a bug. wontfix