Huh. Google Photos on my phone now had a feature called "Lens" that lets me select, copy or translate text from a photo.
That's pretty neat.
Is this… is this covertly sending a copy of the photo to a Google server without telling me
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So here's the thing. I do not consent to Google uploading my photos or microphone recordings to their servers. *Ever*. Under *any circumstances* (attaching files to a message on a Google service, like Hangouts, is the obvious, only exception).
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Replying to @mcclure111
Lens has a mix of offline and online features but it's primarily an online service. It does have the ability to do OCR and translations without their service, at least if you set it up that way.
There's local OCR without involving Lens. Try selecting text in recent apps instead.
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Google Photos makes it consistently *really* hard to tell if they're uploading things behind your back or not. For example, creating an album uploads all the photos, which came as a surprise to me the first time I made one.
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Replying to @mcclure111
Oh incidentally: Here's EXACTLY what happened.
*Click "add photo to new album"*
*It says, "Uploading"*
*I say, "Cancel"*
*IT UPLOADS ANYWAY*
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Google Photos is a client for the Google Photos service. It's not really a standalone application but rather a native version of the web site with more offline functionality. It's named after the service rather than Google Photos referring to the app specifically.
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It's also the built-in photo viewer app for your phone, which is taking the place of the default photo viewer that would historically be on any phone with a camera, almost always labeled "photos".
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It was historically called Gallery and that's still the sample app included by Android itself.
Google Photos is what Google chooses to ship as their gallery app on Pixels, if you're specifically talking about those. It's up to each OEM what they ship as a default gallery app.
Android itself doesn't include Google apps and services. OEMs license those and bundle them in their builds. It's up to them what they ship as their gallery app. Samsung provides their own apps for these things. It varies for other vendors. It's easiest to just ship Google apps.