I already escaped everything big tech related except for my iPhone, but i will get myself a GrapheneOS pixel at some point. My biggest problem right now is my photos being stored on icloud. What can i do to prevent that?
Settings -> your name -> icloud -> saved to icloud -> photos “off”.
Turn on advanced data protection.
Back up your photos first.
I also do not store photos on icloud so I understand that a person might want that.
Why do you want that?
Self hosted immich
While I do recommend this, it doesn’t answer OP’s question of preventing images from going to iCloud
The obvious answer is “stupid using iCloud and use Immich instead”.
Immich is fantastic!
There’s also hosted and encrypted Ente at ente.io.
You can go through iCloud settings and delete all backups then sign out of iCloud.
You probably know this. And, you might suspect as I do that nothing is ever really deleted, they just disable your access to it and don’t do anymore backups. There’s nothing we can do about that, we gave it to them, they’ll keep it forever, associated with your account, no matter what they say--at least that’s what I think. Maybe Apple really does delete it, but I doubt it.
Google doesn’t delete anything, I doubt Apple does, either:
Apple positions iCloud as a “must use” — but I still use my phone with syncs and backups going to my computer. No iCloud. All photos get transferred to the computer on each sync, where they get sorted and touched up without the Photos app, and then a curated folder with stripped metadata etc. gets synched back to the phone.
I have three drives of 1TB on which I replicate my entire collection.
Hetzner + Nextcloud or „Ente.io“
