I hate Google photos because I feel it’s too invasive with that cloud backup that you never really know if a photo is online or on device, so I disabled it in my Google Pixel.
Now Google camera is broken, says it can’t show previews until I enable Google photos again.
Is there any workaround? Tried with many other galleries, but seems it’s hard coded to Google photos…
If you’d like them out of Google, but still on your phone:
You can use Google takeout to download all of your photos. Then delete them from Google, and copy the images you downloaded back to your phone manually. Finally, use a gallery app that can access files stored anywhere on the file system to view them (Simple Gallery seems to work pretty well - it should automatically find the images regardless of which folder you stick them in).
Good god. Why is Google trying to act like Apple now? I had no idea they were building such a gross walled garden. Thank you for giving OP a way out and warning the rest of us what kind of trap the Pixel has become.
Why are people downvoting this?
Google Photos is actually a far cry from Apple Photos and iCloud. Pretty interoperable across platforms and easy to take data elsewhere.