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For the past 4 years we've been using a cheap Android tablet as a digital photo frame. It was going great, but over the years, it became apparent it wasn't an ideal solution:

• The app would pull many gigabytes over the network each day, because it scanned all of our photo files directly from our photos' network share, and displayed the original full-resolution photos (despite its own low-res screen).
• The automatic night shutdown and morning boot of the tablet started being very unreliable.
• And most worryingly, having the tablet plugged in 24/7 meant that the battery had started slightly

Unfortunately, I'm no longer with a workplace that subsidises new phones every two years, so it's meant that I've waited over three years for a new phone.

If I'm being honest, I haven't really needed to upgrade. Once you get to the upper-mid-range phones, upgrades these days are very iterative. There's not much that gets me excited about new phones these days.

The main thing that was really prompting me to replace my now-previous Pixel 7 was the below-par optical under-screen fingerprint sensor (which never worked well in full sunlight), combined with Google's policy change a year into the … Read more →

Other than viewing the photos taken on my Android phone, I've never used Google Photos for cloud storage/backup of my photos. Generally, I've never been comfortable hosting my private documents/photos etc. in a cloud that is controlled by proprietary profit-focused companies (email being the only exception).

However, one thing that Google Photos does really well is presenting your photos in a very nice way. Since the dawn of digital cameras, I've always manually managed the organisation and storage of our photos and videos. We have them stored on our NAS in a year folder, then a month/event folder.

I've never … Read more →