DeGoogling Part 2

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:42:00 +0000

I learnt very quickly there is no grace period cancelling your google workspace account, you get charged for the few days into your current period and then booted out. It’s a good thing.

I’m now over my 0 bytes or 15 gbs quota depending on where you look in the admin panel but I’ve managed to subscribe to the Identity Centre free option. This means I can carry on using some services but not all. An important fact is you can still use Google Takeout so I managed to grab 33gb of photos and videos from there.

Edit My Cloud Identity Free is about to be cancelled and I’m not sure how to save it. I’m under the 15gb storage cap now after deleting a lot of things but that’s not being reflected properly. Sometime in August I’ll find out whether everything is completely gone and I lose access to my account. I can re-sign up but that’s not the point I want to be done with Google once and for all. If anyone knows how to get the free Cloud Identity back I’d be really interested to know.

Email
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I’m a paid up member of Fastmail now, it works and has a good user interface so I’m happy.

Photos
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I have Synology Photos up and running (Thanks Kev!). I still have to merge my 33gb Takeout with the backup from my phone, I also have the “February 2023” problem which is when I last used Takout to move photos from another account in and they had no metadata so I have around 10k photos all with the same date.

I haven’t gotten around to figuring out what’s wrong with Immich yet but will see how I get on with Synology Photos

Edit: This is proving to be a massive pain! I grabbed all my files from google takeout and ran it through Google Takeout Fixer then re-imported them to Synology Photos and I’m left with 10000s of photos all with the same metadata even after fixing them before importing. Synology Photos can’t seem to read the metadata form the files for some reason. I’ll have to delete them all and start again. Also the app is quite frustrating to use because it won’t differentiate between what are phone photos and ones uploaded to a seperate folder.

Files
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I’m testing out Synology Drive.

Online Document Editing
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No update

Maps
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I still get access to Google Maps so happy to use that for the time being.

Phone
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My workspace account is also the account I use to sign into my phone so I was worried that I might break something there. Thankfully it all seems fine.

One issue I’ve found is that Whatsapp can no longer backup to Google Drive I need to find a way to do this now.

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DeGoogling Part 1

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:06:27 +0000

This is going to be a series on how I plan on de googling my life. It’s not going to be easy but it’s becoming more and more necessary to get away from Google for my online services.

I have the following components that I need to migrate and I’ll document my progress on getting away from google for each of those.

Gmail
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~~I’m looking at moving to either Fastmail or Protonmail. This should be pretty easy so, the only thing holding me back is my own insecurities on screwing something up.~~

I moved to Fastmail.

Photos
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Immich is my app of choice, I’m already self hosting this and have my photos backed up but there is a breaking issue that’s stopped me putting all my trust in it. There are issue with duplicate images where the mobile app will constantly re-upload deleted images. This is apparently fixed in the latest version but my setup isn’t working since the update.

Files
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I’m going to run Nextcloud, I was quite happy with it on another server my only issue was it used snap so I’ll set it up in docker on my new server.

Online Document Editing
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I use Docs and Sheets quite a bit, I’m not really sure what the solution is here.

Maps
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This will be the hardest to replace, the amount of information that it has is amazing and really useful, I used it to plan all our holidays.

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De-Googling on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

DeGoogling Part 2

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