Despite all the convenience and quality of Google’s sprawling ecosystem, some users are fed up with the fishy privacy policies the company has recently implemented in Gmail, Chrome, and other services. To its credit, Google has made good changes in response to user feedback, but that doesn’t diminish the company’s looming shadow over the internet at large.

If you’re ready to ditch Google, or even just reduce its presence in your digital life, this guide is here to help.

Dear Lifehacker, Three or four years ago, my Macbook died, and because I was an avid user of Time Machine, I was able to retrieve virtually everything I cared about from my external hard drive, except my photos. Because this tragedy happened to coincide with a software update, the updated photos couldn’t access the old photo library that was stored on the other drive.

Google's Photos Assistant is an amazing tool, most of the time. For starters, it's not too obtrusive, offering users a different take on their photos and videos when it thinks it has spotted a special event or image that is worth a little extra effort. But there's also a problem.

We're turning the lens around for this week's Ask Lifehacker. Our Managing Editor Virginia Smith posed a question in our internal Slack channel that cuts wide and deep: "It's safe to delete photos from my iPhone, right?"

Lens is Google's experimental, camera-powered search engine, but up until today, the service was buried inside Google's Assistant and the Google Photos app. Lens still isn't getting its own standalone app, but now Google is merging the feature into the default camera apps on a handful of Android devices, including the Pixel. With new prominence, Google is updating Lens with a handful of features that should land on your phone sometime "over the next few weeks".

Last month, Google rolled out its innovative Google Lens app to most Android phones. Here's how to get the most out of its visual-recognition abilities.

Earlier this month Google made Google Lens available for non-Pixel Android devices, and this week it's finally started rolling the feature out to iOS devices like your iPhone and iPad as well.

Google Photos is getting a tweak that will automatically adjust the white balance on your photos. While this seems small, it can significantly improve your yellowish indoor shots.

For years you've been saying you're going to scan all the photos you have in shoeboxes in the basement. Now's as good a time as any. There are a few smartphone apps that will help you with this so you don't need to pay someone or drag out a scanner to do it, but Photomyne and Google's recently released PhotoScan are the two top choices.

Android: In your default camera app, there's probably a shortcut to your phone's gallery app so you can quickly access the pictures you just took. If you'd rather use the awesome Google Photos app, there's an easy way to add a shortcut to your camera.

Android/iOS: Google has introduced PhotoScan, a new app that makes scanning and uploading old photos a heck of a lot easier.

Android: Your phone does the best it can to figure out which way a video should be rotated, but sometimes it messes up. A long time ago, Google's photos app had the ability to manually rotate an image. Now, the feature is back.

We've seen Raspberry Pi-powered photo booths before, but Make takes it a step further by adding in a touch screen and automatic uploading to Google Photos.

We already know that the Raspberry Pi makes a great photo frame, but DIYer Paul Stamatiou took it another step and integrated in Google Photos.

One of the best things about Google Photos is that it's easy to find a photo by searching, but today the service made it even easier to find that specific shot you're looking for. They have also added editing tools for Google's auto-generated movies that let you use your own music and add photos to them.

Android: Up until now, Google Photos backup was all-or-nothing. Now, Google's rolling out an update that lets you pick and choose which images you backup to your account.

Google Photos has a ton of awesome ways to edit your pictures. However, when you make a change, the app makes you save a copy to preserve the original. Now, Photos can make changes and preserve the original without clogging up your albums.

Hope you like Google Photos. Starting May 1, Google is going to start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup entirely. Fortunately, you still have some time.

Google Photos is pretty killer for managing all your photos, but it sure would be nice if you could share entire albums, right? Now you can. Better yet, you can even choose to let other people submit their own pictures to a shared album.