How do you take a photo on android to only store it locally?
The whole photos experience on Android has been simplified to break that distinction and there is no way to even really know or realize what is happening - BY DESIGN.
The real answer here is, again, Android is not privacy first by default.
BTW parents taking medical pictures of their children != CSAM which is an acronym for "Child Sexual Abuse Material"... Taking care of your child's medical problem isn't "sexual abuse" despite the conflation of the two people are glossing over in this thread.
I installed an offline gallery and disabled Google Photos. For years and years Samsung android phones didn't have the option of cloud backups.
There's a very clear distinction between local and cloud, every single photo taken using any camera app is local only. Galleries, like Google Photos, and backup services like Dropbox have an explicit setting to enable cloud backup. Google Photo backup is very distinctly different from Google Drive and phone backups in general.
I use FolderSync to sync it with a self hosted NextCloud instance. If I am travelling, I prefer using Syncthing, a wifi file server running off the phone, or a physical wire to transfer photos. I know exactly what pictures are sent where and backed up with what method. I am not sure why you believe Android treats photo and file management like a black box, I don't believe Apple does either. Apple iOS devices are much more difficult to manually backup as they only allow background photo sync to iCloud, if the screen is turned off syncing to a third party will most likely fail. But there is a straightforward toggle to disable Photos backup to iCloud.
Android file management is superior to any other mobile OS. Android is file privacy first by design, as long as you are comfortable managing backup and syncing with self-hosted and self-managed solutions. I have gone the additional step of rooting my phone as well to get around any Android limitations on what folders certain apps have access to.
No one is arguing against the last point you made. No one was conflating the two.
> There's a very clear distinction between local and cloud, every single photo taken using any camera app is local only.
>Android is file privacy first by design
Yet we have the NYTimes article stating that the only ways Google could have access to the photos they tried to have a parent arrested for would be to scan content on the device, scan automatic backups, or spy on the text messages sent from the device.
The examples in the story were parents sharing images directly with their doctor, not the with the general public.
The whole photos experience on Android has been simplified to break that distinction and there is no way to even really know or realize what is happening - BY DESIGN.
The real answer here is, again, Android is not privacy first by default.
BTW parents taking medical pictures of their children != CSAM which is an acronym for "Child Sexual Abuse Material"... Taking care of your child's medical problem isn't "sexual abuse" despite the conflation of the two people are glossing over in this thread.