"Simplifying" Google Photos and Google Drive

[d000hg]

Changing how Google Drive and Google Photos work together

I assume many of you got an email referencing this new "feature". I got y email this morning, which gave me a lot of advance warning

I'm not very on the ball with Google Photos as it is but my first impressions are people found a really useful feature tricky, so Google helpfully turned it off?
If Photos and Drive are now separate, this seems a step back to me - surely the whole benefit of Drive is I can store all my cloudy files in one thing? Now I have to potentially pay for storage in two locations.
Getting a bit deeper how would one now backup their Google stuff to a NAS or something, given photos cannot (?) be accessed from Drive now?

Interested to hear others' thoughts on this - I use Drive a lot but as I say, Photos I don't understand because I always used Drive to access my Google Photos previously.

[sal]

Personally I will be unaffected. 99% of any new photos me and my family make are with iPhone and they all go the family iCloud. The ones I make are also uploaded to google photo to share with extended family and friends (not everyone has apple device). I only use google drive for random crap I want to share with someone, my main file/documents cloud storage is OneDrive.

I don't see any practical application to backup cloud data to a local NAS, the flow is usually the other way around.

[d000hg]

I don't see any practical application to backup cloud data to a local NAS, the flow is usually the other way around.

Purely for ease of access. Though with modern fast, unlimited internet it probably isn't a big deal.