Is data loss less important to you than possible leakage of your photographs?
These are the tradeoffs the GP made choices in.
No: I encrypt my data locally, using protocols I believe/hope are strong enough, and then upload the encrypted data to cloud storage providing multi-level redundancy.
Right now, this is a somewhat painful process, since Google (quite deliberately, I think — 'Don't Be Evil' is now but a fading memory) choose not to facilitate it, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be as simple and straightforward as using the cloud without encryption.
Key management isn't really that difficult: have one master key, stored encrypted under the highest-strength passphrase one can remember, accessible using trusted client software (i.e. not something running in a browser). Done.
so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).
the only real way is to cache all that information on each device that would want to access those photos, which is doable, but it would feel a bit awkward, especially if sharing any of the data with other devices
That's the only way to view any information: it has to be downloaded.
> so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).
An client-side-encrypted photo store could easily support uploaded thumbnails (just not server-generated ones), and separate downloads for them. A client-side-encrypted data store could easily support separately-encrypted metadata, and there are some protocols for cryptographically-secure queries too.