And let us not forget that Google has your pictures and will use them as it sees fit, including selling them to the highest bidder and giving access of them to every government agency and law enforcement agency upon request (no warrants needed, Google wishes to "cooperate).
Sure, put your pictures on Google, sure, use the "Cloud" to store your information, it is absolutely, positively safe from prying eyes and abuse.

Even if pictures are under 16MB now, Google recompresses them to smaller files though keeping 16MP resolution. So it is a bigger deal than this post suggests.