Google knew that what they might be able to claim had a very shaky legal foundation, not even taking the public backlash into account. But there is a big difference between taking a picture and taking billions of pictures, analyzing them, and putting them into a publicly accessible database. German courts are not at all dogmatic in the way they interpret the law, because a law written long back might need to be reinterpreted today in the light of new technologies or societal developments.