Since I do not trust any cloud service with the master/only copy of my data (and I do not trust my phone -- the origin of my photos -- as a permanent storage device), I developed a tool called Timeliner which downloads all your content from Google Photos and other online services to your own computer: <a href="https://github.com/mholt/timeliner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mholt/timeliner</a><p>I run this on a cronjob and it adds all my photos to a timeline in conjunction with my tweets and Facebook posts. It's got a few rough edges but should (mostly) work as advertised.<p>I would love to have help maintaining it, especially now given this announcement (because Timeliner does not require Google Drive).<p>One major limitation with the Google Photos API is that it's impossible to get the location data from the photos through it. Timeliner tries to compensate for this by allowing you to import your Google Location History, but this is not ideal either. Edited to add (since there are a lot of the same question in the replies): no, the EXIF metadata does not contain the location because Google Photos API strips it out (it leaves most other metadata intact).
My day job is programming and I'm obviously computer literate, so it's an embarrassment to confess I don't understand:<p>a- the difference between Google Photos and Google Drive.<p>b- the difference between Google Photos and the folder titled "Google Photos" in Google Drive.<p>c- whether I'll be able to backup/restore the pictures from my Android phone to Google Drive.<p>d- whether this affects me at all.<p>Color me confused. And if <i>I</i> am confused, I cannot imagine what regular users will think of this.
So to address "confusion" with this, they're going to leave users with two separate copies of all their photos which no longer sync so that when you think you deleted a photo you might find it in your account again somewhere else later...<p>I don't feel like this is a solution that adequately addresses user confusion, but rather arbitrarily introduces it.
Can we switch the URL to <a href="https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p...</a> since that's the announcement for the consumer side of Drive/Photos?<p>(Disclosure: I work for Google, but commenting here isn't my job)
Dang. That's the one way I've found to get all my photos syncing to a folder on my desktop. I find it very useful to take a picture on my phone and then have it magically appear in my desktop file system later.<p>Edit:<p>> You’ll still be able to use Backup and Sync on Windows or macOS to upload to both services<p>Wait, I'm confused. The only way I could find to do this before was to enable dumping my photos to Drive and then allow 'Backup and Sync' to sync that folder. I must be missing something.
I have a nightmare story regarding this. I went on a two-week vacation and took a bunch of photos, and unknowingly had the "automatically sync on WiFi" option turned on. Well, at one point in time I did intentionally enable that, but forgot since I hadn't used the Google Photos app in over a year. Anyway, I get back from my vacation and realize I haven't received a personal email in the last 10 days. It took me a while to figure out Google Photos used up all my Drive storage, which then caused ALL my emails to silently bounce. No message or warning from Google that I had reached my storage limit, and of course there was no way to recover my lost emails.
When I read this title, I immediately assumed they were eliminating the "free unlimited ("high quality") photo storage for android users". I expected this because recent advertising for the Pixel 3A explicitly advertised that as a feature - so I thought it might be going away for non-pixel-owners.<p>Instead, after reading the article, I am just confused. I have no idea which photos are on drive and which are on photos - are they going to count double towards my used storage?<p>Regardless, I'm happy to have all my photos backed up elsewhere. And maybe this is the last piece of motivation I need to finish setting up a self-hosted cloud - storage is certainly cheap enough.
I'm not surprised this is happening. This is partly why I never permitted Google to put my photos in their Google Photos solution. My photos are _files_, with file extensions, taking up varying sizes, belonging inside of folders. Google Photos treated them as higher level items in some SaaS product, like posts on Instagram or something. If you wanted archival -- true archival -- then you shouldn't store your media in Google Photos any more than you should store it on a facebook timeline.
Arrrgh!<p>I'm already planning to get off ChromeOS (unscrew the write protect screw!) and Google services, but this takes it one point further.<p>If they remove this option, they should better integrate Google Photos with Chromebooks. Chromebooks have somewhat buggy Drive integration, but it's there. Android at least have it better, because if you can select files from Drive, you can do the same with Photos. GMail finally has proper integration with it.<p>I also used the integration to move some photos to Photos, because it is was easy on a Chromebook.<p>With current resource hungry GMail, Maps and Photos low end Chromebooks are almost unbearable. And that was supposed to be their niche.
DO NOT use google photos. it is complete and utter trash.<p><i>there is no way to download all your photos once they are "backed up" to google.</i><p>if they called it "transfer to google" that would be fine, but using the terminology "back up" which implies an ability to "restore" is a class-action in the waiting. the app actively <i>deletes</i> the photos from your phone, puts them into their cloud app, and then you are forced to interface with the cloud app to actually do anything with them.<p>i have years of my life "backed up" into google photos and no way to download them to a computer for printing, editing, sorting, etc, except <i>one by one</i>!<p>the only pseudo-official way to get all of them was via drive, and it already fails for large collections (i haven't read why they are discontinuing it but maybe something related).<p>are you kidding me? thanks google.
This is a good thing.<p>I've had an ongoing support ticket with Google One for the last six weeks about syncing. The entire process is just broken.<p>I have a normal-ish workflow; take photos with my camera, process on my MBP and export to a folder that Google Backup and Sync is meant to sync with Photos.<p>What actually happens is some files sync and others don't, GBaS then informs me "15 files couldn't be added to Photos, they are in your Google Drive taking up 45mb" and gives me a list of files. No info on what went wrong, no error, no clue. Then I'm left to manually pick up what's left. But the problem isn't with 'my' stuff, I send the photos to Google and they're meant to organise them. That all works, the problem lies between Photos and Drive.<p>It's frustrating because individually, both are fine. I'd go as far to say as Photos is great. But give me a tool dedicated to photos please Google.
> We heard feedback that users were confused by the connection between Photos and Drive.<p>...<p>> Currently, G Suite users can choose to sync Photos to Drive. This means that when they upload a file to Photos, it’s automatically uploaded to the Google Photos folder in Drive. Once these changes go into effect, this folder will stop receiving updates. It won’t go away; it will just stop syncing with Photos.<p>How does this solution solve the problem stated above!? Have they done any actual user research on this? Surely there is a better UX to solve for this rather than just totally severing the connection between Photos and Drive. I am glad to hear that my photos won't be lost in this.<p>I'm sure a vast majority of Google Photos users are mobile only, and so this change will be more or less invisible. But, jeez. You'd think this whole issue could be resolved with a single helpful tooltip...
> Since photos and videos will no longer sync across both products, items copied in Original Quality will count towards your storage quota in both Drive and Photos.<p>This is absolutely ridiculous, I feel that they should have just continued the idea that photos is a view layer on top of storage. Now I guess I'll just have to give them more money for more storage now that all my photos will double count towards my quota if I choose to use both services.
Proving once and for all that the proper answer to "but people love our products" is "until you shut them down, you utterly useless twats".<p>Android to Google Drive to Desktop photo sync was one of the few things that actually worked perfectly, which I set up for family members. Now I have to explain to them why their expensive phone, laptop and desktop can't fucking copy a picture from one to the other. But I'm sure there's some shitty, intolerable Fischer-Price web UI in which you can't do jack.
Wow, I can't really see a reason for Google to implement this change. Now photos are locked on Google Photos with no simple way of creating backups on a local machine via Google Drive?
I have used a phone=>Photos=>Drive=>computer setup for several less technical people to have their photos sync from their phones to computers automatically so they can use local apps to browse and edit them.<p>I guess I'll have to migrate them to some other scheme...
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet:<p><a href="https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync</a><p>is a command-line tool (in Python) that downloads (incrementally) your Google Photos content directly using the Photos API, not through Drive. I just set it up recently.<p>The two main caveats are the lack of location info and that it won't re-download photos that have been edited.
That’s literally the only reason I picked Google over anyone else. Switching to iCloud I guess. I have mentioned this before - it’s not about privacy. One mistake is what it takes to either them blocking you or you locking yourself out of your account. The only safeguard is to keep a downloaded copy that’s accessible. I do that with Photos+Drive sync. Similarly for email, contacts ...etc. Google is stripping away that.
Please don't do this. You are not actually solving any problems with this change. You are simply making it more difficult for users to backup/sync their photos.<p>I use this daily. I am a big fan of Google Photos currently but that may quickly change if this is implemented. I currently use rclone on Linux to backup my Google Photos. It is great and I can modify or delete my photos from any device within Google Photos and then have the changes synced to my desktop and backup service. What you are doing will make it a lot more difficult to backup my pictures or keep a copy saved locally.
Anyone looking for alternatives- I've been using Flickr pro and loving it. It's cheap, no longer requires a yahoo auth, and works really well.<p>I initially resisted when they changed their pricing scheme and set up my own "self hosted" solution. After about 5 months of this I decided I missed Flickr and that it was worth the 60$ a year or whatever(I honestly don't know).<p>Not affiliated in any way but I do hope they get more customers and stick around, it's a good service.
I wonder if now it is good time to start a service which helps you host all important stuff - mail, picture books, contacts - and so on with offline backups which are under your control. Essentially ship me a tape every 6 months or so which has all my content, encrypted at rest.
Much as I loathe Google's ADHD, I've had more than one female friend call me in a panic after finding out their nudes were ending up on Google Drive with no action on their part and they couldn't get photo upload to turn off and stay off.
I see they are going the Photos for the Mac and iCloud Drive route. Meh. It makes sense but it was a feature for Google Drive. Now it just seems like an annoyance for people to try to deduplicate their Photos.
So if I understand this correctly, you now have to explicitly put photos you obtained outside of your Google devices (and therefore stored in Google Drive) into Google Photos, a service that lets you share / view photos.<p>This change makes sense to me because it mirrors what I do on my computer, but it seems like a step back from the idea that mobile and desktop/laptop paradigms are supposed to be merging. It seems like that’s what they were trying to do, but it was too confusing so they changed it.
This disappointes me.<p>I finally got my home backup system setup to my liking, and it's super simple and requires little to no effort on upkeep:<p>1. Google Photos synced to Google Drive.
2. Google Backup & Sync installed on the computer.
3. Backblaze Personal Backup software installed on the computer.<p>Every time I take a picture, edit a document, etc., it's automatically and effortlessly synced to Backblaze.<p>I had a Linux Box with Restic installed, but required more effort than I wanted to put in.<p>Now I'm going to have to rethink how I backup my 40k+ photos.
This is pretty confusing.<p>What I'm doing at the moment is I use foldersync on all my devices, basically mine and my wife's mobile phones.<p>But I sync the photos onto gdrive. It's only later that I discovered photos automatically looks through your gdrive and shows you your timeline and does fancy, spooky face recognition.<p>Which is working at the moment, but will this flow be affected? Sounds like maybe not as they are talking about some sort of separate photos storage that goes to gdrive, not the other way.
As far as I can tell, this announcement is _only_ referring to GSuite users (i.e, work accounts). Their rationale explicitly calls out "consumers" (i.e Gmail/personal accounts) as having a different use case. I don't believe it will apply to end users, unless you've got a personal GSuite account for your own custom domain.
It never worked really on my side. It's clunky internally and I think a lot of corner cases are not well tested.<p>The worst part is that Google Photos is a dead end. Like put photos into a hole which you can only edit with Google internal tools. Not ideal for all creators and more professional photographers although I'm a big fan of Google Photos.
Does anyone know if Photos is actually profitable for Google or is it just a loss leader to get people on the Google platform? It's really hard to understand how they can support a service that allows unlimited photo uploads. Makes me wonder if they will need to charge for it someday in the future.
Seems like an opportunity to write a Lambda function or similar to sync your photos using their respective APIs. I wonder if there are any web hooks available for Photos that you could set to trigger the function or if it would just need to run every 15 minutes or something.
I have an Android One phone. When I take video, it appears only in Google Photos, but cannot be played, says it's processing. Doesn't matter what platform or browser, the video can only be downloaded, not played within Photos.
<a href="https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en</a><p>Google Photos is terrible. Bad UI. Bad organization. Slow. And useless for videos.
I can't wait to stop using Google services.<p>Complete
- all Google stuff backed up
- replacement/self service path identified
- explain to friends and family over past year or two<p>Incomplete
- libre phone
- protonmail
50% - Non internet regular digital camera (older)
They could have at least kept the option for people who want this feature, and turned off Cloud sync by default. Just removing the whole feature seems excessive.
I used to use google photos. But then, I found that it was building facial profiles of every one in my pictures, and creating "albums" thereof. I didn't ask for that, and it's creepy as all get-out. Good-bye, google photos.