14 ms·

Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive

265 points by vanburen 7y ago

DubiousPusher 7y ago
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. Edit: > You’ll still be able to use Backup and Sync on Windows or macOS to upload to both services 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.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  If you are up to self-hosting, Nextcloud has this feature as well :)
  - 0x54D5 7y ago
    And if you don't want to self-host Dropbox does this out of the box.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Sounds like it won't automatically sync to Drive so you might have to manually share the photo to Drive. Sounds like it adds a button press to your use case but then you can delete the photo from the phone without deleting it everywhere.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I haven't tried this, but you could probably getting syncing to work with Dropbox. Everytime I install Dropbox on my phone, I get asked if I'd like to sync my photos, and Dropbox pan-device syncing has always been pretty seamless for me.
- ljf 7y ago
  Just install this on a windows PC and point it to any folders you either want to upload now, or folders that you want it to watch in the future: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Pl...
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  You can continue to dump your files, including photos, to a Drive folder and have them sync. Google Photos was the service that Drive nagged you with to store you photos in instead of a Google Drive folder.
- Micoloth 7y ago
  If HN is confused, imagine the people out there
- rodgerd 7y ago
  OneDrive does a perfectly acceptable job of this.
- myu701 7y ago
  > I find it very useful to take a picture on my phone and then have it magically appear in my desktop file system later. I setup a Syncthing app on my phone and aimed it at my photos folder on my device. Once I connected it to the syncthing on my computer, it p2p securely syncs them over the internet, resulting in the same magic effect. My old alternate to that is Onedrive which has a Camera Upload feature in its app that uploads your photos to a Photos folder in your onedrive which you can have synced to a local folder on your computer. Same result either way, one is p2p and Open Source, the other is proprietary.
  - millettjon 7y ago
    I second this. It works well with android.
- ulfw 7y ago
  Sadly Backup and Sync is a buggy mess for me on MacOS. I have one picture apparently that keeps the app spinning and trying to upload but never does. It doesn't fail either. It just keeps spinning. Of course there is no log for me to see which photo the culprit might be (and hence reencode it or move it out from that photo folder)
  - dontblink 7y ago
    There is a log: https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTo-pyqVwGqJjI/?hl=en&gpf=%23!topic%2Fdrive%2F-pyqVwGqJjI https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTo-pyqVwGqJj...
    - ulfw 7y ago
      Thanks a lot! Unfortunately besides millions of lines of continuous log_decorator.pyo:137 Entering in DoesAutoLaunch(). log_decorator.pyo:137 Returning from DoesAutoLaunch(). there is nothing indicating why the batch process starts and immediately quits and then restarts again. Fun At least I can delete the 240MB log file now while I search for another service that lets me backup my 75GBs of photos and displays them neatly on an iPad/iPhone.
  - wnissen 7y ago
    Yep. I have left mine running for literally weeks (over 25/5 DSL, so not a screaming connection, but perfectly adequate before) and it has not finished syncing a library that was completely synced before. It should be just a metadata update, but somehow it found tens of thousands of photos and videos and is constantly falling over some big movie or Pentax raw file and dying. Total piece of crap.
    - eknkc 7y ago
      I tried my luck with that too, trying to upload my iCloud library from my Mac to google photos. It is a giant pile of shit. I went ahead and wrote a simple app that reads iCloud metadata and uploads directly to Google Photos API. It synced everything in a day. I dont understand how did they manage to mess this up so bad.
- soverance 7y ago
  For what it's worth, Microsoft now has their own apps integrated with Windows 10 that make it a breeze to sync photos from your phone to your computer. Check out the "Your Phone Companion" app (on iOS and Android).
apetresc 7y ago
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.
- AnssiH 7y ago
  The non-GSuite announcement is here (as linked from the linked article): https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p...
  - apetresc 7y ago
    Damnit :(
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      The Apple ecosystem welcomes you with open arms. I store every photo and video I’ve ever taken [hundreds of GBs, first photos are from my teens in high school circa 1997] in Apple Photos; highly recommend it. Yes, you pay a bit for the storage. Yes, it’s a closed ecosystem. Yes, I also backup my originals to Backblaze. But deprecation, ever, is highly unlikely while the UX is top notch. More good things coming for photos in iOS 13!
      - ChristianBundy 7y ago
        Or if you'd prefer to host your own media, SyncThing! https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
        toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Not as good as Apple Photos unfortunately (for photos and video), and I say this as a proponent of SyncThing [1]. On device facial recognition, album sharing and syncing, etc. Most people’s time is worth paying for something that just works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160755
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
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... I don't feel like this is a solution that adequately addresses user confusion, but rather arbitrarily introduces it.
- SippinLean 7y ago
  I'm confused, we'll have a separate Photos folder somewhere? That won't sync? I thought just photos on Drive wouldn't sync.
  - micimize 7y ago
    Right now photos sync with google 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." Really hope they give users a proper heads up and opt out button like "hey your photos are about to be duplicated do you want to keep the old copies?"
    - anchpop 7y ago
      I don't understand this. Lets say I have a 15gb drive limit and 10gb of photos. After this change, will I have 10GB of photos in Google Photos and 10GB of photos in Google Drive, putting me at 20GB total? Or do the duplicated photos not count towards storage limits? edit: "If you use Backup & Sync to upload photos and videos to Drive and Photos, it will upload a copy to each service, but it will not take up duplicate storage." I assume this applies here too
    - SippinLean 7y ago
      But is there a new service to sync your photos (outside of Drive)?
- jey 7y ago
  How does it currently work if I have sync enabled, then I "delete" a photo in the Google Drive UI? Does it get deleted from Photos too?
haunter 7y ago
Is there a site where people can bet when do Google shutdown products? I'm curious what's the o/u on Stadia right now
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Please don't post snark that's completely irrelevant to the article.
  - AimForTheBushes 7y ago
    It is kinda relevant since there's at least 17 google services biting the dust this year.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- newscracker 7y ago
  I don’t know of such a site, but there is one collating information about all the products and services killed by Google. It’s called...Killed by Google! [1] [1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- anchpop 7y ago
  They seem to be spending a lot of money on Stadia, but they spent big on advertising Allo too. I may be one of the only people on Earth who miss Allo. I started using it with one of my friends when our SMSs kept dropping and we both got addicted to the ability to google things inline and both see the same results. Really added something to the conversation. We also sent a lot of pictures (1000+) so maybe we contributed to it getting shut down. I expect MS and Sony to eat Google's lunch on Stadia, but we'll see. If it's successful it would be amazing for the linux gaming community, since all games on it would have Vulkan support at some level. I wonder what will happen to the games people bought if it gets shut down.
amitport 7y ago
So... Can we get Picasa back?
- fooey 7y ago
  No kidding, now Google provides no method at all for mass syncing photos back down? Is this a pivot to leverage photos for ecosystem lock-in?
  - muro 7y ago
    I think only takeout does it, unfortunately.
AnssiH 7y ago
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. I guess I'll have to migrate them to some other scheme...
- Lutzb 7y ago
  That's exactly our gsuite workflow. Support technicians take pictures on their phones and we use synology cloud sync to backup the Photo folder on Google Drive to our the home folder on our file server.
tjr225 7y ago
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. 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). Not affiliated in any way but I do hope they get more customers and stick around, it's a good service.
- jmathai 7y ago
  Flickr's a decent alternative to Google Photos but is not comparable to the combination of Google Drive + Google Photos. The combination they're deprecating is not offered anywhere else.
  - tjr225 7y ago
    Can you explain what the benefit of syncing between google photos and drive is? Is it just another backup?
    - jmathai 7y ago
      It means I primarly use Google Photos and seamlessly have every photo in Google Photos backed up on my NAS at home with no extra work. I also prefer my photos to be organized in a folder structure (which I've also automated) and the Drive integration lets me do this. Long answer: https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724 https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
      - tjr225 7y ago
        Hmm, this seems similar to what I do with Flickr. I have my NAS mounted to my MacBook where I process photos and transfer them to my NAS, the Flickr auto uploadr puts them up on Flickr. I wish this would be possible from my NAS which may be something I am missing. I suppose you lose the ability to go from Phone -> GPhotos -> Gdrive -> NAS. I'll check out the medium post when I'm home though.
iscrewyou 7y ago
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.
dddddaviddddd 7y ago
Biggest Google Photos API (replacing this for backup use cases) complaint is that geotags are stripped.
- mholt 7y ago
  Gah, yes, I hate this. We are discussing workarounds (other than associating with your Google Location History) here: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/38 https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/38 Google Photos API bug report (not that it'll do anything): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228
hitekker 7y ago
Is there a better free alternative or should I just pay for iCloud?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  It all depends on how much money your time is worth. If you have more time than money, look for an open source alternative. If you have more money than time, iCloud is the answer.
  - hitekker 7y ago
    Solid and simple advice. iCloud away!
- jypepin 7y ago
  I recently switched back (again) to iOS from Android and the backend was so painful, I decided to pay for iCloud and have things backed up, swearing never to go away from iOS again (still think it's a better platform after multiple switches back and forth). Really happy with it so far. Simplest way I've found to be able to get my photos and other stuff synced between multiple devices + family and friends (through shared albums)
  - hitekker 7y ago
    Thanks for your perspective! I'm not leaving iOS anytime soon so iCloud is indeed my best option.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
  Microsoft OneDrive isn't too bad, and copies photos fine without stripping data. For family plans, Google/Apple both run 30 bucks/year for 200 GB shared by up to 6 people. Comparable MS is 100/year for 6x1 TB, with Office thrown in. (Just spent a few minutes looking this up earlier today. Have all three free tiers, use MS most.)
- jmathai 7y ago
  iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos are good Google Drive or Google Photos replacements but it does not offer the sync functionality which Google's deprecating in this announcement. You're not gaining much in functionality with iCloud than you would with just paying for Google Drive now that they've made this change.
mholt 7y ago
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: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner 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. I would love to have help maintaining it, especially now given this announcement (because Timeliner does not require Google Drive). 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).
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  Perhaps it could read the location from exif data?
  - mholt 7y ago
    Location metadata is stripped from EXIF when downloaded through Google Photos API. Only alternative I can figure is to scrape the actual Google Photos web app.
- lysium 7y ago
  That looks great! I’d like to have support for iCloud. Have you tried it already? Alternatively, I’d consider adding it as data source myself.
  - mholt 7y ago
    I haven't (I don't use iCloud) - go for it! Would love to see more data sources. See https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/18 https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/18
ilikehurdles 7y ago
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.
benaduggan 7y ago
> 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. 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.
- sciurus 7y ago
  According to the consumer announcement > If you use Backup & Sync to upload photos and videos to Drive and Photos, it will upload a copy to each service, but it will not take up duplicate storage.
  - benaduggan 7y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something here, but how will photos taken on my phone, and uploaded to Google Photos, be synced to Google Drive now? Backup and Sync seems to only deal with files on a Mac/Windows (yikes) client syncing to Drive/Photos, not the other way around?
    - sciurus 7y ago
      I think the point of the announcement is to tell you that they won't be synced to google drive now.
flattone 7y ago
I can't wait to stop using Google services. Complete - all Google stuff backed up - replacement/self service path identified - explain to friends and family over past year or two Incomplete - libre phone - protonmail 50% - Non internet regular digital camera (older)
- discordance 7y ago
  I hear this every day on HN and i'm with you, but I still appreciate how much Google have given us with Android/Gmail/Search etc over the years
iamsb 7y ago
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.
- mholt 7y ago
  On it! :) See my comment on this page, would love to have more maintainers than just myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166539 - I've been using that for my stuff for about 6 months now.
  - iamsb 7y ago
    I will check it out.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  I'm considering Librem One, I hope their cloud storage is picture-friendly, and easy to backup.
  - iamsb 7y ago
    It is an interesting idea. Few things I am worried about is - US & China have regressive laws when it comes to internet - patriot act for example. So ideally I dont want my data in someone else's hands who might be bound by laws that I am not aware of. With the way twitter is censoring content of Indian right wing, I am now a days extremely paranoid about using any internet based services, which includes librem.
- dredds 7y ago
  Not sure about export, but linked recently on HN. (Android app available) https://bloom.sh https://bloom.sh
  - iamsb 7y ago
    See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20180775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20180775. Not sure yet another web based service is the answer here I am afraid.
Lutzb 7y ago
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?
- m-p-3 7y ago
  I guess they really want you to use Google Takeout instead of accessing the files directly :/ I guess it was nice while it worked, but this is another nail in my Google account coffin.
- fooey 7y ago
  Yeah, their FAQ just says: "To download all your items from Google Photos, you can use the Download your data page." This feels pretty gross to me. I can understand them wanting to make the separation clearer, but they should have had a sync solution in place first.
- felipelemos 7y ago
  I think this is the real reason after all.
hbosch 7y ago
> We heard feedback that users were confused by the connection between Photos and Drive. ... > 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. 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. 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...
jefftk 7y ago
Can we switch the URL to https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p... since that's the announcement for the consumer side of Drive/Photos? (Disclosure: I work for Google, but commenting here isn't my job)
- KerryJones 7y ago
  This needs to be upvoted more for the consumer. Last part that's unclear, my Pixel auto uploads to Google Photos -- is that changing? (does anyone know?)
  - muro 7y ago
    If you have photos app installed and enable syncing, there is no change, it will continue to upload your photos. The change is (AFAIK) that they will only show up in photos in the future, not in drive (if you enabled that).
    - slenk 7y ago
      But without that link it will be a lot harder to automatically back up the photos to more storage areas
      - muro 7y ago
        Yes
cmurf 7y ago
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. https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en Google Photos is terrible. Bad UI. Bad organization. Slow. And useless for videos.
SECProto 7y ago
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. 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? 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.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Earlier I think they were just surfacing the same photos in both places without using up storage (that would be a pretty shitty feature). Pointless, perhaps, but harmless, and maybe useful for those who wanted to be able to use driver's more sophisticated organizational capabilities. As far as the change, I can't imagine it will suddenly start counting against your quota. They're just stopping the behavior of syncing between the two folders.
bin0 7y ago
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.
RcrdBrt 7y ago
Isn't it just for paying G Suite customers?
the_af 7y ago
My day job is programming and I'm obviously computer literate, so it's an embarrassment to confess I don't understand: a- the difference between Google Photos and Google Drive. b- the difference between Google Photos and the folder titled "Google Photos" in Google Drive. c- whether I'll be able to backup/restore the pictures from my Android phone to Google Drive. d- whether this affects me at all. Color me confused. And if I am confused, I cannot imagine what regular users will think of this.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  Yeah, I saw the GDrive integration more like a nice to have. Never really used it, to be honest. > a- the difference between Google Photos and Google Drive One is an photo all with storage. The other is a storage service that can also hold photos. >b- the difference between Google Photos and the folder titled "Google Photos" in Google Drive. The later was a way to access the photos stored in Google Photos through a filesystem. >c- whether I'll be able to backup/restore the pictures from my Android phone to Google Drive. I think you back them up to Google Photos. >d- whether this affects me at all. It does if you relied on access to your photos through a gdrive-synced directory on your computer.
  - koala_man 7y ago
    I use it all the time! Thanks to this integration, I can just run leave the Google Drive desktop sync client running and have a local backup of all my photos.
- emddudley 7y ago
  Add to this: Whether the photos in Photos and Drive are your unmodified original image files, or the compressed "high quality" Google Photos ones.
  - pas 7y ago
    That probably depends on how GPhotos is set up to "store" your photos. If it's set to transform them, then you'll probably find the transformed ones in GDrive. If it's set to keep the original, then you'll find that.
wakkaflokka 7y ago
This disappointes me. I finally got my home backup system setup to my liking, and it's super simple and requires little to no effort on upkeep: 1. Google Photos synced to Google Drive. 2. Google Backup & Sync installed on the computer. 3. Backblaze Personal Backup software installed on the computer. Every time I take a picture, edit a document, etc., it's automatically and effortlessly synced to Backblaze. I had a Linux Box with Restic installed, but required more effort than I wanted to put in. Now I'm going to have to rethink how I backup my 40k+ photos.
womd 7y ago
... oh man.... So trade features to prevent confusion.... not a fan of that..
hawski 7y ago
Arrrgh! I'm already planning to get off ChromeOS (unscrew the write protect screw!) and Google services, but this takes it one point further. 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. I also used the integration to move some photos to Photos, because it is was easy on a Chromebook. With current resource hungry GMail, Maps and Photos low end Chromebooks are almost unbearable. And that was supposed to be their niche.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
8ytecoder 7y ago
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.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  The problem with iCloud Photos is that you can't share albums with non-Apple users.
  - virusduck 7y ago
    You can, actually! You have to use the custom URL that is generated.
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      That makes the album visible to everyone who has the URL, not just to specific users. On top of that, it's impossible to change the URL.
  - jmathai 7y ago
    My main issue with iCloud Photos is that there's no way to disable auto-upload. The idea of every photo I being uploaded in an instant to iCloud is such a deal breaker for me. As far as I can tell there's no option which can replace the Google Drive + Google Photos functionality they are deprecating here.
Causality1 7y ago
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.
- byproxy 7y ago
  They're still getting uploaded to cloud storage on Google Photos. What's the difference? Is Google Photos somehow more private?
techntoke 7y ago
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. 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.
president 7y ago
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.
spacedog11 7y ago
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.
petepete 7y ago
This is a good thing. I've had an ongoing support ticket with Google One for the last six weeks about syncing. The entire process is just broken. 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. 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. 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.
skybrian 7y ago
I'm wondering how this affects Chromebook users? Uploading photos off a USB stick already isn't easy.
lordnacho 7y ago
This is pretty confusing. What I'm doing at the moment is I use foldersync on all my devices, basically mine and my wife's mobile phones. 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. 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.
dingo_bat 7y ago
For anybody who's confused, just use one drive to sync all photos from your phone to PC. It works exactly as you expect. It copies the actual image files and let's you clear space on your phone later.
modzu 7y ago
DO NOT use google photos. it is complete and utter trash. there is no way to download all your photos once they are "backed up" to google. 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 deletes 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. 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 one by one! 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). are you kidding me? thanks google.
- demonllama 7y ago
  What about google takeout - https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
  - modzu 7y ago
    thanks for the link, will try this!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- justintime2002 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. If I go to photos.google.com, I can easily select a range of photos (Shift-Click to select an entire range) and download them all as a zip folder.
  - modzu 7y ago
    i encourage you to try this with thousands of photos; the list is lazy-loaded so it's not even possible to select them all.
- matt_heimer 7y ago
vanous 7y ago
This means rclone will stop working. Thanks for the reason to push me to move away from gphotos and gmail...
intopieces 7y ago
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. 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.
trevor-e 7y ago
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.
- draw_down 7y ago
  That's funny, they used to run ads (maybe still do) showing the iPhone's "low storage" UI that pops up when your disk is almost full. I guess their version is better because it doesn't throw a modal in your face, just silently bounces emails. Hmm.
therealmarv 7y ago
It never worked really on my side. It's clunky internally and I think a lot of corner cases are not well tested. 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.
- jmathai 7y ago
  It's not the most reliable but it worked pretty well. The Google Drive sync they're deprecating today is what made Google Photos not a 'dead end'. I've been using it for 3 years and am really bummed that this means I'll have to give up using both Drive and Photos.
mcwhy 7y ago
This feature is (ab)used heavily by pirate video/image sites
mandarlimaye 7y ago
One big missing feature in photos is OCR. In drive you can search images by the text in them.
dnr 7y ago
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync 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. The two main caveats are the lack of location info and that it won't re-download photos that have been edited.
makerofspoons 7y ago
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.
gandalfian 7y ago
But the only way I've found to attach a google photo to a gmail email is via the drive folder? Now what?
cotelletta 7y ago
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". 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.

265 points by vanburen 7y ago

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. Edit: > You’ll still be able to use Backup and Sync on Windows or macOS to upload to both services 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.

Semaphor 7y ago
If you are up to self-hosting, Nextcloud has this feature as well :)
- 0x54D5 7y ago
  And if you don't want to self-host Dropbox does this out of the box.
jayd16 7y ago
Sounds like it won't automatically sync to Drive so you might have to manually share the photo to Drive. Sounds like it adds a button press to your use case but then you can delete the photo from the phone without deleting it everywhere.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I haven't tried this, but you could probably getting syncing to work with Dropbox. Everytime I install Dropbox on my phone, I get asked if I'd like to sync my photos, and Dropbox pan-device syncing has always been pretty seamless for me.
ljf 7y ago
Just install this on a windows PC and point it to any folders you either want to upload now, or folders that you want it to watch in the future: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Pl...
ilikehurdles 7y ago
You can continue to dump your files, including photos, to a Drive folder and have them sync. Google Photos was the service that Drive nagged you with to store you photos in instead of a Google Drive folder.
Micoloth 7y ago
If HN is confused, imagine the people out there
rodgerd 7y ago
OneDrive does a perfectly acceptable job of this.
myu701 7y ago
> I find it very useful to take a picture on my phone and then have it magically appear in my desktop file system later. I setup a Syncthing app on my phone and aimed it at my photos folder on my device. Once I connected it to the syncthing on my computer, it p2p securely syncs them over the internet, resulting in the same magic effect. My old alternate to that is Onedrive which has a Camera Upload feature in its app that uploads your photos to a Photos folder in your onedrive which you can have synced to a local folder on your computer. Same result either way, one is p2p and Open Source, the other is proprietary.
- millettjon 7y ago
  I second this. It works well with android.
ulfw 7y ago
Sadly Backup and Sync is a buggy mess for me on MacOS. I have one picture apparently that keeps the app spinning and trying to upload but never does. It doesn't fail either. It just keeps spinning. Of course there is no log for me to see which photo the culprit might be (and hence reencode it or move it out from that photo folder)
- dontblink 7y ago
  There is a log: https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTo-pyqVwGqJjI/?hl=en&gpf=%23!topic%2Fdrive%2F-pyqVwGqJjI https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTo-pyqVwGqJj...
  - ulfw 7y ago
    Thanks a lot! Unfortunately besides millions of lines of continuous log_decorator.pyo:137 Entering in DoesAutoLaunch(). log_decorator.pyo:137 Returning from DoesAutoLaunch(). there is nothing indicating why the batch process starts and immediately quits and then restarts again. Fun At least I can delete the 240MB log file now while I search for another service that lets me backup my 75GBs of photos and displays them neatly on an iPad/iPhone.
- wnissen 7y ago
  Yep. I have left mine running for literally weeks (over 25/5 DSL, so not a screaming connection, but perfectly adequate before) and it has not finished syncing a library that was completely synced before. It should be just a metadata update, but somehow it found tens of thousands of photos and videos and is constantly falling over some big movie or Pentax raw file and dying. Total piece of crap.
  - eknkc 7y ago
    I tried my luck with that too, trying to upload my iCloud library from my Mac to google photos. It is a giant pile of shit. I went ahead and wrote a simple app that reads iCloud metadata and uploads directly to Google Photos API. It synced everything in a day. I dont understand how did they manage to mess this up so bad.
soverance 7y ago
For what it's worth, Microsoft now has their own apps integrated with Windows 10 that make it a breeze to sync photos from your phone to your computer. Check out the "Your Phone Companion" app (on iOS and Android).

apetresc 7y ago

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.

AnssiH 7y ago
The non-GSuite announcement is here (as linked from the linked article): https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p...
- apetresc 7y ago
  Damnit :(
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    The Apple ecosystem welcomes you with open arms. I store every photo and video I’ve ever taken [hundreds of GBs, first photos are from my teens in high school circa 1997] in Apple Photos; highly recommend it. Yes, you pay a bit for the storage. Yes, it’s a closed ecosystem. Yes, I also backup my originals to Backblaze. But deprecation, ever, is highly unlikely while the UX is top notch. More good things coming for photos in iOS 13!
    - ChristianBundy 7y ago
      Or if you'd prefer to host your own media, SyncThing! https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Not as good as Apple Photos unfortunately (for photos and video), and I say this as a proponent of SyncThing [1]. On device facial recognition, album sharing and syncing, etc. Most people’s time is worth paying for something that just works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160755

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

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... I don't feel like this is a solution that adequately addresses user confusion, but rather arbitrarily introduces it.

SippinLean 7y ago
I'm confused, we'll have a separate Photos folder somewhere? That won't sync? I thought just photos on Drive wouldn't sync.
- micimize 7y ago
  Right now photos sync with google 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." Really hope they give users a proper heads up and opt out button like "hey your photos are about to be duplicated do you want to keep the old copies?"
  - anchpop 7y ago
    I don't understand this. Lets say I have a 15gb drive limit and 10gb of photos. After this change, will I have 10GB of photos in Google Photos and 10GB of photos in Google Drive, putting me at 20GB total? Or do the duplicated photos not count towards storage limits? edit: "If you use Backup & Sync to upload photos and videos to Drive and Photos, it will upload a copy to each service, but it will not take up duplicate storage." I assume this applies here too
  - SippinLean 7y ago
    But is there a new service to sync your photos (outside of Drive)?
jey 7y ago
How does it currently work if I have sync enabled, then I "delete" a photo in the Google Drive UI? Does it get deleted from Photos too?

haunter 7y ago

Is there a site where people can bet when do Google shutdown products? I'm curious what's the o/u on Stadia right now

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Please don't post snark that's completely irrelevant to the article.
- AimForTheBushes 7y ago
  It is kinda relevant since there's at least 17 google services biting the dust this year.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
newscracker 7y ago
I don’t know of such a site, but there is one collating information about all the products and services killed by Google. It’s called...Killed by Google! [1] [1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
anchpop 7y ago
They seem to be spending a lot of money on Stadia, but they spent big on advertising Allo too. I may be one of the only people on Earth who miss Allo. I started using it with one of my friends when our SMSs kept dropping and we both got addicted to the ability to google things inline and both see the same results. Really added something to the conversation. We also sent a lot of pictures (1000+) so maybe we contributed to it getting shut down. I expect MS and Sony to eat Google's lunch on Stadia, but we'll see. If it's successful it would be amazing for the linux gaming community, since all games on it would have Vulkan support at some level. I wonder what will happen to the games people bought if it gets shut down.

amitport 7y ago

So... Can we get Picasa back?

fooey 7y ago
No kidding, now Google provides no method at all for mass syncing photos back down? Is this a pivot to leverage photos for ecosystem lock-in?
- muro 7y ago
  I think only takeout does it, unfortunately.

AnssiH 7y ago

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. I guess I'll have to migrate them to some other scheme...

Lutzb 7y ago
That's exactly our gsuite workflow. Support technicians take pictures on their phones and we use synology cloud sync to backup the Photo folder on Google Drive to our the home folder on our file server.

tjr225 7y ago

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. 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). Not affiliated in any way but I do hope they get more customers and stick around, it's a good service.

jmathai 7y ago
Flickr's a decent alternative to Google Photos but is not comparable to the combination of Google Drive + Google Photos. The combination they're deprecating is not offered anywhere else.
- tjr225 7y ago
  Can you explain what the benefit of syncing between google photos and drive is? Is it just another backup?
  - jmathai 7y ago
    It means I primarly use Google Photos and seamlessly have every photo in Google Photos backed up on my NAS at home with no extra work. I also prefer my photos to be organized in a folder structure (which I've also automated) and the Drive integration lets me do this. Long answer: https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724 https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
    - tjr225 7y ago
      Hmm, this seems similar to what I do with Flickr. I have my NAS mounted to my MacBook where I process photos and transfer them to my NAS, the Flickr auto uploadr puts them up on Flickr. I wish this would be possible from my NAS which may be something I am missing. I suppose you lose the ability to go from Phone -> GPhotos -> Gdrive -> NAS. I'll check out the medium post when I'm home though.

iscrewyou 7y ago

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.

dddddaviddddd 7y ago

Biggest Google Photos API (replacing this for backup use cases) complaint is that geotags are stripped.

mholt 7y ago
Gah, yes, I hate this. We are discussing workarounds (other than associating with your Google Location History) here: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/38 https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/38 Google Photos API bug report (not that it'll do anything): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/80379228

hitekker 7y ago

Is there a better free alternative or should I just pay for iCloud?

reaperducer 7y ago
It all depends on how much money your time is worth. If you have more time than money, look for an open source alternative. If you have more money than time, iCloud is the answer.
- hitekker 7y ago
  Solid and simple advice. iCloud away!
jypepin 7y ago
I recently switched back (again) to iOS from Android and the backend was so painful, I decided to pay for iCloud and have things backed up, swearing never to go away from iOS again (still think it's a better platform after multiple switches back and forth). Really happy with it so far. Simplest way I've found to be able to get my photos and other stuff synced between multiple devices + family and friends (through shared albums)
- hitekker 7y ago
  Thanks for your perspective! I'm not leaving iOS anytime soon so iCloud is indeed my best option.
B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
Microsoft OneDrive isn't too bad, and copies photos fine without stripping data. For family plans, Google/Apple both run 30 bucks/year for 200 GB shared by up to 6 people. Comparable MS is 100/year for 6x1 TB, with Office thrown in. (Just spent a few minutes looking this up earlier today. Have all three free tiers, use MS most.)
jmathai 7y ago
iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos are good Google Drive or Google Photos replacements but it does not offer the sync functionality which Google's deprecating in this announcement. You're not gaining much in functionality with iCloud than you would with just paying for Google Drive now that they've made this change.

mholt 7y ago

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: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner 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. I would love to have help maintaining it, especially now given this announcement (because Timeliner does not require Google Drive). 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).

ivanhoe 7y ago
Perhaps it could read the location from exif data?
- mholt 7y ago
  Location metadata is stripped from EXIF when downloaded through Google Photos API. Only alternative I can figure is to scrape the actual Google Photos web app.
lysium 7y ago
That looks great! I’d like to have support for iCloud. Have you tried it already? Alternatively, I’d consider adding it as data source myself.
- mholt 7y ago
  I haven't (I don't use iCloud) - go for it! Would love to see more data sources. See https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/18 https://github.com/mholt/timeliner/issues/18

ilikehurdles 7y ago

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.

benaduggan 7y ago

> 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. 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.

sciurus 7y ago
According to the consumer announcement > If you use Backup & Sync to upload photos and videos to Drive and Photos, it will upload a copy to each service, but it will not take up duplicate storage.
- benaduggan 7y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something here, but how will photos taken on my phone, and uploaded to Google Photos, be synced to Google Drive now? Backup and Sync seems to only deal with files on a Mac/Windows (yikes) client syncing to Drive/Photos, not the other way around?
  - sciurus 7y ago
    I think the point of the announcement is to tell you that they won't be synced to google drive now.

flattone 7y ago

I can't wait to stop using Google services. Complete - all Google stuff backed up - replacement/self service path identified - explain to friends and family over past year or two Incomplete - libre phone - protonmail 50% - Non internet regular digital camera (older)

discordance 7y ago
I hear this every day on HN and i'm with you, but I still appreciate how much Google have given us with Android/Gmail/Search etc over the years

iamsb 7y ago

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.

mholt 7y ago
On it! :) See my comment on this page, would love to have more maintainers than just myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166539 - I've been using that for my stuff for about 6 months now.
- iamsb 7y ago
  I will check it out.
m-p-3 7y ago
I'm considering Librem One, I hope their cloud storage is picture-friendly, and easy to backup.
- iamsb 7y ago
  It is an interesting idea. Few things I am worried about is - US & China have regressive laws when it comes to internet - patriot act for example. So ideally I dont want my data in someone else's hands who might be bound by laws that I am not aware of. With the way twitter is censoring content of Indian right wing, I am now a days extremely paranoid about using any internet based services, which includes librem.
dredds 7y ago
Not sure about export, but linked recently on HN. (Android app available) https://bloom.sh https://bloom.sh
- iamsb 7y ago
  See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20180775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20180775. Not sure yet another web based service is the answer here I am afraid.

Lutzb 7y ago

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?

m-p-3 7y ago
I guess they really want you to use Google Takeout instead of accessing the files directly :/ I guess it was nice while it worked, but this is another nail in my Google account coffin.
fooey 7y ago
Yeah, their FAQ just says: "To download all your items from Google Photos, you can use the Download your data page." This feels pretty gross to me. I can understand them wanting to make the separation clearer, but they should have had a sync solution in place first.
felipelemos 7y ago
I think this is the real reason after all.

hbosch 7y ago

> We heard feedback that users were confused by the connection between Photos and Drive. ... > 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. 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. 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...

jefftk 7y ago

Can we switch the URL to https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/ https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-p... since that's the announcement for the consumer side of Drive/Photos? (Disclosure: I work for Google, but commenting here isn't my job)

KerryJones 7y ago
This needs to be upvoted more for the consumer. Last part that's unclear, my Pixel auto uploads to Google Photos -- is that changing? (does anyone know?)
- muro 7y ago
  If you have photos app installed and enable syncing, there is no change, it will continue to upload your photos. The change is (AFAIK) that they will only show up in photos in the future, not in drive (if you enabled that).
  - slenk 7y ago
    But without that link it will be a lot harder to automatically back up the photos to more storage areas
    - muro 7y ago
      Yes

cmurf 7y ago

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. https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/thread/66336?hl=en Google Photos is terrible. Bad UI. Bad organization. Slow. And useless for videos.

SECProto 7y ago

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. 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? 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.

wutbrodo 7y ago
Earlier I think they were just surfacing the same photos in both places without using up storage (that would be a pretty shitty feature). Pointless, perhaps, but harmless, and maybe useful for those who wanted to be able to use driver's more sophisticated organizational capabilities. As far as the change, I can't imagine it will suddenly start counting against your quota. They're just stopping the behavior of syncing between the two folders.

bin0 7y ago

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.

RcrdBrt 7y ago

Isn't it just for paying G Suite customers?

the_af 7y ago

My day job is programming and I'm obviously computer literate, so it's an embarrassment to confess I don't understand: a- the difference between Google Photos and Google Drive. b- the difference between Google Photos and the folder titled "Google Photos" in Google Drive. c- whether I'll be able to backup/restore the pictures from my Android phone to Google Drive. d- whether this affects me at all. Color me confused. And if I am confused, I cannot imagine what regular users will think of this.

gtirloni 7y ago
Yeah, I saw the GDrive integration more like a nice to have. Never really used it, to be honest. > a- the difference between Google Photos and Google Drive One is an photo all with storage. The other is a storage service that can also hold photos. >b- the difference between Google Photos and the folder titled "Google Photos" in Google Drive. The later was a way to access the photos stored in Google Photos through a filesystem. >c- whether I'll be able to backup/restore the pictures from my Android phone to Google Drive. I think you back them up to Google Photos. >d- whether this affects me at all. It does if you relied on access to your photos through a gdrive-synced directory on your computer.
- koala_man 7y ago
  I use it all the time! Thanks to this integration, I can just run leave the Google Drive desktop sync client running and have a local backup of all my photos.
emddudley 7y ago
Add to this: Whether the photos in Photos and Drive are your unmodified original image files, or the compressed "high quality" Google Photos ones.
- pas 7y ago
  That probably depends on how GPhotos is set up to "store" your photos. If it's set to transform them, then you'll probably find the transformed ones in GDrive. If it's set to keep the original, then you'll find that.

wakkaflokka 7y ago

This disappointes me. I finally got my home backup system setup to my liking, and it's super simple and requires little to no effort on upkeep: 1. Google Photos synced to Google Drive. 2. Google Backup & Sync installed on the computer. 3. Backblaze Personal Backup software installed on the computer. Every time I take a picture, edit a document, etc., it's automatically and effortlessly synced to Backblaze. I had a Linux Box with Restic installed, but required more effort than I wanted to put in. Now I'm going to have to rethink how I backup my 40k+ photos.

womd 7y ago

... oh man.... So trade features to prevent confusion.... not a fan of that..

hawski 7y ago

Arrrgh! I'm already planning to get off ChromeOS (unscrew the write protect screw!) and Google services, but this takes it one point further. 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. I also used the integration to move some photos to Photos, because it is was easy on a Chromebook. With current resource hungry GMail, Maps and Photos low end Chromebooks are almost unbearable. And that was supposed to be their niche.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

8ytecoder 7y ago

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.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago
The problem with iCloud Photos is that you can't share albums with non-Apple users.
- virusduck 7y ago
  You can, actually! You have to use the custom URL that is generated.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    That makes the album visible to everyone who has the URL, not just to specific users. On top of that, it's impossible to change the URL.
- jmathai 7y ago
  My main issue with iCloud Photos is that there's no way to disable auto-upload. The idea of every photo I being uploaded in an instant to iCloud is such a deal breaker for me. As far as I can tell there's no option which can replace the Google Drive + Google Photos functionality they are deprecating here.

Causality1 7y ago

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.

byproxy 7y ago
They're still getting uploaded to cloud storage on Google Photos. What's the difference? Is Google Photos somehow more private?

techntoke 7y ago

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. 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.

president 7y ago

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.

spacedog11 7y ago

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.

petepete 7y ago

This is a good thing. I've had an ongoing support ticket with Google One for the last six weeks about syncing. The entire process is just broken. 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. 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. 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.

skybrian 7y ago

I'm wondering how this affects Chromebook users? Uploading photos off a USB stick already isn't easy.

lordnacho 7y ago

This is pretty confusing. What I'm doing at the moment is I use foldersync on all my devices, basically mine and my wife's mobile phones. 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. 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.

dingo_bat 7y ago

For anybody who's confused, just use one drive to sync all photos from your phone to PC. It works exactly as you expect. It copies the actual image files and let's you clear space on your phone later.

modzu 7y ago

DO NOT use google photos. it is complete and utter trash. there is no way to download all your photos once they are "backed up" to google. 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 deletes 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. 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 one by one! 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). are you kidding me? thanks google.

demonllama 7y ago
What about google takeout - https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
- modzu 7y ago
  thanks for the link, will try this!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
justintime2002 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. If I go to photos.google.com, I can easily select a range of photos (Shift-Click to select an entire range) and download them all as a zip folder.
- modzu 7y ago
  i encourage you to try this with thousands of photos; the list is lazy-loaded so it's not even possible to select them all.
matt_heimer 7y ago

vanous 7y ago

This means rclone will stop working. Thanks for the reason to push me to move away from gphotos and gmail...

intopieces 7y ago

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. 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.

trevor-e 7y ago

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.

draw_down 7y ago
That's funny, they used to run ads (maybe still do) showing the iPhone's "low storage" UI that pops up when your disk is almost full. I guess their version is better because it doesn't throw a modal in your face, just silently bounces emails. Hmm.

therealmarv 7y ago

It never worked really on my side. It's clunky internally and I think a lot of corner cases are not well tested. 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.

jmathai 7y ago
It's not the most reliable but it worked pretty well. The Google Drive sync they're deprecating today is what made Google Photos not a 'dead end'. I've been using it for 3 years and am really bummed that this means I'll have to give up using both Drive and Photos.

mcwhy 7y ago

This feature is (ab)used heavily by pirate video/image sites

mandarlimaye 7y ago

One big missing feature in photos is OCR. In drive you can search images by the text in them.

dnr 7y ago

Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync 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. The two main caveats are the lack of location info and that it won't re-download photos that have been edited.

makerofspoons 7y ago

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.

gandalfian 7y ago

But the only way I've found to attach a google photo to a gmail email is via the drive folder? Now what?

cotelletta 7y ago

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". 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.