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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

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).

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).