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Ladies and gentleman, it’s official: starting today, all the photos you store in Google+ can now finally be accessed in Google Drive. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve been using the same cloud storage this whole time. This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. We’ve seen Google toy around with this idea a few weeks back, even mention the move more recently. But only today has it become officially available.
Google says you’ll see the new Google Photos option in Drive’s slide-out menu for everything you upload from here on out. For your older albums, well, those will take a few more weeks before they’ll be available in Drive. No word on when/if we’ll see a separate Google Photos app arrive in the Play Store in the near future, but we’ll keep an eye out.
Sweet.
I have thousands of Google+ Photos. and they haven’t used up a single megabyte of my online google drive storage. Google gives you unlimited photo backups as long as you choose standard size in settings when you do AutoBackup. I assume this new change they’re doing will not impact this, am I right?
Does standard size mean that it is reducing the original quality? I have my Nexus 5 set to take 8 megapixel photos at 4:3 aspect ratio. I don’t wan’t to loose quality in backup.
Yes
Oh thanks. I actually just found the setting in the Photo app. It says Standard is limited to 2048 px. So that is like the equivalent of a 4MP photo. And that sux! No way. What is the point of backup if it is going to be reduced. They should not call that “standard” quality. I’ll keep Full quality setting and then just periodically move the files to my NAS and CrashPlan cloud backup.
Or better yet with my Office 365 subscription I have unlimited cloud storage. I’ll just use OneDrive to auto-backup photos.
you probably have 15Gigabytes of Free google drive space, am I right? OK, that space will fill up very quickly with auto photo backups, if you choose Full Backup in settings. My recommendation is that you choose Standard photo backup. This way you get infinite photo backups *yes, they’re resized to 4MP*, however, this size is PERFECT, for sharing on facebook, google+, emailing, or sharing thru text message or hangouts messenger. etcetera, its a perfect size. and Unlimited is good since it doesn’t interfere with your 15Gigabyte Google Drive limit. You might be asking yourself the question, “But i dont want my photos to be reduced to 4Megapixel, i want to keep them at their full 8MP”…. My response to that is simple: Google doesn’t actually reduce the photo quality on your cellphone. those remain high-resolution. you can copy/paste/backup those photos any which way you prefer. You can copy them to a NAS or your laptop hard drive, or whatever, and they’ll remain full resolution. Only the backed up photos on Google Photos Backup get reduced to standard size. You might get tempted to change the setting to Full Size photos, so they never get downsized, but then what will you do when you’ve reached your 15GB google drive limit? you cant even store a pdf file or an excel spreadsheet on your google drive anymore because your pictures have filled it all up, then you’ll have TWO copies of full resolution photos, one on your google drive and another on your phone, and if you backup your phone to your laptop, then you’ll have 3 locations of full resolution photos, your phone, google drive, and laptop. So since you’re probably going to backup your photos to your laptop anyways, you might as well use the unlimited photo backup feature with google photos, and let those stay standard size, and keep the full resolution ones backed up on your personal computer.
Image backups are ‘free’ as long as they’re below 2048 x 2048 resolution. Your 8MP camera shoots larger than that. So, when you choose standard size, the image is shrank to fit these constraints.
Update: I verified that indeed it is 2048 x 2048 and not 2048 total pixels.
From Google: Standard size photos are great for sharing on the web. If you choose this setting, your photos will be resized so that the longest edge of the photo does not exceed 2048 pixels. You can store an unlimited number of standard size photos using Auto Backup.
Yes. Which is why I’m not having that mess. I choose full resolution. I had more space from promotions, though. I’m thinking about getting the subscription if it comes to that.
Yeah, standard size might have made some sense when Photos was just a feature in a social network. But now that it’s become the primary source where you’re supposed to backup, edit, and organize your photos, it’s kind of absurd. Doing all that with anything less than full resolution would be a big waste of time and bandwidth.
I’ve been using full resolution since I started using auto backup, without really knowing what I’d do when I ran out of storage. Then I got a Chromebook and…problem solved.
now if they can just split this all together so I can utilize the Photos app without having to enable Google+, that would be GREAT. Feels like I’ve been reading about this since last summer.
Yup. That’s what I’m waiting for too. This was a nice first step.
completely agree. Its great that they are taking the steps…linking them together like this really makes me feel like they are starting the process
Which means they still upload through G+ then I assume.
yeah….they are not public though. But you HAVE to have Google+ enabled either way. I dont use it so it leaves me without a native gallery app on my Nexus 6. I dont mind having a 3rd party one but it would have been nice to have a stock gallery app of some time.
This just makes sense. About time
All my yes!! Now I can start using Google Drive instead of Dropbox. My promotion had ended in April. Lovely. Time to migrate all my stuff to Drive.
I must sacrifice 5 virgins for the Google Gods!!
I take it it is still split on the desktop then…
I’ve been freelancing from home for some time now, working simple jobs that only required desktop or laptop computer and access to internet and I couldn’t be happier… 6 months have passed since i started this and i made so far in total 36 thousand dollars… Basicly i profit 80 dollars every hour and work for three to four h most of the days.And awesome thing about this job is that you can decide when to work yourself and for how long and you get paid weekly. -> Great work oppurtinity! <-