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Google Drive is separating from Google Photos – Here’s how to keep your photos synced

by 14 Comments

Remember when Google cloud storage used to be quite simple? You had one account to which you uploaded pretty much anything and then it was available everywhere? Yeah, well, not so much anymore. Starting from July 10th, Google will completely separate Google Photos from Google Drive. This means that if you currently back up your photos to one of them, they won’t be there in the other.

The new two new separate storage services will not automatically keep each others photos in sync. After the change, you’ll only be able to upload to either one service or the other, but not both.

If you want to keep them synced to both, though, there is an option. If you use the desktop Backup and Sync app for Windows or Mac, then you are still able to send photos from your computer’s storage up to both Google Drive and Google Photos, but it will upload a duplicate to each service, rather than simply sharing the same space, meaning each image is taking up twice as much of your cloud storage.

According to NDTV, Google says that this is in an effort to simplify things and to prevent accidental deletions in Drive to be synced up to Photos. Google says the decision to separate them is to help avoid confusion.

Google is also releasing a migration tool in July which will allow you to shift all of your photos and videos over from Google Drive to Google Photos. It doesn’t work both ways, though, it doesn’t sync. Changes you make on one side won’t necessarily be reflected on the other.

[via CNET]

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  • Uo

    Bro avoid confusion?😂 Lets make it so that you can’t view pictures you backup to drive! Let’s make you BUY more storage. Jeezus christ money hungry decision imo

  • BlockerBrothers

    Stupidity across the board.

  • Mikheil Ghvinianidze

    I have my own Server Running Ubuntu at home with 1gig connection. Only thing I have to do is find the right software to replace this Google service.
    I use to use Resilio Sync. When it was working it was working better than Google drive but then. Basic features became paid service.

    • Saigo Takamori

      Better than google and their hundreds if not thousands of engineer? I don’t think so.

      • Mikheil Ghvinianidze

        The most of the softwares and services are optimized for non tech savvy people. That is why.

        If you do not belive me try to access your Google drive with SFTP, or mount it as SMB.

        Only option you have is Web, Android and IOS app, windows software and maybe Mac OSX software. No Linux.

        Most of the engineers work time is dedicated to program what designers invisioned for simplicity for average non tech savvy user.

        Do I need to continue!

    • Pauline

      You said it “when it was working” that’s linux for ya, it’s not good for anything end users enjoy doing unless you want to spend weeks figuring out how to make something really simple work half as decently as on a end user OS.

      1% of humanity uses Linux as their main OS, with all the distros and updates going about, it would be a real pain in the but to maintain software for that tiny 1%…

      You know what they say: “if you’re cool enough to run Linux, you’re cool enough to figure it out”

      • Mikheil Ghvinianidze

        Actually when I was using Rsync It was between Win 10 and Android.
        Right now I am not quite sure if I am using anything. I have been so busy can’t motivate myself to do anything during my free time.

        Last Statment is true about everything.

        As they say; It is not about the car it is all about the driver(unless the car is trully shitty.)

        Reality is Linux is not shitty.
        Even for most people, most popular distdos are good enough. Problem comes when average non savvy people who are only trained on expert level with single Software only to use Linux.

        Most of the advence stuff is far easier and less time consuming to do on Linux(for example dcpromo.)

        As for Rsync the reason I could no longer use it was they changed basic feature that use to be free in to paid service.

  • Craig Harris

    The current system is confusing and this seems even worse but maybe they’ll introduce new desktop apps to allow syncing whole photo collection properly.

  • David Gomez

    Weren’t they two separate services in the beginning?

  • RidgeBoyGenius

    Does this mean I’ll have to pay for both Google Photos and Drive? If that’s the case, fuck you.

  • jw48335

    I just completed a migration of ~3TB of family data over to Google Drive/Photos from Amazon. I finally had bi-directional sync between family mobile devices and my home NAS. A fully-integrated environment where I could create Albums on my home NAS and they would automatically appear in gPhotos. Now they sh** all over that, literally a month after I get it all good? Fuck Google.

    Please make sure to go into Google Photos and provide feedback. I already hopped on chat with their support. My impression is they didn’t think through this change. I asked that my feedback be directed to the two PMs that made the blog post about the change. I’m fine with this change, as long as they provide API access to the photos repo. All it is on the back-end is object storage – they just need to give the NAS and app vendors API access, or present a posix front-end, which they already have coded for gDrive.

  • Emanuel

    I’m a tech enthusiast yet I struggle to understand how google drive/photos works. Try to help me with this… I have set my account to sync a folder to Google Photos (I’ve previously hidden the Google Photos folder in google Drive) and I’ve set Backup & Sync to remove my uploads if I delete something locally. Simple. But what happens is that Backup & Sync does its thing and deletes a few from the cloud, and nothing changes. My photos are still in google photos and there’s no sign of any change in google drive either.
    IMO drive and photos backup should be two separate apps as before, all managed internally to avoid uploading redundant info (google’s smart enough to do that)

  • Roger

    Google, thank you for showing me my way back to Onedrive.
    Nice job!

  • AlterVerwalter

    There is one simple reason for this split: If you – like all the people I know – use google fotos to backup and then “free storage on your device” – You are now bound forever to use ONLY google fotos, Your fotos exist ONLY on google fotos cloud as they are deleted from your device and not synced with Google Drive anymore.

    Before you always had a physical copy on your harddrive via google drive – this was the beauty of this solution: a very reliable and fast two-way backup/sync, which allowed you to work with all kinds of software on your pictures on your local harddrive (say: picasa, lightroom, gimp, etc) and everything got synced back to google fotos in no time.

    Now: your only chance to reposses your pictures is google checkout, which is a joke in itself (good luck handling these 300+ zip files…), and if your google account should get compromised somehow you are completely XXXXXX.

    Before you always had an uptodate copy on your harddrive via google drive.

    And you cant sync google fotos to a NAS (synology etc) anymore, to other cloud services like amazon fotos etc.

    This split is done to lock the people inside Google Fotos, to force them to use only Google Fotos, and stay with Google Fotos, like Facebook does.

    And I am wondering that this aspect didnt blow up more on media and internet….

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