Google Photos – Unlimited Backup of all your Photos/Videos
Have you ever had your phone stolen, lost it or simply wanted an automatic way of having your photos backed up? If you’ve ever lost a phone before, I’m sure you’ll have had the thought that the photos are sometimes more valuable than the phone itself.
In short, Google Photos automatically uploads photos and videos from specified folders on your smartphone.
The highlight feature of Google Photos is that there is unlimited storage for photos and videos, provided you are willing to sacrifice a little bit of quality
Advantages:
- Photos and Videos are backed up automatically – with no storage limit albeit at reduced quality
- See example of reduced quality here – a photo of a monkey at Werribee Zoo in Victoria: Original / Google Photo Upload
- People’s faces can be grouped together within the app – i.e. you can look for people by faces
- Google will share memories with you (e.g. 1 year ago today..)
- Google makes collages for you
- Google sometimes recognises a group of photos which were taken roughly side by side and stitches them into Panoramos automatically.
- Google sometimes makes short videos with your videos/photos
- Google combines other information it has about you (location, airfares from emails, hotel bookings) to create “albums” for you based on the photos you’ve taken. For example, Google combines this information and knows that you probably had a holiday in Singapore from January 1-3. You’ll probably see an album called “Trip to Singapore” with all your photos taken in Singapore shortly after the photos get uploaded.
Disadvantages:
- You will require a Gmail (Google) account
- If you wish to upload photos & videos in original quality, it will eat into your regular Google Drive quota which is 15GB by default (shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos)
- If you’re big on privacy, you might not be comfortable with having your Photos & Videos saved on the “cloud”
- If you often take photos with confidential/sensitive information, you may find these photos will get automatically uploaded
- Although the facial recognition feature that groups the same person together is really quite impressive, it does sometimes get it wrong.
Personally for me, the reduced quality is fine – but I am not big on photos. I just really like the convenience of having everything backed up without having to think about it.
Other Useful Tips
- You can select whether uploads are done over Wi-Fi only or data as well
- You can select which folders to be automatically uploaded. This is useful if..
- You use a third party camera app that saves photos/videos into a different folder
- You want WhatsApp Images (i.e. pictures you send to others, or pictures others send to you) backed up.
- You can get the app to scan your images and delete those that have already been backed up to the cloud.
Any comments from anyone else that uses Google Photos? What do you love about it and what do you hate? Please leave comments and don’t forget to subscribe!
