Google Drive is completely separate, except they added an optional feature pseudo-folder. (This can be disabled, and there are probably countless apps that can/do backup to Google Drive though!) And it has a backup/sync function, so if you connect your Google account it syncs photos to Google Photos.
#GOOGLE PHOTOS BREAKS FLICKR UPLOADR ANDROID#
There's a Google Photos app, default on Android phones. They just so suck at it, I don't know how can they consistently be so bad at it.Īnyway, the products and the concepts and the engineering and the flow is mind-boggingly simple. (Reading Google documentation is probably the most important thing NOT to do, it just confuses people while generally being completely unhelpful and less than useless.) And this is because Google is a master of failed communication. Of course I think it's absolutely a mess. Google themselves seem to understand it's not exactly clear, which is why they say "some users are confused by ". And I don't think regular non-tech users will find it understandable even if they read the documentation and tutorials. I know if I put more effort into this I could understand it, but I honestly don't think I should have to. Nothing about this seems intuitive or trivial to me.
I don't remember asking my Android phone to sync my pictures, either. I do know they are not easy to navigate now.
Google Photo? Google Drive? I'm not sure. backups!) Then I was surprised to find Google had automatically backed them up to. Then I got my phone stolen! I thought I had lost all the pictures on my phone, some of them with sentimental value (I know, I know. I'm also not sure if what I did was enough to backup my photos. I followed some unclear tutorial by Google, and I think that created the "Google Photos" folder. I wasn't sure if I had to do something about it. Google Photo? Or whatever it was called.įast forward till recently, and I got an email warning that Google Photo was about to be end-of-life'd. I believe Google automigrated all the pictures to. I stored pictures from my vacations there. Can't remember if it was a separate product that Google bought or if it was always Google's.
And no, I don't think I've ever synced a folder with Photos, the way I use Dropbox. To be honest it's a combination of "I should not have to care about this" with "I skimmed the documentation and Google's unclear warnings and they didn't clear my questions" and "I'm confused by Google's multiple overlapping products and their similar names". 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). Timeliner tries to compensate for this by allowing you to import your Google Location History, but this is not ideal either. One major limitation with the Google Photos API is that it's impossible to get the location data from the photos through it. I would love to have help maintaining it, especially now given this announcement (because Timeliner does not require Google Drive). It's got a few rough edges but should (mostly) work as advertised. I run this on a cronjob and it adds all my photos to a timeline in conjunction with my tweets and Facebook posts. 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: