So Google I/O happened last week and the thing everyone's actually going to use out of it isn't Android M or Now on Tap, its the new standalone Google Photos app with the "unlimited free storage" pitch. I've been meaning to write about this since Thursday and kept getting distracted, but I finally sat down Saturday afternoon with a coffee and about 40GB of backlogged photos and just did the migration properly instead of half-assing it like I usually do with this stuff.
Quick recap in case you missed it: Google spun Photos out from Google+ (thank god, that integration was always clunky) and it's now its own thing on iOS, Android, and the web. The pitch is free unlimited storage for photos and video, no more counting against your 15GB Gmail/Drive quota. Which sounds too good to be true, and it kind of is, but only in one specific way that actually matters.
The catch, because there's always a catch
"Unlimited" applies to what they call High Quality storage. Photos get compressed down to 16 megapixels max, video down to 1080p. If you upload at Original quality instead, meaning your files keep their full resolution and don't get touched, that counts against your regular Google storage, same 15GB free tier you already have for Gmail and Drive.
For most people this doesn't matter even a little bit. My phone (a Nexus 5, don't laugh) shoots at 8 megapixels, so it fits under the 16MP ceiling with room to spare and nothing gets touched. But I also shoot with a real camera sometimes, a Nikon that outputs 24 megapixel files, and those get downsized if I let Photos have its way with them. I decided I don't care. I'm not printing billboards. If I need the raw files ten years from now I've still got them on a drive in a closet, this is just for having stuff I can actually find and share, which honestly matters more to me than pixel-peeping a photo of my nephew's birthday cake.
How I actually did the migration
I didn't trust the "import from Google+" button to do anything sane with an existing mess, so I went a slower route:
- Downloaded the desktop uploader for Mac (they've had this bundled with Drive uploads before, its basically the same tool with a Photos-specific setting now)
- Pointed it at my main photos folder, which is a genuinely chaotic pile going back to a 2005 folder called "camera stuff" that I am not proud of
- Set it to High Quality, unlimited, and let it churn overnight because I have garbage upload speed on my home connection
- Checked back Sunday morning and it had actually finished, which surprised me honestly
One thing worth knowing if you try this: it does NOT delete or touch your local files. It's purely an upload. So don't expect this to free up space on your laptop, that's a separate manual cleanup you still have to do yourself, which I have not done yet because I am a coward about deleting things.
Is this actually better than what I was doing before?
I was on Dropbox before, paying the $9.99 a month for 1TB because I also use it for other files. I'm not canceling that, I still need it. But I was never using Dropbox's photo view for anything, it's just a dumb file folder to me. Google Photos actually has decent search, it found a picture of a birthday cake when I searched "cake" and I did not tag that photo with anything, ever. That's genuinely a little unsettling and also kind of great.
The face grouping thing is also in there and it's fine, not amazing, keeps confusing my sister and her friend who apparently look alike enough to fool it. Whatever, its a nice-to-have.
If you've got a big backlog sitting on an external drive somewhere, this weekend's as good a time as any to just get it uploaded. Worst case you're out an afternoon and some upload bandwidth. Best case you never lose those photos to a dead hard drive, which, if you've been doing this as long as I have, has happened to you at least once already.