Get Ready for Changes in Google Drive and Google Photos
Starting July 10, when you upload photos to Google Drive or Google Photos, those images will not automatically sync with another service.
Google announced the change on Thursday . The move, he said, is intended to help simplify some of the features that have caused confusion among some users. In addition to photos that you upload without syncing with another service, photos that you delete from one service will also not be automatically deleted from the other.
What does this mean for you?
If you haven’t relied on the images you’ve posted to Google Drive to show up in your photos, or vice versa, then the answer is probably not all that great. If you’ve used auto-sync images, you’ll have to do a little more to make this happen in the future.
When it ditches automatic syncing in July, Google plans to add a new Upload from Disk feature to Google Photos. With this feature, you can manually select which Google Drive photos and videos you also want to import to your Google Photos account.
When you copy these images, they will essentially be duplicates of the originals. This means that each will count towards your storage quota for both services. This also means that if you delete a Google Drive video that you copied to Google Photos, duplicate videos in Photos will not be automatically deleted either.
What about the images I’ve already uploaded?
Any images that you uploaded to Google Drive or Google Photos before the change will remain in both services, but will no longer be automatically updated.
As with new photos, this also means that if you want to delete those photos later, you will need to get rid of them in both services separately. That alone might be a good argument in favor of doing a little general cleaning of your photos over the next month so you don’t have to clean up twice as much clutter.