A Big Change Is Coming To Google Drive And Google Photos

Starting July 10, when you upload photos to Google Drive or Google Photos those images won’t automatically sync over to the other service as well.

Google announced the change on Thursday. It’s a move it says is meant to help simplify some features that have caused confusion for some users.

In addition to photos you upload not syncing to the other service, photos you delete from one service also won’t be automatically deleted for the other as well.

What does that mean for you?

If you weren’t relying on images you put on Google Drive to show up in Photos of vice versa, then the answer is probably not much. If you have been taking advantage of images auto-syncing, then you’ll have to do a bit more to make that happen going forward.

When it ditches auto sync in July, Google plans to add a new “Upload from Drive” feature to Google Photos. With that feature, you’ll be able to manually select which photos and videos from Google Drive you’d like to have imported into your Google Photos account as well.

When you copy those images over, they will essentially be duplicates of the originals. That means each one will count toward your storage quota on both services. That also means if you delete a video on Google Drive that you’d copied to Google Photos that duplicate video in Photos won’t be automatically deleted as well.

What about the images I’ve uploaded already?

All the images you’ve uploaded to Google Drive or Google Photos prior to the change will remain on both services, but will no longer update automatically.

Just like new pics, that also means if you want to delete those photos down the line you’ll need to get rid of them on both services individually. That alone might be a good argument to do a little photo spring cleaning over the next month so you don’t end up with twice the mess to clean up later.

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