Hey, Dan here for Macworld and today I just want to make sure you’re protecting your photos. Now there’s a good chance that most of you already are backing up your photos and video from your iPhone through iCloud, Google Photos, or another service and that’s great, but I’m also sure you probably have a parent or sibling that isn’t, especially if they’ve already filled up their free allotted iCloud storage. So please go make them, or do it for them. Right now I just want to show you how easy it is to get FREE protection from losing all your photos if your phone gets lost, stolen, or broken and with Google Photos.
Go to the app store and download Google Photos.
Once that’s finished, go ahead and open it up.
You’ll need to allow Google Photos to access all your Photos.
It’s your choice on whether you want notifications but personally I lean towards no to the distractions.
Now you’ll have the options to Back Up and Sync, which is precisely what you want to do, and what quality to save. For unlimited photos and video storage for free, Google Photos will need to compress those images. To be honest, their compression quality is quite good so you really won’t be missing much. You could save original quality but then you’d hit the free storage limit and you’d end up in the same boat as you were with iCloud. We won’t go into that today.
Finally you can choose to use cellular data to back up if there’s no wi-fi. This is really going to depend on your data plan and the amount of photos and videos you take. If your plan has a limited data cap or if you’re just using Google Photos as a free backup and you’re unlikely to touch it often, then leave this off.
Log in with your Google account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
There are some things to note. First, Google Photos will save all the photos you take on the iPhone but if you delete something from the Apple Photos app, it won’t necessarily delete it from Google Photos. However if you try to delete an image from the Google Photos app, it will ask if you want to remove it from the phone as well. Second, the background upload isn’t perfect and you may occasionally want to open up the app to force a backup. With these settings though, I had good backup experience if the phone was both on wi-fi and plugged in charging.
Finally, if you edit the photo in the Apple Photos app, Google will treat that edit as a new image and save it in addition to the unedited one.
With all that said, you should be able to rest a little bit easier knowing that the only priceless things on your iphone are now a little bit safer.