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Google Photos: How to back up my photos and vidoes

pavloslee95

pavloslee95

Lurker
Hello community,

I just bought the Pixel 2, and one of the main reason was the awesome camera and the service of unlimited origial quality storage of my photos to the the Google Photos cloud until 2021.

But I have some questions regarding this:

-Does original unlimited storage is offered only for the shots taken from the Pixel 2 phone or for any photo stored in the device (e.g. old photos from previous phone)?
-Do I get the unlimited service only via phone or can I use the Google Photos online? I've been uploading my photos/videos only via my phone and I had absolutely no problem apart from the fact that the whole process of backing up was too slow. So I started uploading them via my pc, but soon I received a message 'You've run out of Google Photos storage'. Does anyone know what went wrong? Especially the mention of Google Drive makes me more confused since I'm uploading to Google Photos and not Google Drive.
 

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But you weren't uploading them from your phone, you were uploading them from your computer. Google's offer, as described in their marketing, is for unlimited storage of photos and videos "taken with your phone", not that you will have unlimited image/video storage no matter where you upload them from just because you own a Pixel.

So the question is how are they checking the photos were taken with your Pixel? I don't know, but I would think the most basic check is that they are being uploaded from the Google Photos app on the Pixel phone. If that's all they check then any image/video uploaded by Photos on the phone will be included in the unlimited (for 3 years) storage. I can imagine ways of making this more restrictive, e.g. they could only count photos uploaded from /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera (where the Camera app on the phone stores its images) and not stuff uploaded from other places on the phone. In principle they could check the metadata on every uploaded image to check what it's taken with, but if I were wanting to keep things simple I'd not bother with that myself.

Bear in mind also that Google's philosophy is "cloud first". For years they assumed that Nexus phones didn't need storage because everyone would store and stream media in/from the cloud. They really don't think in terms of people plugging phones into computers and copying that way (like iPhones and iTunes), and have never released tools for USB syncing your phone with a computer. So what you did, copying the photos to a computer and uploading from there, is not the way they expect people to work (and Google are no different from Apple in that respect: if what you want to do is not what they expect their answer is a variant on "you're holding it wrong", if they answer at all).

So I think it's incredibly unlikely is that they will check the metadata of photos and videos you upload using a computer and say "this photo was taken with a Pixel, even though it is not being uploaded from one, and there is a Pixel associated to this Google account, so we'll assume that this photo was taken with that Pixel and so should count against the unlimited storage". If you are running a big system you want to keep it simple, so if I were them I'd say "I've promised unlimited storage for photos taken with a Pixel, so photos uploaded from the Photos app installed on a Pixel are unlimited, stuff uploaded from anywhere else is not".
 
Right, you have to back up images via the Google Photos app on your phone in order to take advantage of the free storage. The upside is that any image uploaded from your phone should benefit from the free storage (not just those taken with the phone's camera).

You don't get free unlimited storage for your account; you get free unlimited storage for photos from your phone. Uploading them via the web will count against your storage limit.
 
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