Google or Apple Photo Storage

I’m strictly a casual photo person, mostly stuff that interests me, and family pics. I have digitalized all our old photos and that was a year long process… I have my photos in iCloud Photos, and have them backed up to Google Photos. I am never really sure which application I should devote my energy to organizing the photos. Apple photos are obviously more private, but Google photos have a lot to offer. I find their search is better, their facial recognition seems better, and you can see the photo info on the phone or iPad, where you can’t do that with iCloud photos.

I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of others who use these photo applications! Thanks!

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Google Photos and it’s not even a contest. You won’t need to do much work to organize them as Google will do it for you. You can use the search bar and it’s very impressive what type of results you can get back.

If you want to make an album of dog photos you can search “Dog” and boom, they’re all there. It’s a very very well developed application with spectacular photo recognition.

The only caveat being privacy. You’ll get more of that by using Apples application however you are sacrificing the convenience.

I have been using it for years. I also just drag and drop the folder into my One Drive photo folder periodically for extra backup (that is backed up to two physical drives as well).

Google Photos by a country mile.

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I second that. If your like me and have given up on trying to keep your photos organized, just uploading everything to google photos saves so much time.

I have tried to setup google photos as an automatic backup for all my sources, computer sync to gdrive which is imported to google photos, mobile devices automatally backup all photos(which I have to go through and clean up every month for photos I dont want to keep long term), etc.

Plus the suggestions in google photos are far better than any other service I have found. I just wish they would add in a photo editor.

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I am of a similar mind with the first two replies. You would think Apple would devote more effort to improving photos, if only for the fact that it is one reason so many users are forced to buy more iCloud storage. I just feel that my Apple photos have always been a mess. Although I did find iPhoto better than what they have now. Thanks for your thoughts!

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Google scares me to death with how they kill off all these other services that people rely on, but that said, Google Photos is my choice as well. Here’s the two reasons I chose Google Photos instead of Apple iCloud:

  • Apple’s iCloud storage price is high compared to the market, and outlandish when compared to the free “high enough quality” option that Google Photos offers.

  • Apple’s insistence on tying everything into one Apple ID and then deeply embedding the Apple ID into the device’s OS (iOS / MacOS) can make iCloud Photos an absolute nightmare to manage (or impossible) if you ever need to work with more than one Apple ID, for any reason.

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I use Google Photos since the fee for the iCloud space that I need.

Although my phone will backup automatically to G-Photo, I will manually upload photos taken with my Point-n-Shoot to have those photos place in an Album.

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All in with the Apple ecosystem here. With the exception of having an older library that doesn’t want to play nice with my new one I’ve not had a problem. I did at one stage when I bought the s10+ upload everything to google but found it too hard to leave the ecosystem.

I should probably still keep uploading to google as a backup but I’ve heard horror stories of trying to pull photos out of there whilst keeping the metadata even moreso since they removed gdrive integration.

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I recommend Google Photos to anyone, no matter what phone they have. I recommend them so much, I made my own page on my website since people had so many questions about it.

Check it out here >>>>https://www.computerbailouts.com/google-photos.php

The machine learning features and free storage is more than enough to keep people around. When I type in the search bar things like ‘dog’ or ‘blue’ or ‘tree’ people are amazed at what it does. Nothing even comes close to this. Plus you can now print photos directly within Google Photos (I have been submitting feedback for this for a while now).

I also agree with the Google killing floor argument, but if you notice, Google updates this with many features very often, they talk about it all the time, they always tout how many users are online in Google Photos, they see this as important to them as they do Gmail, so it’s not going anywhere.

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Thanks for that link. I’ve enjoyed Google sending me “enhanced” photos that they have randomly chosen to make panoramic photos, or color pop, or “effects.” I’ve never lost a photo on Google photos, but I have lost some on iCloud when I transferred from one iMac to another. Not sure how it happened, and Apple couldn’t even figure it out.

I wish I had a forum like this when I began with iCloud. In fact, not even sure why I use it. I have an XS with 256 GB of storage, I’m using 25GB. My iPad has 128GB, I’m using 30GB. There is 733GB available on my iMac. Yet my wife and I buy and share 200GB of iCloud storage, and we are using 23GB.

It’s just difficult to figure out the logical thing to do, especially when dealing with photos. Thank you for your input!

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All you have to do is just start using Google Photos, since you already have everything backed up to that app.

If you are primarily taking photos with your iPhone, just make sure you are automatically backing up to GPhotos. Then once your space gets low, use the ‘Free Up Space’ function. Unfortunately, there is an additional step on iPhones of deleting the Recently Deleted items in your Apple Photos app, then it clears your phone. Then what you do is link your wife’s account to yours so that she sees all your photos of you or kids or whoever by going to Shared Libraries, then they will automatically receive photos of the people you selected (selected by facial recognition) all in one library. This works both ways, just have to setup GPhotos on both phones.

If you are primarily taking photos with a camera/DSLR, then download the Google Backup & Sync application on your Mac and have it automatically upload all photos from your SD card to Google Photos in the ‘High Quality’ mode so it is unlimited for free. But you could also use the full resolution, but I find High Quality is more than enough.

So now, whatever device you run Google Photos on with your account, you have all your photos where ever you go, including albums and shares. It is truly and incredible product.

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Google photos for me, too.

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Amazon Prime Members get free unlimited photo storage. A great option to add to Google Photos.

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NEITHER!
“Apple is obviously more private” except for the multiple iCloud hacks, which have exposed hundreds of thousands (or more!) private photos for the world to see. You only hear about the celebrities affected, but how many others are there from private citizens?
Google drive restricts the sizes of photos, so if you have high quality they’re being downgraded before storage.
RESULT: I choose OneDrive. Why? Full quality, 2FA if you want, and then by syncing with your home computer they can then be backed up AGAIN eg via Carbonite/CrashPlan etc. 3 locations, all full quality, and automatic if you do the initial setup properly. And note it works on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.

I thought that your photo storage didn’t count towards your iCloud storage limits…

Yeah but this totally ignores the organization of Google photos.

So might be the best option if you want to organize your photos yourself. But for ease of use I’d still go with Google photos.

Though as I said I use both

That’s Google, under their free plan. Everything you store in iCloud counts toward storage.

I’m fairly certain that those iCloud photo hacks were a result of poor password management by the celebs. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t believe that Google or Apple photos have ever been hacked at the company’s level. If a celeb uses their dog’s name as their password, their photos are gonna get hacked. :dog:

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Photo Stream (the last 1000 photos or the last 30 days of your photos) does not count toward iCloud photo storage. However photo storage DOES count toward iCloud storage limits.

I agree with that. If I’m not mistaken, Google Photos does not store the original, full-sized photo. Amazon does.

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I’m also on the Google Photo’s train. I love that it is simplistic to get all your photos to back up. My iphone does this automatically. I also enjoy being able to go and and select image easily and add them to a shared folder. With Google photo’s I also don’t have to had a specific method for being able to share it or only able to share to other apple user’s. I can share by text, by email, or simply create a publicly viewable link and share it for anyone to be able to see.

I do pay 99 cents for the extra storage on icloud because I do also back my photo’s up there. but I don’t really do any organizing there. My albums live in google photo’s.Is also super easy for me to launch google photos in chrome and bring those images over to my personal blog.

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