By Kate O’Neal
How many of you have an ample number of photos on your iPhone that takes up the majority of your 5GB of free iCloud storage? I know I did! Thanks to one of our best Desktop Engineers, Tony Nguyen, I was introduced to Google Photos. No longer do I include my photos in my iCloud backup; that’s done automatically through Google Photos. Now I actually have enough space in my iCloud account to back up my phone!
Google Photos is a free app available for Android and iOS systems. It’s getting rave reviews thanks to continuous backups, good organization of photos, and plentiful editing options. There are two choices you can decide between when backing up your pictures: the High-Quality plan or Original Resolution plan. The High-Quality option provides unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels or video that is 1080p resolution or less. Any photos or videos larger than those sizes are compressed. Those of us who are using this app to back up photos from an iPhone or Android should be safe, as most photos from these devices capture photos smaller than 16 megapixels.
If you choose to go with the Original Resolution plan your photos are not compressed and are saved at their original size. However, with this option the sizes of the photos and videos will be counted toward your 15gb of free Google storage space. If you’re looking to store large, raw-format or JPEG photos, the Original Resolution plan would be your best bet. The good news is Google Storage is cheap. When you max out your free 15GB of storage, you can purchase an additional 100GB for $2/month.
After using Google Photos for about a week now, I’m very happy with it. When I installed the app, it automatically started detecting and backing up my photos. The initial backup takes a bit longer, but there is a handy Assistant on Google Photos that will let you know when the Backup is complete. Once my photos were backed up, I deleted my photos from the Photos folder on my phone. To remove the photos from my iCloud backup, I went to Settings > iCloud > Storage > Manage Storage > iPhone. From there you can tap the Photo Library on/off button to deactivate the Photo Library from your iCloud. Note: it’s not necessary to delete the photos from your iPhone first; I simply wanted to free up space on my phone.
There are other photo backup options out there that can help you free up phone space. If you want to look in to them, a couple to check are Flickr and Amazon Prime Photos. Flickr provides 1TB of storage for free, and Amazon Prime Photos offers unlimited free storage to Amazon Prime members.
Kate O’Neal
With multiple years’ experience working with clients in many industries, Kate brings her skills and positive attitude to Network 1’s team, clients and partners. She strives to provide the best service and solutions to her clients so they can achieve greatness through Worry-Free IT.
koneal@network1consulting.com or 404.997.7653
Network 1 Consulting is an 18-year-old, IT Support company in Atlanta, GA. We become – or augment – the IT department for law firms and medical practices. Our IT experts can fix computers – but what our clients value most are the industry-specific best practices we bring to their firms. This is especially important since technology, along with its associated regulations and cyber-threats, is changing so rapidly. We take a proactive approach to helping our clients use technology to gain and keep their competitive advantage.
This tip is super helpful. Thanks, Kate. I’m downloading the app right now!