Just thoughts …

Tag: Google Photos

  • Apple’s iCloud and Google Photos

    A short post to highlight an issue that I wasn’t aware of, and now have to be very wary of. Indeed Ian’s comment about whether you need the Google Photos app installed on your iPhone is prescient – you most probably don’t if you’re backing-up photos to your iCloud account. And if you’re backing-up photos to a google account (as described in the earlier post), there are different ways of doing it which means you quite possibly don’t need the Google Photos app on your phone.

    Remember, you can always look at the photos stored in the Google cloud from photos.google.com on your Apple phone or tablet – you don’t need the app installed.

    So here goes … another learning point. I’ll type it in capitals so that you don’t miss it!

    IF YOU DELETE PHOTOS FROM THE GOOGLE PHOTOS APP ON YOUR IPHONE OR IPAD AND IGNORE THE WARNING – THEY WILL BE DELETED FROM ICLOUD AS WELL.

    There, I’ve said it. I didn’t realise it, and always shied away from deleting photos in Google Photos because I didn’t really understand what the warning meant. But now I do and obviously that’s not something I want to do, so how do I go about removing photos from the app, and/or from the Google cloud. Read on!

    Scary, eh?! Take care when deleting photos from your iPhone

    What I’ve researched is well summarised in the following article …

    How to Delete Photos from Google Photos But Not from iCloud

    and a couple of posts on the Google Photos support forum …

    Does deleting photos in Google Photos also delete them from my iCloud photo Library?

    Google Photos deleted my iCloud Photos library

    So what do I take from this?

    1. If you want to delete photos from Google Photos – do it on the Google Photos website, not in the app on your iPhone or iPad. If you have synchronisation active, they will then be deleted from the app on your device as well.
    2. If you want to quickly delete all photos from your Google Photos app, just delete the app having first ensured that you’ve switched off Backup and Sync, because if you don’t, when you re-install the app, they will be synchronised back to your iPhone/iPad.
    3. If you don’t need the Google Photos app, uninstall the app, no photos will be deleted from your phone, they will still be in your Camera Roll and will have been stored on iCloud, nothing will be deleted from the Google Photos website either, so you will have to do that deletion from photos.google.com – see Case 1 above.
    4. An unlikely scenario, but one to be aware of – If you turn off iCloud before deleting photos from Google Photos on iPhone, then the photo will be removed from your device and Google Photos. It will stay on iCloud. However, if you enable iCloud again on the same phone, the photo will be removed from it too.
    5. And even more unlikely, but probably unexpected and a potential surprise – Disabling Backup and sync will not have any effect on your iCloud photos as it is just a setting to enable or disable backup service on Google Photos. If you disable it and then delete photos from the Google Photos app on your device, they will be removed from the device as you are technically deleting the device copy on your iPhone/iPad. And once it is deleted, the iCloud copy gets deleted automatically.

    Remember. Google Photos in the cloud, and iCloud Photos do NOT work the same way. Apple aims to synchronise all images across all devices with “the master” being held in the cloud. The Google Photos app is just a portal looking into the images on the device, and synchronising (if chosen) those images with ones stored on photos.google.com.

    I hope that makes it all perfectly clear 🙂 🙂 🙂

    In summary, do not delete photos in Google Photos directly from your iPhone if you have both apps on the device. Use the Google Photos website to remove photos. It is suggested that you should delete a few photos initially. Then, check them in iCloud after some time. If the photos are still there, you can go ahead and delete them in bulk.

  • Snapseed and Google Photos

    If you want to edit, even if only in a minor way, the photos on your smart device (phone or tablet, Android or Apple), two offerings from Google should be tried first. If you’re an Android (Google) device user, it’s a no-brainer.

    The Google Photos app will be installed on your device when you get it, and all you need to do is install Snapseed from the Google Play store. If you’re an iOS or iPadOS (Apple) device user then there’s a couple of extra steps you need to do before you can get started.

    This guide concentrates on Snapseed. I’ve written about Google Photos previously and I’m providing links to them below. I’ll check to see that things haven’t changed materially since I published these posts …

    Getting to grips with Google Photos – needs some updating and revising, and links need to be checked.

    More Google Photos – some simple image manipulation – basically sound, but I need to check to see if there are any additional tools added.

    Sharing an image (or album) from Google Photos – should be just about up-to-date.

    How do you delete photos from Google Photos? – more recent so I’m assuming that it’s good-to-go, but I’ll check of course.

    Although Snapseed is intended for use on smart mobile devices, you can install it on either a Windows PC or a Mac, but I have no experience of doing this, so it would be a project you would be taking on ahead of me. So for that reason I’m only looking at the app that you can download either from the Google Play, or Apple App stores.

    So for camera users (rather than smart phone users), you will first of all need to get the photos onto your device. This could be by a direct cable connection from your camera to your phone, or by transfer using Bluetooth or WiFi, but more likely might be by using a SD-card cable like this one I have for the Apple gear. [It will either have to have a Lightning or a USB-C connector – check first before buying one.]

    The image(s) thus transferred will be added to your photo library be it Google Photos, or Apple Photos. Another way of adding photos on your computer to your Google Photos would be an Upload to photos.google.com – you will need a Google account to do this. This is how you would do it …

    You could decide to use Google Backup to synchronise all your photos from your iPhone (or iPad) to Google Photos as an “easy” way of getting the photos on your Apple device into Google Photos, but this is not necessary to use Snapseed as it can access your Apple Photos directly; so I don’t because I’m already backing-up my photos to iCloud. [I only discovered in November I was also sync’ing to Google Photos, so I stopped doing that then and saved some Google Drive storage, and a whole lot of complications about knowing what was where.] But if you want to synchronise from your Apple Camera to Google, this is how you do it from the Google Photos app on your device …

    You should now install the Snapseed app on your device(s) from the Google Play, or Apple App stores, if you haven’t already. If you’re an Apple user you might choose to install the Google Photos app at the same time – although you don’t need it to use Snapseed, but you might just like to compare how it works.

    Next up, if you’re an Apple user you need to allow access to your Photo Library to Snapseed (and optionally Google Photos). This will allow both apps (on iOS) to access the Photos in your Camera Roll on your iPhone or iPad.

    So now your ready to start editing. Open the Snapseed app on your device – you are prompted to Open from device (ie look at the images in your Photo Library), or you can access the camera to take a shot, or Open latest image that you’ve taken. The steps from then on are relatively straightforward and you will have selected the image that you want to Use.

    That’s about it. This video (recorded from my screen, hence background noise and rather low audio volume) gives a reasonable introduction on how the Snapseed app works …

    A brief (14mins) introduction to editing photos using Snapseed

    Here are some links that you might find of interest:

    Complete Guide To Using Snapseed To Edit Your iPhone Photos

    How to Edit Photos in Snapseed

    Using your Android camera to take photos; but I believe all Android phones have slightly different camera interfaces, so you’re better off researching that for yourself. [NB If you have come across a really good guide, let me know and I’ll add it to the list here.]

    How to Use the Camera on an Android Phone: The Basics Explained

    Then for the iPhone …

    How to use iPhone Camera: A guide for beginners and pros

    A Beginners Guide To Incredible iPhone Photography

    How To Use The iPhone Camera App To Take Incredible Photos

    I hope that helps. Please advise if you come across something that doesn’t quite work for you, it might be my notes!!!