Google has taken to its Keyword blog this morning to explain changes to the sync between their Photos and Drive products. In short, they confirm changes that were predicted last month following discovery of references to the change in updated APKs – Google Photos and Google Drive will no longer share your photos between them.
Google says the changes are being made to simplify features that caused confusion for users. It does look like it’ll make some operations less ambiguous and easier to understand.
What’s changing?
In July, Google will stop syncing new photos uploaded to Photos into Drive, and vice versa.
Existing photos will remain as-is, and your “Google Photos” folder within Drive will remain in place. Google specifically calls out deletion of photos, saying that deleting from one service won’t affect photos in another – this could be a hint of where some users found some confusion regarding the connection between the services.
Users have been able to disable the Photos folder within Drive for some time, so it seems likely that most users aren’t actually using this right now (otherwise it likely wouldn’t go away).
New “Upload from Drive” button
To make it easier to move photos from Drive to Photos, Google is adding an “Upload from Drive” button on the Google Photos website that will let you upload items from Drive – including items under “Shared with Me”.
Backup and Sync tool
Google’s Backup and Sync tool will continue to function as you would expect, and is capable to uploading files to both Drive and Photos.
Handily, Google is saying that uploading an original quality photo to both services will only count towards your quota once.
