Google stops syncing your photos and videos

Google will soon stop automatically syncing your photos and videos between Google Drive ( https:// drive.google.com) and its Photos website.

This means that photos and videos you add to Photos will stop appearing in Drive, and vice versa. In addition, photos and videos you delete in one won’t be deleted in the other.

In a blog post ( www.snipca. com/31888), Google said the changes - due to be implemented in July - will make Photos and Drive less confusing and easier to use.

It also added that one of the reasons for the change is to prevent users accidentally deleting a file from both sites when they think they’re just erasing it from one.

To replace automatic syncing, Google will provide a new ‘Upload from Drive’ tool. This will appear on Google Photos, letting you move photos and videos from Drive, creating two versions of a file.

This also means you’ll eat

up more of the free 15GB storage space provided by Google. If for example you upload a 40MB video from Drive to Photos and leave it in both locations, it will take up 80MB. Before, when it was synced, this file would only have taken up 40GB.

To get around this, Google recommends uploading files using its ‘Backup and Sync’ program for Windows ( https://photos.google.com/ apps, see screenshot). Highquality files uploaded this way won’t count against your storage quota, while ‘Original-quality’ files will count just once.

The move doesn’t affect any files you’ve previously synced across Photos and Drive. These will remain in the folders you’ve already created. If you have a Google Photos folder in Drive, for example, it will stay there, but will no longer receive photos you add to the Photos website.