2022 – Page 2 – Just thoughts

This article is prompted by a combination of a casual enquiry about sending photos from your iPhone to Google Photos (hosted on a Google Drive), and my own discovery that I was backing-up iPhone photos to BOTH iCloud and Google Photos.

Observation one. Google Photos and iCloud Photos don’t work in quite the same way. Whereas you can access the Photos you may have stored on Apple’s iCloud storage from icloud.com through the iCloud Photos app, you cannot access Google Photos from drive.google.com directly – you have to go to photos.google.com to access them. Google Photos uses up some of your Google Drive storage – you get 15Gb “for free” with a Google account – but it’s a standalone application, in the same way as Google Mail is. It’s an important distinction. Google provides you with applications which make use of their cloud storage, Apple provides cloud storage alongside access to applications which use that storage and which synchronises back to devices.

The iCloud window {Access to all Apple applications and cloud storage}

The Google Drive window {NB No access to Photos, or Mail}

The Google Photos window {separate from Google Drive}

Observation Two. This article concentrates principally on Google and Apple, because they are the two principal players in the Camera and Cloud Storage space. There are other cloud storage solutions on which you can store photos, eg Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Dropbox. I will only refer to these briefly at the end of this article. There are undoubtedly other cloud storage solutions, but I won’t be writing about them.

Observation Three. Anything I write about the link between Camera and Photos on an Android/Google system is second-hand knowledge, and I cannot verify it!

Observation Four – the final one. This article does not seek to cover the general topic of transferring photos from a phone to your computer. This is more than adequately covered in this article. I suggest you read it too.

Not wishing to be dismissive, but just because it’s so straightforward – I’m going to discuss Google Photos first. If you have an Android phone and thereby have a Google account, you automatically have 15Gb of cloud storage and the two are linked, and by default any photos you take on your phone are backed-up to your Google account. This is described well in the Google Support article. A couple of things are worth highlighting however: a) you can switch-off automatic back-up and synchronisation of your photos, in which case all backups would need to be done manually; b) you should carefully choose the “quality” of the photos you back-up – they may not be the same as that of the photo on your device; and c) it would appear that you could backup photos to a different account from your main one, thus adding to the free 15Gb you get with each account. [Alternatively, for £15.99 a year you could get an additional 100Gb of storage from Google. If you aren’t an Apple user this is definitely worth considering.]

It’s not that much more difficult if you want to save photos from your iOS (iPhone or iPad) device to the Google cloud storage. Again the Google Support article describes the process and the options quite well.

Similarly if you’ve transferred photos to your computer (eg from a camera SD-card), then Google’s got you covered to back-up and sync to their Cloud storage in this article. You should nominate a folder on your computer that Google Drive will monitor for newly added files which will then be backed-up and synced to either Google Drive, or to Google Photos, or both, depending upon the option(s) you’ve chosen.

Note (4) – you might get two copies if you don’t uncheck “Sync with Google Drive”

For this to work however, you do need to be sure you’ve a) installed the Google Drive on your computer, and b) you’ve set the preferences the way you want them. In my case, since I’ve increased the amount of Google storage I have, I’ve chosen to Mirror a folder (in itself called Google Drive) – then both the folder on the computer, and the one in the cloud should be exactly the same. A mirror in fact. Anything I add to (or edit on) my local Google Drive will be copied to my Google Drive in the cloud.

So we turn next to the Apple ecosystem. [I should feel more confident here, but as you may have noted that I disclosed at the start of this article that I was doing something extremely stupid and not noticing my idiocy.] Here the support page on Apple Photos and iCloud I think really does a good job of explaining your choices and how to set up backup to their cloud storage. I don’t think I can improve on it. But what if you’ve got Google Photos installed as well on your iOS device? This is where I made my foolish mistake. I enabled Backup and Sync on my iPhone and so I got TWO copies of every photo – one in my Google storage in Google Photos and the other in my iCloud storage. Duh!!!

Disabling the Backup and Sync left me with an image which was shared locally between the Google Photos and Apple Photos apps. How could I get that image (or group of images) onto Google Photos to perhaps share with friends or family?

It turns out that there are two reasonably easy ways of doing this. By enabling iCloud Photos on the phone (or tablet) …

… I can then download from iCloud to a folder on my computer which I can then upload to Google Photos from. Really rather simple and not a use case for Google Photos Backup and Sync to be employed.

Alternatively, I could go into the Google Photos app, select the image I want to send to Google Photos in the cloud and Share it by getting a link and then sending myself a message. The act of sharing it copies the image to the cloud, from which I can then add it albums, etc.

Using either of these approaches allows you then to obtain a link for the album which you can then Share to a list of users, or obtain a link for public sharing.

Once you get the photos onto Google Photos the fun starts. It’s not intuitive what happens when you decide you want to delete them either from the cloud, or from your device. In fact it’s downright confusing. I’ve written about this before and life is too short to repeat anything that I believe still to be correct. Best of luck!!!

The situation with deleting photos from Apple Photos and iCloud Photos is slightly more straightforward and is detailed below …

“I can confirm that deleting a file on iCloud Drive from the Files app on an iPhone will delete it from icloud.com and your iCloud drive on MacOS as well – which is what you would expect should happen.”

However, the situation of Photos stored in the Apple Photos app (on iPhone or iPad) and iCloud Photos should also be noted – for completeness.

I’m not going to write anything; just provide three links to follow to clarify …

How to Delete Photos From iPhone but Not iCloud

How to Delete Photos From iCloud (While Keeping Them on Your iPhone)

and

How to recover a deleted photo or video on your iPhone or iPad

If you want to delete a Photo from both device and iCloud Photos. Just ensure Sync is left on and then you can delete the image from either the device or icloud.com

Having confirmed all this, and having more storage space on iCloud, and understanding that sharing Photo Albums is about to come to Apple Photos, and having checked that Sync’ing does seem to be working for iCloud Photos (from my Apple devices), I checked my Google Photos settings settings and switched-off Back up and Sync. I was doing far too many cloud backups!!! Always worth checking. If I want a Photo to be on Google Photos (for sharing for instance), I will now Upload, not rely on syncing.

It goes without saying that keeping it all in the Apple ecosystem (for me) makes a lot of sense, and with the ability to share albums on the way – it’s not yet as sophisticated as the Google Photo Albums service – I may transition away from Google Photos altogether in time.

If you’re a PC Windows user with an iPhone, then a solution is beginning to appear that enables you to use the Windows Photo application with iCloud. You can install iCloud for Windows on your PC and then you should be able to manage your iPhone photos from your desktop.

For Dropbox users, you can setup an automatic upload of photos to the service. They even give you a bit more free storage if you enable this, or at least they used to!

I doubt whether this is the only post with this title being written this week.

I have to admit that my usage of twitter has shrunk to just the casual glance at Notifications, and certainly not the eyes-glued on the twitter-stream that it used to be.

Ah! Those were the days. When I used to tweet about my journey on the bus to all and sundry during the early days when I was the self-appointed social media evangelist (or maybe it was even a role I’d been asked to lead on at Cardiff University). As an early adopter of twitter in 2007 I just thought it was wonderful. It complemented the blogposts I wrote, and advised folk of the existence of yet more pearls of wisdom that I felt it necessary to promulgate. I was chatting to an extended circle of friends, family and colleagues who I wasn’t likely to see that day, week, month, or even year. It kept me in touch with like-minded folk. I was also able to laugh with Stephen Fry, and a few others who I didn’t know, but whose views I respected. All was well in the twitterverse.

Things of course changed over time, and I won’t detail those changes, and of course we arrive at the state of play we have today. Quel domage. Things will never be the same again for twitter. I will probably still post notifications of blogposts – perhaps even this one – on my profile, but it will be done with a heavy heart.

Others have written that this could mark the end of twitter, and even the beginning of the end for open public discourse. I’m not going to get into that discussion, but I am going to reflect on the journey of social media and ponder aloud whether there is a way ahead for respectful open discussion on the internet.

Let’s start with Facebook. {Must we, everyone who might read this will know how much I dislike Meta and all it’s done to the pre-advert, pre-tracking, original Fb, then Instagram, and then later still WhatsApp} All that was good about the concept was lost in the need to monetise the platform. And its our fault! If we didn’t want/need to get something for nothing, if we didn’t put a value on software or the service that was being provided, it was inevitable that Fb would go down the path it went. The rest is history. Bye, bye Facebook – for me at least.

Then there was Google+. Great idea; great concept; but again Google was unable to monetise what became a closed social community. Google had been able to get marketing information from its other services – Gmail, Photos, Maps, etc etc, but Google+ wasn’t bringing in any revenue. It had to go, erstwhile under the excuse of security holes that were too difficult/expensive to fix. A lame excuse imho.

I’ve dealt with my worries about WhatsApp previously. Suffice to say that I still don’t trust Meta, and so my stance on using the application is unchanged. I lurk (as I do on Facebook and Instagram by the way), but I don’t contribute and I always Log Out when I’ve finished lurking!

And so we arrive at Social Media 2.0, or perhaps I’ll call it Simple Social Media for Simple Folk, or What you Want is What you’ll Get – remember WYSIWYG. People want segmentation, to be able to communicate with others of a like mind, in a safe, unpolluted space. Whilst in that space they don’t want to be shouted at, trolled, insulted or bullied – for that they can stay on twitter.

I’ve thrown myself into using Signal. I have many groups that I’ve either created, or am a member of. It’s easy to join, or leave, a group, and I use it as a substitute for Messaging apps as well for 1-to-1 chats. Keeping all such communication in the same place. Its an Open Source platform, and the happenings of the past week are making me think I should subscribe to it, to help ensure its survival. I evaluated some alternatives here and here – and plumped on Signal and Discord. The latter got me thinking of whether it was possible to have an open group/channel in Signal that you could join – like twitter; but I have rolled-back on that idea. I rather like the peace and quiet of Signal. If I want noise I can always go on Discord.

So that’s where I am. A bit of a rant, some reflection, and a lot of regret that an old friend is going the way of other old friends.

Perhaps the lesson to be learnt is that if something is worthwhile and important in your life – pay something to use it. Don’t expect to get anything for free without compromising something – and this most probably will be tracking what you do, security concerns and almost certainly a loss of privacy. Subscription services are not really that expensive. You pay for your mobile phone service, why balk at paying for the software that runs on it?

Also, consider using Open Source software wherever possible – the people who contribute to writing it almost universally have their hearts and minds in the right place – so help them with monetary contributions to keep them going. [Did you know that the code that forms the basis of WhatsApp came from the original Signal team.]

Tag: 2022

Getting photos to the cloud(s) and back