Old photo storage work around - Google Pixel XL Questions & Answers

Since the Pixel and Pixel XL have unlimited full resolution gPhotos storage for pictures uploaded from the device itself, can I download all of my photos that were on there, delete the photos from gPgotos then reupload them from my Pixel to free up some gDrive space?
The photos would take a long time to download so before I try it, I was wondering if anyone has attempted this already? I haven't been able to find anything about this.

Yes
I downloaded all my old photos and videos from drive.
Gathered every other photo and video I wanted to keep.
I created a folder on my phone and dropped it in there 40-50gb at a time.
let it upload over night.
Performed the space saving task in google photos the next morning.
I did this repeatedly over 10 nights.
never saw an increase in storage consumption registered in my account.
just make sure you are on wifi.

Wait what? maybe im missing something here.
ive always used google photos, and when i purchased my pixel i was almost out of original quality photo space. After activating my pixel and signing into my account, the storage amount said unlimited for both original and hd quality.
i didnt have to download delete and upload or anything like that.

@noidea24
Its only unlimited for all new photos uploaded from the pixel. All photos from the past take up storage if stored in original quality.

irule311 said:
@noidea24
Its only unlimited for all new photos uploaded from the pixel. All photos from the past take up storage if stored in original quality.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im still not seeing what your saying. Like i said, i have ALL my old videos and photos backed, and continuously back up more everyday. The only difference is where google photos said "3gb left original storage" and "unlimited hd/hq storage" before, it now says Unlimited.
From the day i activated my pixel, this has changed to unlimited storage for both from my pixel and my pc.

noidea24 said:
Im still not seeing what your saying. Like i said, i have ALL my old videos and photos backed, and continuously back up more everyday. The only difference is where google photos said "3gb left original storage" and "unlimited hd/hq storage" before, it now says Unlimited.
From the day i activated my pixel, this has changed to unlimited storage for both from my pixel and my pc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Go here and you should see what we are talking about.
https://www.google.com/settings/storage

noidea24 said:
Im still not seeing what your saying. Like i said, i have ALL my old videos and photos backed, and continuously back up more everyday. The only difference is where google photos said "3gb left original storage" and "unlimited hd/hq storage" before, it now says Unlimited.
From the day i activated my pixel, this has changed to unlimited storage for both from my pixel and my pc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To free up drive space so you can store other items (non-photo's/videos) you would want to convert all your OLD photo's/videos to the "free unlimited storage". This is why you have to download all the old items, delete them from Google Drive, move them to your phone, and then upload them again. You will then have all your Google Drive space back.

parakleet said:
Yes
I downloaded all my old photos and videos from drive.
Gathered every other photo and video I wanted to keep.
I created a folder on my phone and dropped it in there 40-50gb at a time.
let it upload over night.
Performed the space saving task in google photos the next morning.
I did this repeatedly over 10 nights.
never saw an increase in storage consumption registered in my account.
just make sure you are on wifi.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks! I'm going to give it a try.

Do all the "refreshed" photos maintain all the date info for timeline purposes? I'm thinking they would, but just wanted to make sure before I go through with it.

Related

[Q] Automatic Picture Backup

I've just got rid of my Omnia 7 out of frustration of its infancy and moved back to android, but one thing I miss is the automatic picture uploading to skydrive after you take a picture.
Annoyingly it compresses the image which peeved me to no end, but at least It had the option.
I know Google has Picasa but I get a measly 1GB of capacity compared to skydrive's 25GB.
Are there any decent (Private) apps or services that I can use to automatically upload my phones images to?
- What I mean by private is that nobody else can see them (or an option to set them to private).
N.B I take a lot of photos and I also don't want my new 8MP sensor to go to waste
You can try Dropbox, you only get 5GB though. Its not automatic but I'm sure you can make a profile with Tasker to do it for you..
Well I've just downloaded Titanium media sync which auto-syncs folders with Dropbox, but I only get 2GB (N) Oh well, it's better than nothing for now.
Edit: Sorami lets me access (somewhat) my skydrive account, but isn't automatic.

Google+ Data Usage

Hi everyone,
I wondered if anyone could should some light on google+ for me?
I've had for the GN for a little over a day nowand for whatever reason I thought I'd check my data usage. Google+ has somehow managed to use 296mb even though I don't use google plus at all.
I've figured out that the camera does an auto upload, so I have disabled that, but is there anything else that I can turn off to help keep this data usage down to a minimum because 250mb per day is pretty heavy...
Any help would be hugely appreciated as I'm completely new to android.
Thanks all.
Probably you have activated the automatic picture upload to Google+? This could be managed within the app. Under settings you could manage that this upload will only be done by WIFI or you could completly stop this upload!
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalkd
floateruk said:
Hi everyone,
I wondered if anyone could should some light on google+ for me?
I've had for the GN for a little over a day nowand for whatever reason I thought I'd check my data usage. Google+ has somehow managed to use 296mb even though I don't use google plus at all.
I've figured out that the camera does an auto upload, so I have disabled that, but is there anything else that I can turn off to help keep this data usage down to a minimum because 250mb per day is pretty heavy...
Any help would be hugely appreciated as I'm completely new to android.
Thanks all.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think the only killer is instant upload of pictures and videos. Did you even take 200+Mb of pictures? Everything else is pretty harmless apart from synching contacts and that wouldnt take up much. Just set your uploads to only go over a wifi connection and it should be fine.
Mark.
Thanks for the replies guys
I think i took a total of six pictures just messing with the camera. I think ill stay off the camera for a day and see if the data calms down.
Ive turned auto upload off so hopefully itll sort itself out anyway.
It was probably just initial contact/data sync and then picture instant upload. If you turn off instant upload in the settings you'll be fine.
You can also just turn off background data for G+ in the data use settings if you're not going to use it.
I've had Google+ issues too today.
I haven't got instant upload ticked, but now that i'm home and on wifi, google+ is say here rattling away at 4% CPU and appears to be constantly downloading something, but god knows what as I've been home 4 hours and its not stopped.
"System Panel" app shows my Network on the phone constantly downloading upto 1mb/sec. I confirm this is Google+ by force stopping the app and the network usage and CPU drops to zero.
I do have a rather large Picasa collection, but as these are already with Google, i'm not sure why it would do anything with those....
I've rebooted the phone since the force stop and all is quiet, no downloading.
Opened Google+ again.... a little download when I went into photos, but all quiet.
Opened Gallery, its shows all my albums, but no extra traffic or CPU.
I wonder if Google+ just got its knickers in a twist somehow?
zarch1972 said:
I do have a rather large Picasa collection, but as these are already with Google, i'm not sure why it would do anything with those....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It'll be syncing them to your gallery then. They've probably all appeared in there now.
Data usage of google plus
I have the same problem with my Galaxy Nexus.
I found that a backup of all my pictures in picasa is automatically kept under:
/data/media/Android/data/com.google.android.apps.plus/cache
which appears as "USB storage data" in Google+ App info.
This backup starts even if the "Make available offline" option in the Gallery is not selected and since I have many pictures in Picasa, the total amount of storage used is almost 2GB !
In order to avoid this undesired synchronization of google+, I had to disable the "Sync Google Photos" under my "Sync Settings".
I also removed by hand the above directory to recover the (precious) space in my phone.
Unfortunately this is causing the side effect that the instant upload is not anymore available for photos and videos.
It would be highly desirable that an option is introduced to disable this google+ synchronization.

[Q] Latest HTC Gallery update [CLOUD]

Hy,
anyone saw that the new gallery update brings "Browse your photos and videos in the cloud" functionality?
Now I sure dont see any option for this but at night I got a notification from Coud that "duplicates has been deleted"...
I dont know where I can find this features, but I sure dont want any photos/videos uploaded to cloud without my permission... So if anyone have any info on this, I would really appreciate it.
Best regards
X2
I have an htc one m7 that I just updated to the latest version, after a reboot it shows the same message "gallery cloud" duplicate... etc
It didnt ask for my permission, I have the htc sync disabled, cant seem to find the option to disable this POS. Not happy.
I just noticed this morning the same behavior. I am trying to find out where this service is coming from, why it is running without my permissions and why it is putting my personal information in the cloud somewhere and I don't know where or how to get it, shut it off, or change it. It has really pissed me off to no end. I am hoping someone has an idea.
Just came here looking for the same answer.
A bit of a **** move if HTC is uploading peoples pics without asking first!!
I've emailed HTC via the play store app and asked how do we turn this feature off. I'll post if I get an answer...
Chiming in. just saw this, not pleased. I'm thinking of disabling the app till a solution is found.
I might bin it too, don't want this feature using up my data allowance...I've got about 4000 pictures on my phone...
yea wtf
Same issue. my phone keeps giving me a Cloud Gallery notification every 10 minutes or so saying it deleted duplicate photos. What in the world HTC was thinking, we may never know. But they need to let us turn this off because I show it using my data. Not cool HTC.
To add to it, I open my gallery and its cycling through all of my photos. Constantly. I click a folder, then the 'highlights' starts fast-cycling through every single photo in the folder. Not like a preview as it used to (which was annoying). This needs to stop. As someone else mentioned, I also have thousands of photos on my phone and this is driving me nuts.
CrazyCypher said:
Hy,
anyone saw that the new gallery update brings "Browse your photos and videos in the cloud" functionality?
Now I sure dont see any option for this but at night I got a notification from Coud that "duplicates has been deleted"...
I dont know where I can find this features, but I sure dont want any photos/videos uploaded to cloud without my permission... So if anyone have any info on this, I would really appreciate it.
Best regards
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
HTC Cloud Gallery does not upload any of your files to the cloud. It only indexes whatever you have on Dropbox, GDrive, FB, Flickr, only after you have agreed to link to those sites. If you see photos found by Cloud Gallery, those could be uploaded by Dropbox or GDrive automatically. You need to check their settings. Again, Cloud Gallery is a "read only" indexing service.
Started getting the same notification since the last few days -- and the worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a setting anywhere in the gallery app or in the system settings allowing to configure this "Cloud Sync" or turn it off all together.
And now I really don't know if my pictures got "synced" somewhere in someone's cloud Really annoying. Uninstalled the gallery app altogether with Titanium Backup root uninstall.
adri72 said:
Started getting the same notification since the last few days -- and the worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a setting anywhere in the gallery app or in the system settings allowing to configure this "Cloud Sync" or turn it off all together.
And now I really don't know if my pictures got "synced" somewhere in someone's cloud Really annoying. Uninstalled the gallery app altogether with Titanium Backup root uninstall.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the same issue. Haven't found a solution yet but I wanted to let you know that freezing/uninstalling gallery will stop the cloud syncs but there are side affects.
I froze it and all seemed normal until I tried to set a contact image. Freezing gallery somehow disrupted the ability to link images to contacts. I tried it from within the contact app and through a third party gallery app and it wouldn't work either way. I had to defrost the HTC gallery in order to set the contact image.
There maybe other side affects but that was the only one that I ran into.

Space on Google Drive

Hi all!
Since 2015-01-04 I was given 1Tb on Google Drive as a bonus since I was a local guide at level 4+
Yesterday, my space ran out. (Does anyone know btw if there will be more bonus for local guides?)
So now I have two option. Pay for the drive or remove all my files.
My mail wont work again until I do one of the options.
Since mostly of my files (292,79 GB) are photos and film in originally quality. Should I remove all files and upload again? I have the originally files in my computer. Most films are in 4K, so films on Google Photo is converted to 1080p.
What should I do? Wich is the easiest way if not paying for more space?
My LAN is 1Gb down and 500mb down. It should take long to upload everyting again.
What's going to take the longest is uploading through the Pixel (as it has limited space). But you have less than 300GB so it won't take terribly long. I've uploaded probably 400GB which wasn't bad, and now my Google Photos reports taking up zero space.
I would go through the Pixel, as that would permanently free up 300 GB of space on your Google storage space (even though the unlimited original quality storage expires in 2020, per Google, whatever you upload before then through the Pixel will stay permanently free).
The only caveat is that hopefully your photos and videos have the correct EXIF photo dates, otherwise Google Photos may not sort them properly which is a giant pain. And along the same line, shortly after uploading a bunch of files, I noticed that they sometimes don't get sorted properly right away (I had like 1000 photos initially sorted as taken "today" for a several minutes after backing up.)
BTW, how do you get to level 4 in Google guides? Is that free TB still offered nowadays? Edit: nevermind, looks like they offer nothing for level 4...
The extra storage was a "thank you for working for us free" from Google two years ago. I took photos of every store I visited.
Can i attach a USB drive to my Pixel 2 XL and add as a folder for uploading images and videos?
What exif data is Google looking at? In my drive there was a folder containing photos with structure year -> month
Thats not the way to go?
Supposedly you can attach a flash drive to a USB type C male to USB type A female adapter, but I never tried it. Incidentally the Pixel comes with one of these adapters!
With regards to EXIF, I'm just referring to the metadata that's attached to each photo (contains date/time taken, location taken, camera used, etc), not the file name. Pretty much all digital cameras and modern smartphones have the correct dates embedded. But some devices don't do it properly, and if you saved a photo someone texted you, they often have no metadata.
If there is no metadata, Google photos may just use the date the file was created rather than the actual day it was taken, regardless of if the file name itself lists the correct date. This becomes a problem sometimes when copying files as the creation date sometimes gets changed to the date it was copied
beezar said:
If there is no metadata, Google photos may just use the date the file was created rather than the actual day it was taken, regardless of if the file name itself lists the correct date. This becomes a problem sometimes when copying files as the creation date sometimes gets changed to the date it was copied
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yep. I had this problem.
I can confirm that the little adapter in the box works as USB2Go. Just plug an USB memory in and move files. But how to upload to Google Photos if its not charging? I dont have splitter for that USB C contact.
Is there a way to make a network folder as a "local" folder on Pixel 2 XL ? That would make the process a bit easier.

How Does Google Photos Work?

I have been using Google Photos for years, but this is my first Pixel device. My main concern is that since Google Photos is the primary photo/video viewer, how can I ensure that when I playback recorded videos that they are loading from my internal storage and NOT from the cloud?
Basically, I don't want to wait for videos to buffer, but I can't seem to tell when I'm accessing cloud storage vs internal storage when viewing pics/vids. Any tips?
PuffDaddy_d said:
I have been using Google Photos for years, but this is my first Pixel device. My main concern is that since Google Photos is the primary photo/video viewer, how can I ensure that when I playback recorded videos that they are loading from my internal storage and NOT from the cloud?
Basically, I don't want to wait for videos to buffer, but I can't seem to tell when I'm accessing cloud storage vs internal storage when viewing pics/vids. Any tips?
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Click to collapse
I don't think there is a way to know for sure. If you took a video and didn't tell photos to delete the backed up photos and videos I would assume it will play the local file.
hatdrc said:
I don't think there is a way to know for sure. If you took a video and didn't tell photos to delete the backed up photos and videos I would assume it will play the local file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That hasn't been the case so far. I played a video that I recorded a few days ago (backed up but not deleted) and it took a few seconds to buffer before playing. I would think Google Photos would play the local file by default instead of wasting data.
Edit:
On second thought, you might be right. I don't recall turning on the auto delete feature but scrolling back through the images from inside the camera app shows the video is not there. But that still doesn't tell us a good way to know when Google Photos is accessing internal storage or cloud storage in general.
Turn on airplane mode. If you can access your media, it's local. If not, it's in the cloud.
btonetbone said:
Turn on airplane mode. If you can access your media, it's local. If not, it's in the cloud.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good call, that worked perfectly!
To make sure you're looking at local files hit the Menu button and go to 'Device Folders'
thenags said:
To make sure you're looking at local files hit the Menu button and go to 'Device Folders'
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's even easier! I knew there had to be a simple way. thank you
PuffDaddy_d said:
That's even easier! I knew there had to be a simple way. thank you
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Now if only it'd keep the folder structure in the backups. That's my one huge complaint aboit Photos.
Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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