Google ends the integration between Drive and Photos

Google Drive is a storage place for all your files and Google Photos is a storage place for all your photos. In appearance, the integration of these two Google services is rather logical. Today, all your Google photos are in Drive and all your Drive photos are in Google Photos. But this week, Google has announced the end of this integration, citing user comments that this integration is "confusing". From July, the two services will be separated with photos in one service do not go over to the other.

The "Backup and Sync" desktop app from Google Drive is the Google equivalent of Dropbox. Install it on your desktop computer. All files on your hard drive will be uploaded to a folder. This folder will be synchronized and updated. Usually this involved a ton of office files generated by Google Docs, etc., and the integration of Google Photos meant that, by default, Drive was also trying to download the entire collection of photos to each computer. you own. Although it is difficult to fill a hard drive with office files, the Google Photos folder can contain tens, or even hundreds of gigabytes, depending on your degree of shutter.

Some users may wish to have a local backup of all their photos on all their computers, but others may want to treat Google Photos only as an archive storage service on the cloud, which allows it to store all their photos in the cloud. to worry about them. Previously, users who were installing Drive had to find their computer full of all the photos they had ever taken might have been tempted to open a file manager, to click on the Google "Photos" folder. Drive, then click on "Delete". It was a terrible idea, though. Through the integration of Drive and Photos, deleting the "Photos" folder from Drive would also erase your entire collection of photos in Google Photos.

At no time was this connection clearly communicated to users and Google seems to agree that it is a major problem. The new blog article on the ad makes it clear: "This change is intended to prevent the accidental deletion of items on multiple products."

Google offers a support page detailing how the transition works. The integration of Drive and Photos will be disabled on July 10th. Drive's "Google Photos" folder will no longer represent your Google Photos collection. Your files will remain alone, but downloads, changes, and deletes of files will no longer be synchronized between the two services.

Google Drive's Backup and Sync app for Windows and Mac can still be downloaded to Google Drive and Google Photos, but the ability to have a local synced copy of your Google photos will disappear. Google still offers a full download of photos via Google Takeout, but it's a huge brick of all your photos and not a sync service.

On the mobile side, this change also means that the Google Photos app will no longer automatically sync photos from your smartphone to Drive, where they can be automatically downloaded to your computer. If you use Android and the photos on your smartphone need to be automatically downloaded to a computer, the third-party application "AutoSync for Google Drive" is a good solution. There is also always Dropbox.