Google Photos & Flickr

I do love my photography, especially that of urban scenes or events.

Recently, I was dismayed at the decision by Flickr to charge users for an app that allows for their photo directory on a computer to synchronise and upload photos to their accounts. This took the stress off me in terms of organising photos for uploading as the app scanned the selected folders and only uploaded recently taken photos.

It makes cloud back up of my photos alot more difficult now.

But Google Photos have stepped up to the plate. They have now replaced Picasa as a photo hosting site for Google. You can upload up to 15GB of photos in any size, or unlimited uploads of photos of up to 16 Megapixels. Any higher than 16 megapixels and the image will be resized. While the backup works, it does mean for me a loss of photo size as some photos are 20 megapixels.

Compare that with Flickr which offers a generous 1TB of storage space for each account. Still that is very good. 

I am in the process of backing up 110 000 images from my computer taken over 14 years. This is about 100GB in size. I like the simplicity of the free backup app which gives security, but compressing the images will let me down, especially with photo editing. Also they don't upload by folder, they leave it to you to organise the images into albums. 

But in the classroom, the simplicity of Google Photos will help and the fact its tied to your Google account will make its use easier. But what about if a person finishes school or leaves? What happens then to the images