Free Up Space on Your iPhone using Google Photos

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll show you how to use Google Photos to offload your photos from your iPhone so that you can free up space and still have access to all of your photos in the cloud.  And don't worry -- you won't lose your photos!

Do you ever get an error message on your iPhone that you are running out of storage space?  You might get a message that looks like this?  And you know that you have a bunch of photos stored on your phone that you would be happy to offload somewhere else, but you are not quite sure how to do this?  You also might have a vague recollection that you've been warned that you don't have enough iCloud space either and your phone really wants you to upgrade to larger storage?

Okay -- in this video, I'm going to make the case that you should offload your photos to Google Photos, I'll tell you how the Google Photos app works vis a vis your Camera Roll, and I'll show you step by step instructions on how to do this.  

The bottom line is -- your photos are important.  You don't want to lose them and you aren't willing to take risks with technology that you don't understand well.  Can you imagine if you ended up deleting all of your photos somehow?   All of that anxiety might make you want to do nothing, so then you are stuck with years worth of photos on your phone and no storage space left.  Okay -- in this video, I want to make sure that you understand the process well, so that you don't have any anxiety!  First off, why

Google Photos?

I think we are in agreement that you can't continue to keep all of your photos on your phone indefinitely, right?  So, the next question is where should you keep them? If this was 10 years ago, you might say -- move them to your home computer.  But it is not 10 years ago.  What good are they going to do you on your home computer?  You have to be home to access them.  Technology has advanced, and you really want them to be up in the cloud.  That way, even though they are not taking up space on your phone, you can still access them from whereever. 

So, you have a bunch of options for cloud storage, but the 2 most obvious are Apple's iCloud service and Google Photos.  If you are a hardcore Apple user and use Apple computers as well, there might be convincing reasons to use the iCloud service.  I am not.  I have a PC laptop and, other than my iPad and iPhone, I tend to prefer Google services.   Here are the three big reasons that I prefer Google Photos:

• Storage space - iCloud gives you 5GB of storage for free, but considering you should be backing up your entire iPhone to iCloud, that gets used up in a hurry.  I upgraded to 50GB for $1 per month, but since 30GB of that is already backups, if I wanted to store my photo in iCloud as well I would have to upgrade to the higher level, which would be $4 per month for 200GB.  Google charges less for space.  First of all, they give you 15GB for free.  Their next tier is just $20 a year for 100GB.  Considering this covers all of the Google services that I use, Gmail, Google Drive, AND Google Photos, I think it's worth it.  Plus, I'm a power user and I am only using around half of that storage amount.  The next thing is
• Less Glitchy - Apple goes out of its way to make things "simple" for the user.  Sometimes their services are TOO simplified for my taste.  I found Apple's photo syncing to be a little glitchy and there are just not enough controls for me to determine what is going wrong and how to fix it.  I don't seem to have that issue with Google Photos.  And finally,
• Searchability - this is the magic that Google brings and is by far my favorite thing about Google Photos.  After all, what use are having all of your photos at your fingertips if you can't find the one you are looking for?  Google Photos allows you to search by date, but also does facial recognition, so that you can search by person.  In addition, it has some AI features that scan your photos and let you search your photos for occasions like Halloween or Easter and also objects, like dogs or plants.  It's fabulous.  Okay -- now that I've convinced you that Google Photos is the way to go, let me explain how the app works with the photos on your phone.

Google Photos, Camera Roll, Photo Stream

First of all, you are going to need to download the Google Photos app.  I put it right next to my Photos app on my home screen.  If you have a gmail account or use Google Drive, you already have a Google account, so you can use that to sign in.  If not, you'll need to register for an account.

Once you download the app and log in, go to Menu (which is the three bars in the upper left hand corner), then Settings, then Back up & Sync.  Now flip this switch next to Back up & sync.  Once you do this and are on wifi, Google Photos will start backing all of the photos on your phone to the cloud.  You can also choose the Upload size of your photos (I choose Original which is the highest quality) and then tell it when to back up.  If you have unlimited cellular data, you may want to choose to back up photos and videos even when you are using the cellular network.  By default it only backs up over wifi.

Okay -- now let me explain how Google Photos interacts with the Photos on your iPhone. 

• Back up - Google Photos backup simply takes all of the photos on your phone and sends them up to the cloud.  You can view them using the Google Photos app, but since they are stored up in the cloud, they don't take up much space on your phone.
• Google Photos / Camera Roll - On an iPhone, the Camera Roll is essentially the main photo storage.  You take a picture on your phone -- it ends up on your Camera Roll.  You may have other albums on your phone, but deleting a photo from your Camera Roll deletes it from those albums as well.  Here is the relationship between Google Photos and your Camera Roll.  If you delete a photo from Google Photos, it ALSO DELETES that photo from your Camera Roll.  However, if you delete a photo from your Camera Roll, it does not delete that photo from Google Photos.  That means that the photos stay backed up in Google Photos regardless of what you do to the photos on your phone.  So, once your photos are backed up to Google Photos, you can delete all of the photos from your Camera Roll and it won't affect your back up.  I promise!!!
• Google Photos / Photo Stream - Photo Stream is a nifty Apple photo album that allows you to share photos across your Apple devices.  I have an iPhone and an iPad.  Photo Stream (as long as it is turned on in settings) takes photos from both of my devices and shows them combined.  The truth is -- I don't really need this anymore since Google Photos does the same thing for me.  If you delete a photo from Photo Stream it will NOT delete it from your Camera Roll, but it will delete it from the Photo Stream on your other devices.  If you delete a photo from Google Photos, it will remove it from Camera Roll, but it will not delete it from Photo Stream.  
• Multiple Devices - I take photos on both my iPhone and iPad, which is fine with Google Photos.  I have the Google Photos app installed on both devices and have them both set to back up and sync.  I have noticed that sometimes the photos won't sync unless I deliberately open up the Google Photos app.  I mentioned before that if I delete photos within the Google Photos app, it will also delete those same photos from my Camera Roll.  It will only do this on the local device.  For example, if I'm on my phone and I go through and delete 5 photos -- 3 that were taken on my iPhone and 2 that were taken on my iPad.  It will delete the 3 phone pictures from my Camera Roll, but the 2 I took with my iPad will still be on the iPad Camera Roll, so I will need to go onto my iPad to delete them.

Once you have all of your photos backed up and synced, you can literally delete all of the photos from your Camera Roll and from Photo Stream.  This is my phone -- see?  No photos.  You should start using Google Photos as your main Photo app.  You can email or text a photo directly from the app.  If you need to edit a photo or send it for printing, you can always download it to your Camera Roll and then get rid of it afterwards.  

Here's a note to help ease the anxiety of deleting all of these photos, iOS has a recently deleted folder where it keeps your deleted photos for 30 days.  If you go into Photos, Albums, and scroll down, you can find the Recently Deleted folder.  In it, you will find all of the photos that you just deleted with the number of days until they will be deleted.  This also means, of course, that they remain on your device for 30 days, which means it'll take 30 days before clearing up your storage space.  I point this out because you can always recover your photos from this folder.  Also, this folder is the reason you won't have immediate relief with storage space.  I would suggest going into the folder and deleting forever photos that you really don't want -- duplicates, screen shots, etc.  Remember, deleting from this folder is something you can't undo.

So, that's it!  Offload your pictures into the cloud, free up space on your iPhone, and start using Google Photos great search features.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!