Google user
Original Poster
Nov 28, 2019
"iCloud Photo Library" "Optimize iPhone Storage" <-> "Backup and Sync" "Google Photos" // on iOS
I've been using Google Photos and iCloud Photos together for a while so I have some experience with this.
-------------------
The two services play nicely together. The best option is to keep iCloud Photos turned on, along with optimize storage. Then install Google Photos and start the sync. Here's what happens.
At the beginning, there are (let's assume) no full-size photos on your phone, only in iCloud. Google Photos goes through every photo in your library, and wants to upload it. It requests the full-size photo from iCloud, which downloads to your phone and gets cached on the device. Then the full size photo is uploaded to Google, and Google Photos moves on to the next one. It keeps doing this until it's gone through all your photos.
The optimize storage setting is doing what it's supposed to do. At some point when the phone fills up, it will begin removing photos again like before. Let's say for example (using not real numbers) you have 5GB of free space on your device, which is enough to hold 500 images. Google Photos will download those 500 images from iCloud and upload to Google, then iCloud will see you're out of space and remove those images, and move on to the next batch of 500.
Google Photos and iCloud Photos don't really talk to each other much, all of this stuff just happens in the background automatically. When Google Photos asks for a photo, iCloud knows it needs to download it first so it does. Then when your phone fills up it knows it needs to clear off space.
It should pretty much manage itself without needing to do much. When you're totally done syncing with Google, you can just leave your phone and let iCloud delete the downloaded photos when it needs space.
-------------------
Well, I just wished it has worked like this text describes it :-( My Photo Library in iCloud is around 500 GB of data. I use "optimize iPhone storage" (turned on / enabled) on my iPhone XS Max with 256 GB local storage. My Apple Photo App was all synced with iCloud and worked pretty well. Then I downloaded the Google Photos App on iOS and started "Backup and sync" in Google Photos on my iPhone. As it is described. it started to download all the high resolution files from iCloud to my iPhone for them to get upload to Google Photo.
It happens to be that my iPhone storage runs full of those pics and videos during this process. And now I always get messages like "storage full" (check the pictures), some apps stopped working. The iPhone became incredible slow due to a lack of free "working storage". I really thought the iPhone will "optimize iPhone storage" automatically but it doesn't do that at all as it turned out?! It's just stuck at the moment and Google Photos App can't upload anymore because there is no storage left to download from iCloud in the first stage.
Someone an idea how I can force my iPhone to "optimize iPhone storage"? so that the files already uploaded to google get replaced by thumbnails again on my phone? I'm really struggling here. Also a restart of the phone has not helped. The only thing which helped is making more space manually, means deleting media files on Apple Music App or deleting huge Game Apps. But this only leads Google Photos to download more from iCloud, Upload it to Google Photos until it's stuck again due to running out of local iPhone storage.
The iPhone storage calculation is also not correct. It shows enough empty storage but in reality it's full of photos and videos. Maybe this (the amount of free storage it shows, which is incorrect) is also the reason why "optimize iPhone storage" doesn't start with it's work at all?
I don't want to touch "free up space" in Google Photos because I've read this will delete the files not only on my phone but also on iCloud?
I would highly appreciate any help or thoughts on that issue. It's so sad that this has to be such a bad experience, especially because I wanted to leave iCloud behind.
Informational notification.
This question is locked and replying has been disabled.
Community content may not be verified or up-to-date. Learn more.
Google user
Original Poster
Dec 1, 2019
First I tried the ideas from @PeteranDi:
"Background App Refresh" of Google Photos App in iOS settings --> Is and was activated / turned on / enabled. So that was not the solution.
"Recently Deleted album in Apple Photos" --> there were about 10 pictures. I've permanently deleted them. But also this was not the solution.
"turn off iCloud on the device" --> wow. That made the mess perfect. First I've tried to inly turn off Photos from iCloud. But turns out that this will not delete all the photos on the device. They've been untouched by this change. So I went through all my photos and deleted them manually. SInce there is no such option in iOS Photos this took me couple of time (selecting all and trying to delete). I was able to move every picture and video to the "deleted" (bin) in iOS Photo. But here I was not able to permanently delete all the pictures. Honestly, I think the iPhone really had some difficulties to handle this huge amount of data. So I moved on trying the actual idea: "turning off (the whole) iCloud on the device" --> this was possible. But still I didn't got rid of my locally stored photos. So I've connected my phone to the PC and restored it to firmware settings...
And here now my solution:
Resetting the iPhone deletes (for sure) all locally stored pictures. After setting up a new phone with iCloud Log-In iCloud started to put the thumbnails again on the phone (took an hour or so). After this was finished I installed Google Photo App and switched on "Backup and Sync" again. The process then skipped all the pictures already uploaded and continued with the missing files. This also took a whole night.
In the morning I got it: "Backup complete" YAY. Turns out there were like 8 files unable to upload. .psd files and .moc files each more than 10 GB. I guess this was maybe the problem that created that mess at the first stage.
But be aware: I've made a backup of my iPhone of course before I put it to firmware settings. Later I was unable to restore the backup on the phone because the storage on the phone was not enough regarding to the message from iTunes.
Took me the whole afternoon to manually recover my iPhone as it was before.
But anyway. It's working now. I leave iCloud photos disabled since I'm only using Google Photos now. Goodbye iCLoud Photos I won't miss it.
Thanks everyone for the great help!
All Replies (7)
Google user
Original Poster
Nov 29, 2019
Hello again Christoph,
It looks like nobody is tempted to get involved, I would have expected a response by now, so I will share some thoughts. I have been doing some testing with iCloud and suggest the following options to see if we can get things moving again.
First, there is a setting in the Apple General Settings; Background App Refresh. Check if it is turned on for both Google Photos and Apple Photos. If this setting is off it stops the apps from working as soon as you exit them.
Second, check the Recently Deleted album in Apple Photos to see if there are any photos or videos which can be permanently deleted by emptying the album.
Third, turn off iCloud on the device. This will empty Apple Photos of any optimised downloads and leave any photos, if any, taken with the device in place.
Turning iCloud back on should kick off Backup again.
Note:
It is safe to free up space and empty the Recently deleted folder if iCloud is turned off. iCloud will repopulate the device with optimised copies when switched on again.
If there is any discrepancy in numbers with Google Photos it is harmless to delete the app and reinstall so that it rescans and resets it's counters.
I am on UK time so don't know if we align, but happy to try to answer any question,
Good Luck,
Peter
Nov 30, 2019
Does the app recognize the photos is same? so it doesn’t duplicate sync from iphone photo app
Google user
Original Poster
Nov 30, 2019
@Muhammad , one danger with that is that if the Google Photos backup on the iPhone is at HQ then the icloud copies would be uploaded using the manual process. They would be seen as different photos.
Google user
Original Poster
Dec 1, 2019
It seems a good idea. Actually, I've been thinking the same your idea since this question started, if Christoph want to achieve just the goal of uploading iCloud photos to Google Photos.
Google Photos (server side) recognize the photo is same, so it would not duplicate sync from iPhone photo app. If you enable syncing for the Google Photos app on your iPhone after uploading through a PC, also the app on the iPhone would recognize same photos and skip uploading, but I guess it can do after getting original photos from iCloud and comparing it with server side.
So if "sync" iPhone with Google Photos in now condition, the problem of apps not working due to lack of storage space on the iPhone may not be solved in the end.
@PeteranDi
What does that mean "at HQ"?
Even if the Google Photos backup for the iPhone is made with High Quality, the photos saved in server with High Quality are given the unique ID calculated from the original size photo. You can see the ID in Exif of the photo compressed by Google Photos as below screenshot. If you open the original photo that not yet having ID using "Picasa3" desktop application, Picasa will recognize it with the same ID given to the compressed photo.
After that, when the iCloud copies try to be uploaded using the manual process, your browser would calculate the hash in a preparation process and return it to the server. If a photo with the same ID, Google Photos would not accept to upload it in the next process, so that it would be never seen as different photo.
@ChristophHuber
iCloud took away most 456GB of original photos from iPhone and left small thumbnails.
By Apple's clever trap, you can't get back all the original photos to your 256GB iPhone at the same time, and you have to continue to pay for iCloud.
When you have a large amount of 456GB in iCloud, it will be difficult to upload them to Google Photos from an iPhone with insufficient space. In the first place, Google Photos is compatible with Android, but when it joins the iPhone that all photos have been transferred to iCloud, it might not work comfortably.
When you want to sync new photos to iCloud and Google Photos at the same time, there should be no problem.
If you just want to copy photos from iCloud to Google Photos as Muhammad said, it's easier and faster via PC. And if you emptied iCloud and then put back the original photos downloaded on your PC to iCloud little by little, it might work.
But if you want to keep syncing with iCloud and create a sync between your iPhone and Google Photos, it take too long days.
Last edited Dec 1, 2019
Google user
Original Poster
Dec 1, 2019
First I tried the ideas from @PeteranDi:
"Background App Refresh" of Google Photos App in iOS settings --> Is and was activated / turned on / enabled. So that was not the solution.
"Recently Deleted album in Apple Photos" --> there were about 10 pictures. I've permanently deleted them. But also this was not the solution.
"turn off iCloud on the device" --> wow. That made the mess perfect. First I've tried to inly turn off Photos from iCloud. But turns out that this will not delete all the photos on the device. They've been untouched by this change. So I went through all my photos and deleted them manually. SInce there is no such option in iOS Photos this took me couple of time (selecting all and trying to delete). I was able to move every picture and video to the "deleted" (bin) in iOS Photo. But here I was not able to permanently delete all the pictures. Honestly, I think the iPhone really had some difficulties to handle this huge amount of data. So I moved on trying the actual idea: "turning off (the whole) iCloud on the device" --> this was possible. But still I didn't got rid of my locally stored photos. So I've connected my phone to the PC and restored it to firmware settings...
And here now my solution:
Resetting the iPhone deletes (for sure) all locally stored pictures. After setting up a new phone with iCloud Log-In iCloud started to put the thumbnails again on the phone (took an hour or so). After this was finished I installed Google Photo App and switched on "Backup and Sync" again. The process then skipped all the pictures already uploaded and continued with the missing files. This also took a whole night.
In the morning I got it: "Backup complete" YAY. Turns out there were like 8 files unable to upload. .psd files and .moc files each more than 10 GB. I guess this was maybe the problem that created that mess at the first stage.
But be aware: I've made a backup of my iPhone of course before I put it to firmware settings. Later I was unable to restore the backup on the phone because the storage on the phone was not enough regarding to the message from iTunes.
Took me the whole afternoon to manually recover my iPhone as it was before.
But anyway. It's working now. I leave iCloud photos disabled since I'm only using Google Photos now. Goodbye iCLoud Photos I won't miss it.
Thanks everyone for the great help!
Google user
Original Poster
Dec 1, 2019
Google user
Original Poster
Dec 1, 2019
I think Christoph took a detour, though he does not need resetting the iPhone to delete all locally stored pictures.
Also if you decide not to use iCloud from now on, that means you won't use "iPhone storage optimization." Not all photos are stored on his iPhone and currently Camera Roll doesn't show all, because it's impossible to put all 456GB photos on a 256GB device. So the process of syncing with iCloud after a device reset and then uploading from your iPhone to Google photos taking long time would be unnecessary for those who won't use iCloud. you just have to upload iCloud photos to Goole Photos at once via PC. Other people reading this should use smarter steps.
Last edited Dec 1, 2019