Photos, Chromebook, and Google Drive

January 5, 2017 10:19 AM

I'm probably doing something wrong, but I have questions about Google Drive, my Chromebook, and pictures.

I've tried to google this, and I looked on Stackexchange, but I'm not seeing anything that resembles my situation. I have the following:

1. Galaxy S7 Edge, on which I use QuickPic as my photo manager
2. Toshiba Chromebook 2 with up-to-date stable channel Chrome OS (for work reasons, I can't switch to dev or beta channel)
3. A folder on Google Drive where I sync my photos to

For a bunch of reasons, I don't really want to use Google Photos unless it solves these problems, but here's the issues I'm having:

1. When photos sync to Google Drive, multiple copies end up getting synced
2. When I attempt to open a photo in Drive, it tells me I need a photo editor like Pixlr, even just to view it, and I have no idea why - on my Windows work laptop, I have no such issue
3. Once I open a photo using Pixlr, it opens rotated 90 degrees, so I have to rotate it and save it again

None of these feel like "standard" behaviors, really, but I guess that's why I'm asking - is this a typical flow for saving and viewing images in Google Drive, or is it some setting I'm missing in Chrome OS that is requiring Pixlr use and rotating my pics? And what's up with the multiple copies?

posted by pdb to Technology (8 answers total)

On point 3 (google for "exif orientation"):

Digital Cameras with orientation sensors allow auto-rotation of portrait images. Unfortunately, support for this feature is not widespread or consistently applied.

Annoying and frequently occurs transferring apple photos to a pc.
posted by sammyo at 12:18 PM on January 5, 2017

Are the photos RAW files or JPG? If they are RAW then the Chromebook may not have the plugins to handle it.

As far as duplication is concerned, when I put RAW files into my Google Drive it puts JPG copies into a Google Photos folder in my Google Drive, but that is the extent of the duplication. What is happening in your case?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:31 PM on January 5, 2017

Response by poster: any portmanteau: they're jpg. And what is happening with me is that when QuickPic syncs to Google Drive, it puts anywhere from 2-4 copies of the photo in the designated GDrive folder. QP has its own cloud that I thought was the issue, but I turned off syncing to that cloud and I still have the GDrive duplication problem.
posted by pdb at 12:40 PM on January 5, 2017

With respect to Google Drive and Google Photos, I think it's not so much duplication as two ways to look at the same thing. At any rate, if you delete from Google Photos, it's deleted from Google Drive also.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:16 PM on January 5, 2017

Response by poster: @semisalt: No, it's actually a case of there being 2-4 identical photos in the Google Drive folder I sync to and none in Google Photos, which I've never enabled and do not wish to use if I can avoid it.
posted by pdb at 4:28 PM on January 5, 2017

I have an iPhone and a Mac mini, but Google Photos works amazingly well on both and I've never had any of the issues you mention, despite having tens of thousands of photos on there.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:58 AM on January 6, 2017

You can also do things like search your photos for "orange cat" and get (mostly) pictures of your orange cat.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:01 PM on January 6, 2017

My Google Drive/Photos will occasionally duplicate photos and I'm not sure why. Both a RAW and JPG version will show up and I have no idea where the JPG version came from. I don't mind because I'd rather have 2 of each than 1. What is annoying is when the JPG version makes it from Drive to Photos but somehow the RAW version is only sitting in Drive. Again, I'm mostly just glad that the RAW file is still safe in Drive but there are enough hiccups in the system to make me glad I have my own multiple backups of all my photos.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:24 PM on January 9, 2017