Moving Google Photos to IPhotos, Worth it, Tips and Tricks

August 29, 2024 9:29 AM

Thinking about moving my and my wife's google photo collection to iCloud photos. Have you done this? What things should I think about?

We have 2 iphones and 1 personal mac, 1 work mac and 1 work pc. We have about 70gb of photos over 20 years and getting more used because of kids.

I loved being able to search images and faces on google, love being able to see it mapped to locations. I don't love how I have to go to google and search for older pictures (after i delete them to save space on my iphone pics) and have pictures in two places for awhile. I know that with iphone it will also backup pictures in the cloud but seems like it might be more seamless?

I understand takeout doesn't do well with geo reference and there's someone who has a app he built for $50 that will help with that.

We pay $2.99 a month for 200gb of icloud and $1.99 for 100gb of google. I would love to remove paying google

posted by sandmanwv to Technology (4 answers total)

The Apple photo ecosystem does a very good job of keeping your photos and videos in the cloud and having thumbnails for all of them on your devices, and then bringing them down when you want to look at them. It has pretty good search by faces (including pet faces!), locations, and they are starting to understand the content of photos more generally.

Unfortunately, Apple does not provide a way for family members to share a full resolution library of all their photos. Even if it knows you are family, you can't do this. There is a way to have a shared photo stream that you can add things to, so maybe that's good enough for you. But you should make sure you understand well how it works before you move over.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:05 AM on August 29

Winnie the Proust: That actually isn't true any longer. If you create a family, you can have a fully shared Photo library, complete with full resolution images: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118229
posted by griffey at 12:41 PM on August 29 [1 favorite]

Wow, that's great. When I last checked, you couldn't send everything straight from your camera to that shared library at full resolution. Good to know.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:34 AM on August 30

Sort of unrelated, but are your photos backed up? You might consider using both, as a failsafe in case something happens to either service or the photos are accidentally deleted. I also recommend doing a backup to an external drive (not USB) periodically and even making a second copy to keep at a friend or family's home (or safety deposit box). You can even encrypt the drive with bitlocker if you're concerned about them looking through it.
posted by fern at 10:31 PM on August 31