google photos on iphone

[camerageek8]

My iphone has very limited free space, and I am looking for a cloud where I can save photos, safely store them there or save to my ext hard drive, and then delete from my phone. I have these questions though:
1. Apple's iCloud seems to not be a good option because if you delete the photo from the phone, it deleted it from the cloud, but as far as I can tell, this is not true of google photos, right? If I backup to google photos, I can delete the picture from my phone and still have it on google photos?
2. Are there any issues saving from google photos to your computer or external hard drive?
3. People say iphone picture are less than 16MP so they would not be compressed or altered when saved to google photos for the free storage, is this true? Are iphone photos saved in the original form to google photos?
4. If google decides to discontinue google photos some day, what would happen to all the photos saved there? I hope we would have advanced notice to at least save them elsewhere and not lose them.
5. When does google photos back up your iphone pics? I put under settings to use date to back up phone and videos but there seems to be a random lag of automatic backing up of the photos even when I have internet connection, of like 15-20 minutes.
6. Are there any issues with backing up iphone videos and any quality lost?

 

[Rob Phillips]

1. Yes, if you back up to Google Photos, or any cloud service outside of iCloud, you can delete the photos from your device without deleting the stored copy from the cloud.
2. No issues that I’m aware of. Works just fine for me when I need it to.
3. Choose the “high quality” option for upload size. Only photos greater than 16 MP will be compressed, which is a moot point because iPhone photos aren’t that large at the moment. Furthermore, it won’t eat into the free storage Google gives you.
4. You’ll receive advanced notice. Whenever Google has discontinued services in the past we’ve had several months to prepare and Google generally provides instructions on how to do so. With the growing popularity of cloud storage I don’t think it’s something to worry about though.
5. I’m not sure how often it backs up but make sure you have background app refresh enabled for Google Photos or it will only sync when you launch the app.
6. Google Photos will allow you to store unlimited 1080p videos at full quality. Unless you’re recording video at 4K you’ll be good to go.

 

[Ledsteplin]

Be sure to keep photos in the "Recently deleted" album deleted on the iPhone. They take up space. Especially just before you back up.

 

[eve6er69]

I also use Google photos and I can honestly say it's awesome. I still use iCloud to mirror pics between devices but google photos having unlimited storage is a win win for me.