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lawful

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 26, 2012
66
6
Hello everyone!... I have 200 GB of photos plus other stuff (backups etc), and I'm paying 9.99 for 2TB. I'm thinking to move to Google Photos, but I'm afraid to regret later...

. Any experience / advice?
. If I stop using iCloud Photo Library, can I still Use Photo Stream?
. How do you manage 4k videos when using Google Photos?
. Photos and Videos in iOS Device or in a Mac will keep they original size? so I can back original size media using Time Machine?

Well, thank you a lot for reading my post. And Thank you in advance for any advice!
 

zorinlynx

macrumors G3
May 31, 2007
8,353
18,582
Florida, USA
My personal feeling on this is that it's absolutely worth $10 not to have to manually manage and maintain your photos. With iCloud Photos it's entirely automatic; you just have to make sure you have enough iCloud storage.

With the free version of Google Photos you're going to have to deal with the cloud versions of your photos being in reduced quality, and having to manually transfer photos off your phone using your Mac if you want to preserve the full quality versions. Also, Google has made it harder to keep an automated offline backup of your photo library by removing integration with Google Drive.

It's up to you, but for me doing all that sounds like a nightmare. I happily pay the $10 a month to not have to deal with it all. Also, you can use the space to have an additional backup of your personal data as well.

However regardless of what option you choose, be sure to follow the most important advice: DO NOT STORE YOUR ONLY COPY OF YOUR DATA IN THE CLOUD. Always have an offline backup of some sort.
 

lawful

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 26, 2012
66
6
My personal feeling on this is that it's absolutely worth $10 not to have to manually manage and maintain your photos. With iCloud Photos it's entirely automatic; you just have to make sure you have enough iCloud storage.

With the free version of Google Photos you're going to have to deal with the cloud versions of your photos being in reduced quality, and having to manually transfer photos off your phone using your Mac if you want to preserve the full quality versions. Also, Google has made it harder to keep an automated offline backup of your photo library by removing integration with Google Drive.

It's up to you, but for me doing all that sounds like a nightmare. I happily pay the $10 a month to not have to deal with it all. Also, you can use the space to have an additional backup of your personal data as well.

However regardless of what option you choose, be sure to follow the most important advice: DO NOT STORE YOUR ONLY COPY OF YOUR DATA IN THE CLOUD. Always have an offline backup of some sort.

Thank you for your answer and I agree it’s worth it to pay 9.99 for having iCloud Photo Library... but sometimes I feel that Apple owns our lives deciding what we have to do and how mucho we have to pay in order not to go through a nightmare.

I know and I agree that iCloud Photo Library is great but let’s suppose tomorrow Apple says that we have to pay 20 in instead of 9.99. My point is that the more Apple products you have, the more advantage they take from you because they know you are locked in their ecosystem.
 
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