Backing up pictures from Android to the cloud
 

I feel as if there should be an easy answer to this, but I'm seeing all sorts of conflicting info...

I have a Nexus 4 running Android 4.4.4. I have ~12GB of space and ~8GB is used for storing photos and video. I'm dangerously close of running out of space.

I'd like to move all of the existing photos off of the phone and into the cloud, but still have them visible when I go to Gallery or Photos. (In other words, I don't want to have to open up a separate app to see them. It should be as seamless as my Dropbox folders appearing in my libraries on my PC.)

Right now everything is automatically backing up to Google+ (and OneDrive). But from what I've read, if I delete the photo from my phone, the photos will also be removed from Google+. (I just tested it, and that does in fact seem to be the case.)

Presumably I could backup all of my photos from my phone and then manually upload the photos to Google+, then delete them from my phone, but that seems silly. Is there any way to remove them from my phone but ensure they remain with Google+?

Did you remove it from within Google Photos? That definitely removes it from the cloud; I thought that if you remove it via a file manager (or via moving it off the phone onto your PC with a USB cable) that it would not delete it from the cloud.

You might try the latter.

I believe I removed it from Gallery as opposed to Photos.

I would have thought that was safe, but it may be integrated.

The cloud photos don't show up for me in Gallery, but do in Photos (only in the "All" view, not in "On Device".)

I was looking for something like this - does this process remove the photos from the phone (freeing up space) but keeps them visible in the integrated gallery app as described? or like dropbox, is there a copy in each location?

I hate Google+ and don't want anything to do with it, but at the same time, I can't find an app to integrate my photos that I moved to the Amazon S3 cloud with my phone, even as a third party gallery app.

If this option really works, it would be worth considering as I can still archive my photos to S3 for pennies a month so it doesn't matter if I delete photos from Google.

dropbox makes it dead easy to back up photos on Android to them.

I use OneDrive, which automatically backs them up, but that still forces me to flip between the Gallery/Photos (for the pictures on my device) and the Dropbox/OneDrive app.

I'm looking for a way to see them all in a single location -- preferably Gallery/Photos -- regardless of where they're backed up. And I really enjoy the Auto Awesome feature, so I'd prefer to use Google + cloud storage.

On my Galaxy S4 running 4.4.3 GPE Rom but with the Gallery app still there, I'm able to delete from Gallery and maintain the Google+ backup without issue.

I've tested 3 methods of deleting...

1. Go to Photos, slide out the left menu, select "On Device" and delete a photo -- Seems to remain in Google+ but is gone from phone. I can still view it in the gallery if I select "Photos."

2. Go to Photos, look at the default view (which seems to be Google+ view), delete photo, am prompted that I understand I'm deleting everywhere. Photo disappears from Google+ and from phone.

3. Go to Gallery, select photo, delete it. Photo seems to delete from device but remain in Google+.

So it seems method 1 & 3 will remove it from the phone (freeing up storage space) but keep it on Google+. I'm going to keep an eye on Google+ to make sure things just aren't delayed in being deleted. (But given that the picture disappeared in Google+ when I tried method 2, I think I have my answer.)

If you remove photos from your phone with a USB cable it will not delete them from the cloud, as far as I have experienced. I had to clean my Nexus 5 a couple months back when it was completely filled with photos and was in the same boat. So I tried a small copy, then checked against the cloud and it was fine ("the cloud" here being Google+). They're still there months later.

The photos still appear in the Photos app, but I haven't found out how to get them in Gallery - but I don't use Gallery anyway.

So I'm clear on the process, if I want to free up space on my phone, I would do the following?

1. enable auto-backup with google+ to transfer the photos to the cloud
2. connect a USB cable, browse the phone to find the DCIM folder
3. delete the contents of the DCIM folder
4. open the Gallery app and all my photos and albums should still be visible with photos in the correct album because I'm connected to Google+?
5. if I want to send a photo, I still attach it from gallery, but I need a data or wifi connection to bring the photo back down from the cloud to make the attachment? Once I do this, does it re-store the photo back to the DCIM or other folder on the phone?

Sorry, but something in the process is still eluding the non-techie side of me :)

Gallery app is not the same as the (Google) Photos app. The former is generic Android, the latter Google+ related, and you may need to download it from Google Play.

No; if you have both on your phone you'll have a choice of apps to attach it from, and you'll need to use "Photos" and not "Gallery."

It has its own cache directory (which you can find if you dig, but is not exactly user-friendly; the file names and directory structure are not the original) and will hang onto low-resolution copies of newer things, and clear out older ones when offline.

As far as I know, there's no way to get to Google+ Photos in the old gallery app except where the photos are shared into one of the old-style Picasa Web Albums.

OK, so deleted many more photos using the Gallery and Photos/On Device and I can confirm that they've remained in Google Plus. I'll switch from primarily using the Gallery to the Photos app.

One thing to note if you're doing this: You have two choices when doing auto-backup of photos to Google+ actual size/resolution (whatever you have as your default) and web sized. (Google may use different terminology.) You can backup an unlimited amount of web-sized photos, but if you backup at the original resolution, it counts against your Google+/Google Drive total capacity. So if you want the unlimited option but care about your photo resolution size, back them up to another storage option, too.

Ok this process is really flustering me. I open the Google Photos app and see all of my photos, but none of my albums. When I enabled auto-backup, nothing was uploaded until I scrolled to each album from the app (from the on-device link), turned off auto-backup then turned it back on - overnight, some 2500+ photos went up.

However, when I open the Google Photos app, I just see the photos, none of the albums, but if I click through the menu to 'on device', I see the albums - however if I remove the photos from my device, I assume that on-device content will go empty and I will lose the album organization.

I set the photos to upload at original size, but I only see about 5GB used when it should be about 20GB+ and I would have had to purchase more storage, so it seems they did not upload at the correct resolution - what's probably cheaper is keeping a copy of my files as a backup on Amazon S3, and buying a SD card to move my photos/videos to free up space on the phone. Seems much simpler and maybe even cheaper in the long run.