Google announces changes to Google Drive, Google Photos

In a blog post attributed to Google Drive product manager Dan Schlosser and Google Photos product manager Jason Gupta, the company outlined the changes to the backup and storage functions for these popular services. Backup and Sync for Windows and macOS will still work as before.

“We’ve heard feedback the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Drive and Photos.”

Beginning July, a new photos.google.com feature called “Upload from Drive” will let the user manually choose photos and videos from to import into Google Photos. Doing this, however, breaks the sync of these items between both services, and “Original Quality” items will count towards the storage quota in both Drive and Photos.

The blog post added:

“Any photos or videos from Drive in Photos that you have uploaded prior to this change will remain in Photos. If you have a ‘Google Photos’ folder in Drive, it will remain in Drive, but will no longer update automatically.”