Management of Google photos.

[Yves Thomazeau]

Hello.

A my photos are on google cloud, pictures taken from my bridge are in Google Drive and those taken with my smartphones are on Google photos.
For the moment i ve been managed only my photos on drive and it works quite well, thank you imatch.
Now i consider to do the same with google photos but i d like to have advices for it.
For the recent ones i have done it by uploading from GP then putting them on Drive and then do the work with Imatch as usual. It s ok but it takes time and i have to delete them from Gp no to have doublons.
I wonder if it is possible directly from Imatch by scanning GP. It would be easier and also i would alays have  the albums in GP that is a bonus to watch some folders i think .
have you experienced that ? Have you had any problem doing it ? Thank you for your help. 

[Jingo]

You should be able to set up a Network Drive using Google Drive... I'm sure it will be slow to access the photos so don't expect the same performance as a local drive.. but it should also work just!  https://www.google.com/drive/download

[Mario]

IMatch does not directly access photos stored in vendor-controlled clouds like Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, Amazon Photos, Apple Photos or similar. There is not really much demand, and each vendor has it's own interfaces, security rules and hoops to jump through in order to access files in their clouds. IMatch would have to add support for all that, download the images to your disk, process them there, extract metadata, produce a local cache image etc. and then delete the image again. This will be slow, either way.

Most vendors allow you to maintain a local copy of the images in the cloud, in the Windows file system, where IMatch can access them. It's quite comfortable with OneDrive and DropBox. Such software can be download "on access" from the cloud and removed from local storage if not used for a while. And similar options, depending on the vendor.

Not sure about the software Google offers (Jingo's link). Or how long Google offers the software or maintains it. They are in the habit to discontinue software and services all the time. They have their own graveyard. The only reason for Google to offer free email and cloud storage is to utilize and monetize the data users upload. If it does not make money anymore, they discontinue it. Never rely on Google for anything important.

As a side note:

you should always have a local copy of your files anyway. Because, as many people have learned the hard way, when one of the cloud vendors pauses or terminates your account for a wide variety of reasons (from a possible hack to a violation of one of the 9,000 rules in their terms of service, you will lose access to all your cloud files from one second to the other. There is no appeal and usually all you can get in contact with is a bot and not a person. People are often not aware of how quickly you can, e.g., lose access to Google cloud.

[Yves Thomazeau]

I am using local copy of my images with Drive so there is no problem but i have no local copies of google photos on my PC.
That is why i asked community how they manage it if they do.
it is more a question about google than imatch but i did not know if there was a feature in imatch, now i know there is not.
The google photos synchronization seems to be more complicate than with Drive (no deleting , modified pictures only added) so i think i will import pictures from GP to my local folder, delet them from GP, tag them with imatch and have them synchronized in Drive.

[Mario]

If you mean Microsoft OneDrive when you say Drive - yes, it's quite comfortable.
And you have, unless you enable OneDrive to store some files only in the cloud, a local copy of your files - which is a good thing.
The files are accessible by IMatch and you're using OneDrive as a backup.

[thrinn]

If you mean Microsoft OneDrive when you say Drive - yes, it's quite comfortable

I think this topic is more related to Google, so I assume we are talking about Google Drive, not MS OneDrive.

[Mario]

Probably. I have never used Google Drive, so I unfortunately help with that.

I've used DropBox and I still use OneDrive.
But most of all, I use NextCloud on my own server. Which keeps all things encrypted and independent from the big cloud companies.

[6b6561]

Old topic, but I can clarify it a bit as I'm using both Google Drive and Google Photo. These two are two quite separate services, but they do have some bits and pieces shared.

The windows google client allows you to do two things:
 - Setup a file folder synchronization between your PC and Google Drive
 - Setup a backup of a photo folder on your PC -> Google Photo. This will just upload photos to Google Photo but will not replicate any file deletions etc. on the PC.

Pictures that are taken with the camera on the phone will end up in gphoto and will be visible in the Google Photo app or on https://photos.google.com/

Files will be visible in Google Drive app or on https://drive.google.com/

I use Google Photo as a carry around album, so I do upload pictures from my Cameras to gphoto.

My workflow is that I once per month:
- Cull images in gphoto
- Assign images in gphoto to albums
- Download the months pictures to my PC
- Import them in IMatch

"real" camera photos are uploaded to gphoto and added to albums. For this I have added a "Google" category in IMatch, so anything uploaded to gphoto is easily found in IMatch.