When your devices synced the photo, did it take up twice the space in your Drive? Unfortunately, this synced system was somewhat confusing. If you took a photo with an Android device, it would be added to your Google Photos account and sync automatically with Google Drive. If you uploaded a photo to Drive, you could add it to Google Photos, and they would sync. Up until 2019, Google Drive and Google Photos synced data between them. After all, why not leverage cloud storage along with a photo service? Today, many photo identification systems are much more refined and work as part of Google Lens.Īt this point, Google Photos needed something in the Google Ecosystem to tie to, and they chose to connect it to Google Drive. When Google+ shut down in 2015, Google Photos became an independent service. One of them was a photo component that would automatically identify and attempt to tag elements of a photo uploaded to the service (as well as all of the usual photo-management tools a photo service implies). Google pushed that network as hard as they could, but it never really caught on, and in 2015, they shut it down.īut, Google+ had a few useful features. In the far-off days of yore, in the deep history of the early 2010s, Google Photos was part of Google+, Google’s attempt at a social network. Google did not tie Google Photos to Google Drive initially. But which is better? You might think it’s the app specifically designed for photos, but Google Photos has limitations that are worth considering. Google Drive and Google Photos are both excellent options to store and sync photos between devices in a central account.

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