Please ask your questions here (not in email) – we promise to respond here, no such promise with email. This is a benefit of membership. Here’s info on how to post to this Q&A Forum.
You must be logged in as a Premium Member to Ask the Geeks a question. All are welcome to freely browse the Forums.

8:44 am

March 10, 2017

How can i tell how many photos I have in Google Photos. is there a limit?
I have seen photo sticks to back up my photos, but will this work with Google Photos?
I also have Drop Box and would like to bring those pictures into Google Photos – do they work together?
I also have DriveOne as backup.
I know I am all over the place, but I am going through all my pictures and want to put them in one place, and will be able to find as quickly as possible.
Thank you – have a great day! Take care, and be safe!!!
Google Photos gives you unlimited storage space for free, IF you are using the size called “High Quality” If you mistakenly set yours to “Original” you can retroactively change them all to High Quality using the command “Recover Storage”
See this video: 486.GP-Recover Storage
To see how many photos and videos you have, go to your Google Dashboard and scroll down till you see photos – you should see a number there. This is not a very accurate number, but it gives you an idea.
Photo sticks can only back up photos that are stored on your computer or on your phone, they can’t access your Google Photos in the cloud.
Dropbox and Google Photos do not work together, but you can set Dropbox to sync to your computer – meaning all the photos in dropbox are on your computer, then you can upload from Computer to Google Photos. BE CAREFUL here – it sounds like many of your Dropbox pictures may already be in Google Photos, so if you upload them again you’ll have lots of duplicates.
OneDrive works like dropbox, so same thing – you could add OneDrive photos to Google Photos, but you’ll have duplicates.
I think your first step is to look at all your photos and get a good feel for what is where. Get a notebook and take notes of what photos you see in Google Photos, Dropbox, and OneDrive. What years, what events, how many.
I do think Google Photos is the best place to collect all your photos in one place, and it there’s not too many duplicates, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Let me know if any of this helps and we can go from there.
11:06 am

November 28, 2019

A photo stick is just a USB “thumb” drive that you plug in to a computer. It has software that will automatically search your computer for all photos and copy them, it is supposed to also help eliminate duplicates. So, sure, you can use a photo stick, if copying pictures from your computer is what you need.
I prefer using an external hard drive as thumb drives are too easily lost or damaged. But, the main thing is that I don’t have pictures on my computer that need backing up. ALL my pictures are in Google Photos, in the cloud, and my important photos and videos I have downloaded to my computer. So – if photos are on my computer, that’s already my backup.
1 Guest(s)
