My Current iPhone and Google Photos process

I tossed my tinfoil hat aside the day Google released the new Google Photos. I’ve tried nearly every photo storage/backup/sharing service and Google Photos is by far my new favorite. It combines drop-dead simple backup with some fancy searching and categorizing features. All for free.

I started out by configuring both my Mac and iPhone to send photos to Google. The problem was that I also import my photos from my phone to my Mac so I was getting duplicates of everything. To avoid this, I’ve turned off syncing on my phone. Now my process looks like this…

1. Take photos on iPhone for a day or so
2. Plug iPhone into Mac and import via Image Capture (deleting all photos from phone after import)
3. Edit, tag, and caption every “keeper” using Photo Mechanic
4. Import into Lightroom

Since the photos in Lightroom are uploaded via Google Photos Backup they eventually end up visible both at photos.google.com and the Google Photos iPhone app. No duplicates. The other benefit is that all of the uploaded images are properly captioned, making the already great search feature even more useful.