But first I am going to take some time to discuss some recent changes to Google Photos and the automatic sync that once was between Photos and Drive. June came the month that announced the impending change of how Google Photos would work with Google Drive and that it would affect storage as well since the automatic sync was discontinued. When the automatic sync was discontinued that meant that photos would stay inside of Google Photos without going into Google Drive unless you downloaded the image from Photos to your device then upload the image to Drive. To go from Drive to Photos is now simply clicking on a button called "Upload from Drive" while inside of photos.google.com. The discontinuation of the sync also meant that any images uploaded to Drive would take up storage and if the image is in Original Quality, that will also take up space no matter if you are in Photos or Drive. The discontinuation of the automatic sync does not impact the Backup&Sync for Windows and Macs (information on Backup&Sync: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313). The June 12 article about this change can be found at https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/.
Photos as a whole was not impacted by this change and still continues to operate the same. Last week I discovered something new about Photos and Photos storage. According to the article at https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791, photos that were uploaded to Google Maps, Hangouts, Blogger, (and even included Google+ photos and Picasa photos) can take up space and those photos are not located inside of photos.google.com but inside of Album Archive which is located at get.google.com/albumarchive. The photo can take up space even if the starting point of the picture was not in any way related/in connection to Google Photos app. But it is easy to transform those photos from original quality to not take up storage space but once that is done, no way to undo. I was able to utilize that process to free up 2.5GB inside of my Google Account.
I don't use Google Photos often myself however I know that any pictures I take on my phone via the camera app save automatically to the Google Photos mobile app. I have library sharing turned on which automatically shares those photos to a second Google Account of mine (that is not connected to the phone in any way whatsoever) so if I need to grab my photos to share with some people that are connected with my Google Account, I can. I also utilize that library sharing option so I can insert photos into this blog. How I do so is actually by viewing the photo inside of the shared library on this account, click on 'save' then when I am in the blog post using the insert image link, navigate over to 'from Google Album Archive' type in the date in the search bar and viola, the photo will appear and then I can insert it to this blog. The informational article about how to share your Google photos library with another account: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/7378858?hl=en. Some clues about if you do have a shared library inside of your own Google Photos is that the URL of the shared library will be photos.google.com/partner and you will see an option "Turn on auto save" if that is not already on as well and that is if you were the recipient of the library. If you were the one to share your library with someone else, the URL would be a photos.google.com/partner and once inside of that URL, it would say "photos shared with" and for me, it tells me the exact email address not the display name of the other account.
And lastly let me touch upon Album Archive a bit more besides saying it is a storage place for Hangouts, Google Maps, Blogger, and used to also hold Google+ photos. For my Album Archive, I see photos from Hangouts, profile pictures, Blogger, Dropbox, and Auto Backup. Now what's interesting to me is this particular Google Account needs to have a section called Auto Backup when it does not control any devices whatsoever meaning it is not on a mobile device and the current device I use to write blogger on is a Chromebook and this is not the Google Account that even controls that ie it does not use this username and password to log into it and access password manager or the Chrome settings. But to show you what does Album Archive look like:
To explore Album Archive more, let's click on that "photos from Blogger" section to see what it would now reveal to us and for me, it reveals 3 "albums" which means I have 3 blogs. One of them does not have photos and is a private only me but Album Archive realizes and can recognize that blog still exists even without photos.
Let's now click on the album that is for this particular blog, which tells me in the photo we just saw has 13 images. What I see now is those 13 images plus telling me the status of the visibility of that particular album (and the visibility there would be for the Album Archive album itself not for the blog visibility setting).
The menu also gives me some options including downloading and deleting and even a choice of "settings" which clicking on "settings" reveals to me a choice on whether or not allow people to download those images (from the actual Album Archive). If I click on a specific image and then view the menu (3 vertical dots), I get an option to delete just that photo so let's say you want to keep some photos but not all of the photos...make sure you go to the specific photo in mind to delete rather than accidentally deleting the entire album. The good thing about Album Archive is that before you delete anything, it will confirm it since it tells you that once you delete it, it is gone for good.
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