I’ve been using an Android phone for the past 5 years, and need to upgrade. My current phone still works, but is slow as molasses and is stuck on Android 9. I have thousands of photos on this phone, that also get backed up to Google Photos.
If I take more pictures, those get synced to Google Photos, and if I delete photos from my phone, those photos will be deleted from Google Photos (which bothers me). So, Google Photos seems to be acting of a mirror (or backup?) of my phone’s photo library. This includes any custom albums I have organized some of those photos into.
My question is what happens if I get a new phone to replace the one I have and associate it with the same Google account? Obviously, the new phone won’t have any photos on it to start. Will that cause all the previously synced photos in Google Photos to vanish?
And come to think of it, the same question arises if I merely lose my current phone and have to buy a new one. What becomes of all the old photos?
If you have Amazon you could save all your photo’s to Amazon Photo’s for back up. You get 5gb for free and if you are an Amazon Prime member you get unlimited.
Yes, there are lot’s of other ways to backup and save existing photos. But I’d like to understand how Google Photos works. It should not be this hard to understand. (Note: I do have Amazon Prime, as well as iCloud, but frankly, I trust Amazon more than Apple for data storage!)
Ok, I have google photo’s also and still have photo’s saved from my old phone going back years. So I don’t think they just go away. I think you would have to delete them. Does that help? I have photo’s from back in 2014 still on google photos
I suggest you look at the Pixel phones. They are made by Google - well some part of Alphabet. They are rated as the best phones for Android users by TheWireCutter. Additionally these phones (as opposed to Samsung phones) get security updates to the OS - something that my brother-in-law does not get on his 2 year old Galaxy.
I can’t get you much beyond this as I am an iPhone person.
Too late. I’m a Tracfone user cheapskate, and just bought a new Samsung A15. My old phone was a Motorola G6.
I did just find this article which seems to allay my fears, but can I trust it?
Setting up your New Phone
If all the photos from your old phone were successfully backed up, and you know the account that was used, then setting up a new phone is a piece of cake!
Get the Google Photos app from the App store (iOS) or the Play store (Android) and Install it.
Verify that the correct Google account is being used
Open the Google Photos app and see all your pictures!
I have an android phone, goog photos and photos on my phone.
If the phone is backing up to goog photos, I do not see any indication of it.
All the photos on goog photo were uploaded from my PC. Some are from my phone but most are from my drone or my camera.
I download photos to my PC using a USB cable or Bluetooth. Cable is easier. Just plug it in, select Phone in thunar (file manager), touch “Allow” on the phone and I have access.
I upgraded my phone and used the copy app. It copied all photos, contacts, etc. Once on the new phone, I had to do some “mousing around” to get it looking like what I had for photo albums. They were all there but the “smart phone” decided I did not want to see all my albums in the “Albums View!” Go figure …
If you go to the “Library” view, look at the “Photos on device” grouping, any folder you click on shows a toggle to turn on backups or not. And any folder that is backed up will show up on Google Photos as well.
When you get a new Android phone and sign in with your Google account, don’t worry—your photos won’t disappear from Google Photos. They’re all backed up in the cloud, so they’re not tied to your phone’s physical storage. As long as everything’s been synced, all your photos will still be there when you switch devices. Even if you lose your current phone, your pictures are safe in Google Photos. Just be careful when deleting stuff from your phone, because that’ll delete it from Google Photos too unless you’ve turned off syncing or used features like archiving to keep them safe.
Yeah, I upgraded two months ago, and everything went fine: all photos present and accounted for. I had thought that because the new phone would start with no photos, that that might trigger a mass deletion of all the cloud photos so as to match. But thankfully, it didn’t. Apparently, the presence of a new empty phone is not equivalent to deleting all the photos from that phone.