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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

So to address "confusion" with this, they're going to leave users with two separate copies of all their photos which no longer sync so that when you think you deleted a photo you might find it in your account again somewhere else later...

I don't feel like this is a solution that adequately addresses user confusion, but rather arbitrarily introduces it.

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How does it currently work if I have sync enabled, then I "delete" a photo in the Google Drive UI? Does it get deleted from Photos too?

And that is why this change is happening, it's confusing to users. Currently, I want say that if you delete a photo in Drive, it will delete it in Photos too?

Yes, they all get deleted from Photos; and in Drive they are moved to Trash. They also get moved to Trash on your phone if sync is on. It's also very hard to unlink Drive and Photos. I can't remember how I did it, but I turned off the feature immediately once I found out how useless it is.

This is a good change. There is no reason to sync them to Drive if Photos's underlying storage is not Drive in the first place, which it sounds like it is not.

I'm confused, we'll have a separate Photos folder somewhere?

That won't sync? I thought just photos on Drive wouldn't sync.

Right now photos sync with google drive. "Once these changes go into effect, this folder will stop receiving updates. It won’t go away; it will just stop syncing with Photos."

Really hope they give users a proper heads up and opt out button like "hey your photos are about to be duplicated do you want to keep the old copies?"

I don't understand this. Lets say I have a 15gb drive limit and 10gb of photos. After this change, will I have 10GB of photos in Google Photos and 10GB of photos in Google Drive, putting me at 20GB total? Or do the duplicated photos not count towards storage limits?

edit: "If you use Backup & Sync to upload photos and videos to Drive and Photos, it will upload a copy to each service, but it will not take up duplicate storage." I assume this applies here too

But is there a new service to sync your photos (outside of Drive)?

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