My wife and I utilize Google’s free, “high quality” backup feature in Google Photos. It’s been rock solid for us and I highly recommend it. If anything ever happened to our devices, we’d still have copies of all our photos. But, of course, it doesn’t save full resolution copies. For that, we use Plex’s camera roll upload capabilities to backup our our photos to an external hard drive attached to our Mac Mini.

This setup gives us a “high quality” offsite backup and a full resolution local copy. But our devices are stuck uploading the photos twice, which isn’t exactly ideal. What I’d like to do is turn off automatic backups in Google Photos on our iOS devices and rely on Plex to backup our photos to the Mac. From there, Google’s new Backup and Sync app would see the changes in our Photos folder and backup to Google Photos.

I tried this setup with Google’s previous desktop uploader, but it didn’t work well. Sometimes it would fail to upload photos or wait too long between refreshes and we’d be stuck waiting for them to appear in Google Photos on iOS. Hopefully, this new app solves those problems.