Google just changed the way photos in Google Photos and Drive sync up. It’s true that good product design is hard, but this decision seems really bad to me.

The upshot is that if you have an Android phone and are using Google Photos, Drive, or Backup and Sync, there is no longer a way to take a photo and have the image file automatically appear on your computer soon thereafter.

Sound crazy? It is! But it’s true.

Let’s say you take a photo of something on your phone, and then want to play with the JPG file on your computer, for example to edit it in Photoshop, attach it to an email, upload a receipt image to your company’s expensing system, back it up to an external HD, or indeed anything else.

The only way to do this now is to navigate to photos.google.com in your browser, manually download a copy of each file to your computer, and then do it on the copy in your download folder.

(Or you could manually connect your phone to your computer with a cable, but seriously, who does that these days?)

This is bad product design that runs roughshod over an extremely common way people use photo syncing.

Unfortunately, I am left with no choice but to go back to using Dropbox to automatically move photos from my phone to my computer — something I only stopped doing 3 months ago.

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Footnote

(Added: Read about this privacy issue in detail at Google Photos is making your photos semi-public and you probably don’t realise.)

I am particularly annoyed about this because unlike Drive, Google Photos offers no way to share a photo with someone without making it public on the internet, protected only by people not knowing the right URL to find it. This is not a secure way to share confidential information.

If the URL ever leaks, for example by an email thread being forwarded to the wrong person, those images can be seen by anyone at all, and you wouldn’t even know they had looked at them. Google would never use this system for their sensitive corporate documents, and we shouldn’t be expected to for our private information either.