I have been doing this dance between Google Photos and Apple Photos / iCloud for as long as Google Photos as been around and it is so frustrating. I bought the extra storage space from Apple/iCloud this year (after listening to the MPU #537 episode) with the hopes of fully migrating to Apple Photos but I gave up after getting completely frustrated by iCloud double and triple syncing photos with my desktop Apple Photos app and Apple Photos not syncing with iCloud if I kept my taxonomy as is. Maybe I was doing something wrong with Apple Photos but it just wasn’t working as I had thought it would and was too exhausting to think about adapting my workflows.
I have ~20 years of original digital photos organized by Year and Event and I want to keep that taxonomy and approach intact, and I want to have access to the ‘master’ photo files/images.
My workflow includes the need to add photos that my wife and kids take to that taxonomy structure, so I use Dropbox and Hazel to help process this workflow. Each person has Dropbox and Google Photos apps installed on their iPhones and they open up them every few weeks to sync their photos.
- Each person opens Dropbox and it uploads copies of photos to each person’s shared “Camera Uploads” folder.
- On my Desktop, Hazel takes the photos via Dropbox in those folders and puts them in the taxonomy I described above in the current year folder.
- Every month or so, I go through those photos and put them in the relevant “event” folder. Yes, I could do by year/month but chose not to.
- We also open Google Photos and that backs up all photos to their individual Google Photo accounts.
I really wanted to move to Apple Photos but it just wasn’t working as I had hoped. Will try to dig into it again and see if I was doing something wrong.