How to automatically upload your photos to Google Photos instead of iCloud on iPhone

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up Google Photos on your iPhone, move photos and videos from iCloud Photos to Google Photos, disable iCloud Photo Library, and enable auto-upload of iPhone photos to Google Photos.

Move photos and videos from iCloud Photos to Google Photos on iPhone

Why use Google Photos on iPhone?

Accessing iCloud Photos on iPhone, iPad, Mac, or a Windows PC is easy. Unfortunately, if you also use an Android phone you can’t easily access your iCloud Photos. To address this, you might want to automatically back up your iPhone pictures and videos to Google Photos, which is available on all major platforms.

In addition to that, the popular photo and cloud storage service from Google offers several cool features. It comes with face and pet recognition, AI search using keywords, plenty of editing options, Google Lens, and more.

Google offers 15GB of free storage to anyone who signs up for the service, while with iCloud Photos, you get just 5GB. You can upload photos either in original or compressed high-quality, which can save some space. The stored photos and videos will be available across any number of devices via the Google Photos app.

How to set up Google Photos on your iOS device

Setting up Google Photos is quick and straightforward. If you don’t already have the app on your iPhone, then you can download it for free from App Store. When you first launch the app after installation, you’ll need to provide full access to your photos. After this, you’ll be asked to sign in using a Google account.

If you have already used a Google account on the iPhone, you can sign in directly, or you can open a new Google account. Once you’ve signed in, you should be able to use the Google Photos app as an alternative to the stock iOS Photos app. Before you start backing up photos to Google Photos, we recommend doing the following.

Move photos from iCloud to Google Photos

If you haven’t backed up your iPhone photos to iCloud Photo Library yet, then you can skip this step and simply back up everything to Google Photos. If you have several photos and videos on iCloud Photos, you can move them all to Google Photos with Apple’s Data & Privacy transfer tool.

Here’s how to migrate photos and videos from iCloud to Google Photos:

1) Head over to Apple’s privacy website.

2) Sign in using your Apple ID and password.

3) Choose Request to transfer a copy of your data.

Data and privacy Apple iCloud

4) Select Google Photos as your destination and select what you’d like to transfer. You can choose to transfer only photos or videos, or both. Click Continue.

iCloud to Google Photos

5) Sign in using your Google ID. Allow Apple to add photos and videos to your Google library.

That’s it. A copy of your photos and videos from iCloud will be transferred to Google Photos and will appear in the app on your iPhone. You can then delete all your photos and videos from iCloud Photos.

Disable iCloud Photos

Next, you can disable iCloud Photo Library so that photos and videos aren’t backed up to Apple’s service anymore going forward. Follow the steps below to do this.

1) Launch the Settings app on your iPhone.

2) Tap your name at the top of the Settings menu to access iCloud options. Select iCloud from the menu.

iCloud settings iPhone

3) Now, tap Photos.

iCloud photos

4) Turn off iCloud Photos and My Photo Stream.

disable iCloud photos

iCloud Photos is now successfully disabled and will no longer back up your iPhone photos and videos to iCloud.

How to auto-upload photos from iPhone to Google Photos

You can now set up auto upload of photos from your iPhone to Google Photos. This means you won’t have to manually back up photos to the service. Here’s how to go about it.

1) Open the Google Photos app on your iPhone.

2) Tap your profile picture from the top right corner and select Google Photos settings.

google photos settings

3) Tap Back up & sync.

4) Turn on the toggle for Back up & sync.

backup and sync photos

Your iPhone photos and videos should now automatically back up to Google Photos. Once everything is backed up, you can even delete the photos and videos from your device’s Photos app if you’re running out of storage.

If you’re looking for an alternative to iCloud Photos, then Google Photos is a great choice. It offers plenty of features, 15GB of free storage space, and works well with iPhones and iPads. We hope this tutorial helped you back up all your memories to Google Photos.

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