Google photos is an awesome photo storage service by Google. It’s really the best place to store all your photos because, in addition to storing them all, it also organizes them by date and gives you a whole lot of really cool features like facial recognition and much more.
So naturally, if you have some of your photos stored on Google Drive, you’ll probably want to move them across to Google Photos to take advantage of all these cool features.
The obvious way to do this would be to download them all to your computer and then re-upload them to Google Photos. And that would get the job done just fine, but if you have a lot of photos or a slow internet connection it could take quite a long time to do it that way, and if your ISP (internet service provider) puts a limit on how much data you can use each month, you might even get extra charges added to your bill.
Fortunately, Google gives you a way to simply move your photos from Google Drive to Google Photos in a matter of minutes without having to download and re-upload them, and in this article, that’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do.
Prefer to watch a video about how to move photos from Google Drive to Google Photos? Click here.
How To Transfer Photos From Google Drive To Google Photos
First of all, you will need to do this on the Google Photos website rather than the app. You can visit the website in the browser app on your phone if you want, but I’m going to be doing it on a computer to make things easier.
But regardless of which device you’re using, the first thing you’ll need to do is go to photos.google.com and sign in with your Google Account if you’re not already signed in.
Once you’re there, you’ll need to click on the “Upload” button near the top right-hand corner of the screen.
Then, in the menu that pops up, click on “Google Drive”.
You’ll then see a box appear on the screen containing all the most recently modified pictures on your Google Drive. If you just want to move some recent photos from Google Drive to Google Photos, you’ll just need to scroll down a bit until you find the ones you want.
But if you have some photos in a specific folder in Google Drive that you want to move, you’ll need to click on “My Drive” to show every photo in your Google Drive.
And then you’ll be able to either select photos from the “My Drive” folder of your Google drive, or go into a different folder and select the photos in there.
For this example, I’m going to go into the folder called “Timmy’s Favourite Photos” and select photos from there, but you can obviously select photos from wherever you want.
Once you’ve found your photos (wherever they might be), you’ll need to select all the ones you want to move. You can do this by either clicking on each one individually to select it. Or by clicking on the top photo, holding down the shift key on your keyboard, and then clicking on the bottom one to quickly select them all.
Once all the images you want to move are selected, go ahead and click on “Upload” to begin moving the photos to Google Photos.
The photos will then begin uploading from Google Drive to Google Photos, you will see a progress bar while they’re uploading.
If you’re only moving a few photos (like I am) this will only take a few seconds, but if you’re moving hundreds of photos at a time, it could take a few minutes, and then once it’s done, all your photos will now be there.
How To Find Your Photos Once They’re There
Once your photos have finished uploading, you might be wondering where they are. Well, as photos in Google Photos are arranged in chronological order, your photos from Google drive will be arranged along with your other photos based on the date they were taken.
So if the photos you just uploaded from Google Drive were taken more recently than any of the other photos in Google Photos, they will now be at the top of the list.
But if the photos you just uploaded from Google Drive were taken at an earlier date than some of the other photos in Google Photos, you will have to scroll down a bit to see the newly added ones.
Why The Photos Are Still In Google Drive
Once you’ve added the photos to Google Photos, they will still show up in Google Drive because this method really just copies them to Google Photos. So once they’re in Google Photos, you’ll probably want to go to drive.google.com and delete them from there so that they don’t take up unnecessary space in your Google Drive.
Want to learn how to delete files from Google Drive? Click here.
And that’s all there is to it, you will now have all your Photos in Google Photos so that you can enjoy all those features, without the downsides of having to download and re-upload them all.
