Last week, Google announced some sweeping changes across all of its services centered around privacy. This included an auto-delete feature to limit the time Google holds on to things like search (on the web or in-app) and YouTube history, as well voice commands history (things you say to Google Assistant), as well as faster and easier way to switch to Incognito mode (just long-press on your profile picture in Chrome). It also rolled out a pretty important change to Google Photos, which will affect its more-than one billion users.
From here on out, Google Photos app won’t automatically backup your photos in quite the same way. If you take photos directly through messaging apps, such as iMessage, WhatsApp and Slack, Google Photos won’t automatically backed them up to Google’s cloud, as it did before.
This change could be a godsend for those who take a lot of photos directly through those messaging apps and don’t actually want to save them, or a major inconvenience for those who want Google Photos to automatically save all the photos you take. Either way, you can reverse this setting and re-enable backups just adjusting your backup settings — if you want to turn it back on, you just have to manually do so through Settings.
This is actually just significant change that Google has rolled out to Google Photos recently. For starters, it completely redesigned the Google Photos app a few weeks ago that has a completely new interface (so if you haven’t opened Google Photos for a few weeks, you might be in for a little shock). And it killed the photo printing subscription service, which would mail you 10 physical photos each month from your Google Photos library, that it launched at the beginning of 2020.
