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My wife and I use Google Photos to share pictures between our devices. We like it because it has Auto Backup and automatically syncs pictures between our two phones.

To make this work, though, she has had to add my Google account to her phone, which comes with a host of annoyances. Even when we turn off sync for everything but Photos, many Google apps automatically switch her over to my account. The worst is Hangouts -- because I use Google Voice, she gets all of my text messages and voicemail, and I can't find a way to stop that.

Does anybody have some advice for either:

  1. A way to sync photos using Google Photos, but without my wife getting all of my messages in Hangouts?
  2. A non-Google app that will give us similar functionality for photos (automatic backup and syncing)?
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  • Have you looked into Dropbox, Box, or any of the many other file-syncing services?
    – Matthew Read
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 16:27
  • I've done this with OneDrive before -- in fact, I auto backup all of my photos to OneDrive as well. But it has a pretty crummy interface for actually viewing my photos. Do you know if Dropbox or Box is any better?
    – Jeff Rosenberg
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 16:57
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    I could be wrong, but you ought to be able to sync the photos to a world-readable location and then use whatever app you want for other tasks like viewing them.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 18:37
  • Yeah, good thought. I could do OneDrive combined with a better app for viewing them.
    – Jeff Rosenberg
    Commented May 7, 2015 at 18:47

3 Answers 3

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Me and my wife use Picspro android app for Google photos. It allows browser authentification to sign into any amount of Google Photo accounts without having to add the full Google account to the phone itself. Personally, We keep all our photos on her account, using this app I can be logged in and view them and also upload to it so our photo collection is unified. We also use this to upload to our Mum's accounts too and it works a treat. Settings>accounts>add account. Untick the box next to "Use phones account"

To fully back up all your Google photos to your PC, just go to Google Takeout and you can download any or all of your photos whenever you like.

Hope this helps :)

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  • Ooh, that sounds good. Thanks, I'll give it a try!
    – Jeff Rosenberg
    Commented Jul 29, 2015 at 9:26
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I am trying to figure this out as well. I was keeping copies of photos on our respective personal laptops and then using something like Microsoft Sync, but didn't like it. Then went to BitTorrentSync which seemed to work well. Then I would use the desktop app to keep photos in sync with each person's Google Photos account.

Then I decided to setup a makeshift server to save our photos to. But this caused issues with uploading to our respective Google Photos accounts as now there is only one laptop in the server.

So, I may go back to BitTorrentSync. But, I wish there was an easier way to do this. I really like having local copies of my photos, which are backed up on Backblaze without having too many programs running that can crash and to maintain.

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I achieved this using Google Photos and Drive. I activated, in Google Drive, the Google Photo folder, then I shared it with my wife. If she do the same you can see each other photos from Drive "shared with you" folder.

Activating also "Google Drive" from Photo settings and adding shared folder in Google Drive (from context menu on the folder) should also bring those photos in each Google Photo app.

You can also create a Google Photo shared album if you don't want to share every photos, but that way you have to manually add photo to it.

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