Google Photos Backup Terminology Now Less Confusing

Backing up photos to Google Photos is mostly an automatic task that you set once upon first open and then forget. That’s sort of the beauty of it. But since Google took away free unlimited storage, you may have taken a look at the backup settings in the app and realized that the terms they use to describe both backups and quality can be confusing. Google is changing the verbiage.

In a short community help post, Google announced that they heard from enough users who expressed confusion that they came up with changes to terminology that are “intuitive and easy to remember.”

Here are those changes:

• The entire “Backup & sync” section has been renamed to just “Backup.” The “sync” portion was apparently throwing people off, so now you’ll simply tap on “Backup” to find your backup settings.
• The other change is to “Upload size,” which is now known as “Backup quality.” I actually like this change, as quality is something you adjust depending on your storage situation and is a better way to explain to people that not going with original quality uploads reduces their quality. Those quality options are not changing names and are still “Original quality” and “Storage saver.” I would argue that “Storage saver” should probably be renamed to something else, though.

So that’s it. Pretty minor changes, but they should make your backup and quality options easier to understand, assuming you had to make a difficult decision once those free backups went away.

Did everyone end up paying for Google One storage to keep uploading to Google Photos or what was your move?