I have been a big fan of Dropbox for a long time. It’s a great service to back up and sync documents, photos, videos, and whatever else, but when Google announced the massive price cuts to Google Drive storage plans, I made the switch. After a few days of uploading, I had all of my Dropbox data imported into Google Drive, but I still needed to find an easy way for my wife and I to upload our pictures and videos from our phones to Drive.
The Drive app works well enough (although it’s definitely slower than Dropbox for displaying images), but it doesn’t have an automatic upload feature for new photos and videos. Google offers automatic upload functionality with Google+ (which uses the same storage plan as Drive if you want to upload full sized photos and videos), but photos uploaded on Google+ are not visible in Google Drive (though you can make photos in Drive appear in Plus).
The problem with relying on Google+ to back up your photos is two fold: first, you are relying on a service that is designed to share photos, not preserve them; second, having your photos only on Google+ means you are completely reliant on Google to keep your photos safe. It’s always good to have more than one backup, which is why I wanted to use Google Drive to sync my photos on Google’s servers (off-site backup) and on my computers (local backup).
Drive Autosync by ttxapps is the perfect app for uploading photos and videos to Google Drive automatically. The app is free in the Play Store for uploading photos and videos under 8 MB, but a $4.99 upgrade to Drive Autosync Pro enables uploading files of any size. When you open the app, it will ask you to connect to your Google account, then you will select the folder you want it to sync. After that, you select the folder on Google Drive that you want to sync to, and then you select from seven sync methods for the two folders (two-way sync, upload only, upload then delete, upload mirror, download only, download then delete, and download mirror). The app then works in the background to automatically upload photos and videos as you take them.
Drive Autosync also comes with a ton of options to control how and when you want to upload your photos and videos to Drive. The app defaults to warning the user if they try to initiate a sync on mobile (which is helpful if you have a data cap), allows you to set a battery percentage at which it will stop automatically uploading to conserve battery, lets you select which WiFi networks you want to use, and whether or not to allow uploading on battery or just if the phone is charging.
Upgrading to Pro ($4.99) not only allows you to upload files larger than 8 MB, but also gets rid of ads, allows you to sync multiple folders, sync your entire Google Drive with a local folder on your phone, and allows you to set a passcode to access the app’s settings.
If you’re looking for a great app to automatically upload your photos to Google Drive, look no further than Drive Autosync. Seriously, don’t look any further. For some reason this is a problem that very few are attempting to solve on Android, while there are multiple options on iOS (PhotoSync is best, by the way). Please note, PhotoSync is now available on Android as of today, however, it is quite limited so far in its functionality.
Download Drive AutoSync directly from Google Play by following the link below.
