By now, it may be common knowledge that you can use an original c.2016 Google Pixel to back up your photos and videos to Google Photos in Original Quality for free. While there are several posts and tutorials on how to set this up, in practice I found that some notable points were missing from them, namely how to deal with deleting the photos from your primary device once they were backed up from the Pixel. I’m an Android user so this is written primarily from that perspective.
Here’s how to sync/delete the backed up photos from your primary device and the backup pixel [Android]:
1. Install Resilio Sync on both devices. On the Primary device, Create Folder and select your Camera folder, located in /DCIM/Camera
Once created, tap the “i” icon to edit the settings for the new folder you created. Deselect “Selective Sync” if it is enabled. Then tap the gear icon and change the Permissions setting to “Read & Write”.
2. On the primary device, next to the Share setting is a QR button. Tap it to display the QR code for the Camera folder you just set up. On the Pixel 1, tap “Scan QR Code” and scan the QR code to link the two devices.
3. In the Google Photos app of the Primary device, turn off Backup. Then take a few photos with the primary device to test the sync.
4. On the backup Pixel 1, in the Resilo app, you should see the new photos being sync’d.
5. In Google Photos on the Pixel 1, be sure that Backup is enabled and that your Camera folder is selected to Backup. you should see the phots being uploaded to your Google account.
And finally, here’s how to deal with removing the backed up photos from your primary device:
6. After the photos are backed up, you can tap the ‘Free Up Space’ function to delete the images that have now been backed up. After a few moments, you will see that the images on the primary devcie have been deleted from the Sync folder.
Some notes and observations:
– You can quit Resilio Sync on the primary device and start it up as needed to sync to the backup pixel.
– Unless you are taking photos and need to back up constantly, you don’t need to have the backup Pixel plugged in and On at all times. Just boot it up and sync as needed.
– You can set up multiple devices to sync to the Pixel 1, like an iPad or iPhone as well. Resilio is available on iOS devices, too.
– The backup Pixel doesn’t seem to display all of the available directories that contain media for some reason. I have also seen the sync directory disappear on occasion, but once I start a sync and then relaunch Google Photos, it seems to pick it back up again.