iCloud vs Google vs Microsoft - PHOTO CLOUD COMPARISON 2022

today I wanted to discuss photographs in the cloud these three are top competitors when it comes to cloud and cloud storage but specifically, when it comes to photos on your iphones ipads, and mac computers I want to discuss how it looks using iCloud photos google photos and Microsoft one drive because Microsoft apparently doesn't have a photos app, yeah here we go so we're gonna try and focus it to synchronizing photographs amongst your phone through iCloud and how it works with Google and Microsoft now there are other solutions out there amazon photos cloud there's probably 20 other cloud services.

but my points for this whole vpost is they're all cloud services so let's dive in and see how this all works on my computer here i have icloud photos turned on and we can tell that because if i go to photos in the top left choose preferences i can choose icloud and i have icloud photos checked and it's also downloading all the originals to this mac also to the left of that we have general and because use as system photo library is grayed out that means that this is a system library that synchronizes with icloud photos which you can only have one library and if we take a step back and look at the overall.

icloud preferences we would go to system preferences and inside of system preferences at the top you have apple id and this is where you're signed in with your icloud account and really the whole purpose of any cloud solution is to synchronize data from multiple devices so you have to ask yourself is the cloud a good solution for you every single cloud solution that you go with is going to be an additional monthly cost or a yearly cost every single one of them i've never seen one that's free integrating a cloud solution it's like an invisible hard drive you're just paying someone else to have files on some other computer that's not in front of you so it's just a big bucket in the sky that you have access to now you have the storage physically on your phone and you have the storage physically on your ipad and in your computer but the concept of the cloud is to move information easily wirelessly amongst all of these devices so on my computer here it's very important that you use the same icloud account that way they can all talk to each other just like if you were in the google environment and you had a google pixel phone and a windows computer or an android phone whatever it may be you're going to use a google account so that all of those devices synchronize with one another as well so here we have apple id i have my learn with joel account and

i have photos checked so this tells it that it's going to synchronize the photos from this computer up to the cloud and if we go to my phone here i will go into the settings scroll up towards the top and we'll have the same apple id i'll select this it's the same learn with joel at icloud.com and if we go to icloud we'll notice that photos is turned on here and it's toggled to download and keep the originals and i also have shared albums on if i go to the ipad here we'll go to settings we'll go to the same place icloud and again it's the same exact account so right off the bat if all three of your devices if you have three devices and content is not synchronizing amongst them first thing to check is that you're signed in to the same account within all of your devices if we go to icloud go to photos notice it's also turned on just like the iphone is so the way this works is if i take a photograph with my phone here so let me press the home button we're going to go into the camera and i'm just going to take a photograph here of my zoom f3 recorder which is awesome by the way just got it super slick connects right to the mac goes right to my microphone up there and it works great so when i took that photograph if i exit out of the camera and go to photos notice that photograph is right here in the photos apple photos app so if i press the home button this is the apple photos app you'll notice down here i have google photos which we'll get to in a second so if i go to apple photos it's now taking this picture and uploading it to icloud so notice here it says uploading one item so we need to wait for this to happen to finish uploading because then on our computer and our ipad that photograph will then show up so if we go to our computer notice that just showed up if we switch to our ipad and go to the apple photos it will show up

 

here in a second so the picture is now downloaded to my ipad so that one picture that i took with my iphone went to icloud icloud says hey you have a apple computer over here and you have an ipad over here so i'm going to send that picture to both devices so that they're the same that's the purpose of syncing here is where it intertwines with something like google or microsoft onedrive if i exit out of apple photos on the phone and we go to google photos you'll notice that under the photos down here in the bottom left we have that same picture i just took so what google photos is doing is if i click on my account in the top right and i go to google photo settings and go to backup and sync what i've told google photos to do is to back up and synchronize my photographs that i take with my phone but here's the thing when i take that picture with my phone it's going to icloud storage over here but it's also going to google photos over here it's two different cloud storages so the perceived notion is i'll just get a free google account because honestly they do give you more storage than icloud does where icloud only gives you five gigabytes google gives you 15 so it's three times as much but in the grand scheme of things it's not that much storage you're gonna fill it up so because

i turn that on that picture now is in both places and if i go to my ipad here if we exit out of apple photos and go to google photos here i scroll up and here is that picture if i go on the computer i would open up safari i would go out to photos.google.com and here's that picture so that picture synchronized just like icloud does now with onedrive it's the same exact thing if i go to my phone and we open up onedrive there's a preference that you need to turn on so that it automatically uploads your photographs that were taken with your phone so in the top left here if i click on my account and go to settings i need to make sure that camera upload is turned on this is linked with my microsoft account and then i tell it to include videos organized by month and that way it will automatically synchronize it so if i go to photos in the bottom right you'll notice this picture here is the same one i just took if we go back to my ipad here swipe up to get rid of google photos

if we go to onedrive in the top left we go to settings camera upload and everything is checked to match my phone but if i go on the bottom right and go to photos here is that photograph then on my computer open up a new tab i go to office.com i'm already signed in and then over here on the left hand side we have one drive and inside of onedrive it has photos and here is that picture so if your goal is that you want to save storage and not use icloud these photos yes can synchronize to google photos and microsoft onedrive you're gonna fill it up just like you would with icloud now it really comes down to two different things either you're filling up the hard drive space physically on this device or you're filling up the cloud storage so a lot of people misinterpret both of those and think one is the issue of the other keep in mind they're two entirely different storage units one is the cloud that is kind of expandable based upon the subscription that you have but your iphone and your ipad and your mac are all set in stone the moment that you purchase that device you can't upgrade the storage anymore it is what it is and whether that storage space is from photographs or text messages or just

files in general i think there's this preconceived notion that if you have an iphone and your icloud is getting full or it's asking you to pay for more storage that they can just use google photos as an alternative to fix that problem and that's really not how it works if something is full if icloud is full the solution is not to go to another cloud solution because if you're trying to avoid paying for more storage you're just going to end up paying to another cloud storage to try and fix the problem of paying for icloud storage but here's where it gets interesting on my phone here if i go back to the apple photos and i select this picture here and delete it in the bottom right i can delete this and notice it's going to say this photo will be deleted from all of your icloud photos on all of your devices so when i touch the lead photo it's now going to be deleted from the phone and if we come to the computer here and if we come back to my ipad here it's going to synchronize those changes back to both of these devices and delete it out of apple photos but that picture will still remain in google photos and it will still remain in microsoft onedrive now we've been looking at the particular apps on the ipad and the iphone and the mac but you can actually go out to safari and we'll open up a new tab and go to icloud.com and we'll sign in with the same exact icloud use touch id to sign in and then i'll go to photos and here's all of the photos so essentially right now we're waiting for the phone to send that information to icloud because the moment icloud knows that we deleted that picture it's going to delete it from apple photos on the mac and apple photos on the ipad

let's refresh this so there it synced from icloud.com notice it deleted out of icloud photos on my mac and in a short second it should also update and reflect deleted on my ipad so let's go back on my phone here let's go to google photos notice that picture is still here and if we go to our computer we go back to the tab for google photos that picture just because we deleted it from icloud photos or apple photos it didn't delete it anywhere else so yes by deleting out of apple photos it's going to remove it physically from your phone and your computer and your ipad and free up that physical space and it's also going to free up icloud storage space but all your and i delete it notice it says remove from your google account shared devices and places shared within google photos so if i move this to trash and go back that picture is going to be deleted off of my phone and my ipad and google so it synchronizes and deletes just like icloud photos does it's no different i always see this comment out there the concept that users don't like that icloud photos delete your photograph off all of your devices if you delete it from one location but the thing is all cloud services do that if we wait here in a second on my phone google photos is going to delete that picture i just deleted on google photos on the computer and if we open up the ipad here and go to google photos notice it already deleted it from the ipad and let's refresh on the on the phone here and there it goes it's deleted from the phone so that picture that we once took with the phone which went to icloud originally then we deleted it from icloud which made it delete from all the devices we just did the same thing with google photos and it deleted from all the devices let's do the same thing with microsoft on the phone here let's exit out of google photos we're going to go into one drive

i'll touch photos in the bottom right we'll go to the same exact photograph we'll touch the trash can at the top and do delete so now it's deleting this photograph out of microsoft's onedrive cloud so we'll swipe down it's completely gone let's go on the computer we'll go to onedrive let's refresh this notice the photographs gone let's go to the ipad to onedrive and notice it disappeared from there as well so the thing with all of these cloud services they're all designed to synchronize all of your devices so that they're on the same page when it comes to photos though icloud photos google photos and microsoft onedrive i mean microsoft wonder they don't even have a photos app for the mac and really honestly neither does google google photos on your mac is purely running through a web browser now don't get me wrong google photos has some really great features that

i hope apple takes note and incorporates them because there's a lot of cool things that google photos does that apple photos does not do one of the biggest things is family sharing if i click sharing here on the far left you have the ability within google to add a partner so that collectively all of your photos go into one location versus you have your own individual account so this is huge google awesome job apple you need to uh you need to take note on that so let's look at the editing tools amongst all of them if we go to the iphone let's exit out of here when it comes to managing and organizing your photos if we go to apple photos apple photos does a pretty good job with organizing and all of their edit tools and i'll link some videos down below that talk about the photo editing and organization but you have a nice clean application that organizes and and you have all of your photographs if we exit out of here and go to google photos google photos is pretty good on the iphone and ipad also they're both the same if i exit here and go to google photos on my ipad you have photos in the bottom you have a search feature which will automatically find all of your photos based off of the type of file it is you again have the sharing option which please apple add this and then you have the library which the library confuses me for google photos because i

i'm so trained to apple photo library where the library is where all of your photographs are and then you sub categorize them in google photos it seems to be reversed all of your photos are in photos and then you have the library which is your categories and your albums so it's almost opposite which is totally fine it they both still accomplish the same task but google photos is pretty nice i do enjoy it now if we look at onedrive though let's open up onedrive and we go to photos here it does have organization for albums and we can click the plus sign in the top right and create an album with photos so we can organize on there but that's pretty much it you can't really edit any photographs like you can within apple photos or google photos if we open up a photo if i click on the eye i can get information on this photograph click on the dots i can download it or rename it or open it in another app which does allow you to edit but for microsoft onedrive it's more of a storage solution their onedrive option is very similar to icloud drive which is also very similar to google drive it's just a storing facility that stores and organizes files in this cloud that you pay for additionally every month or year so let's exit out of microsoft onedrive on the ipad we'll go back to google photos and we'll pull up that same picture here and across the bottom you do have some editing tools that are pretty nice it gives you something filters you can go through in all of these different sliders so you can actually do a lot google photos you've done a great job incorporating your tools into the iphone and ipad but the mac not so much everything i showed you on the ipad is pretty much identical on the phone so

let's move to all three of these solutions on your computer now when it comes to photos you have apple photos it's a great beginner level application for editing and organizing and sharing your photos you can also access these photographs through icloud.com but again on icloud.com you can't edit the photos it's purely organization now if you wanted to have your google photos on your computer they don't have an app like apple photos does there's no google photos to actually download the only thing that you have is google photos photos.google.com if you don't have an internet you're not gonna be able to use this it's not a standalone app so the only thing google does have is google drive on the mac so if i open up the finder and i go to applications if i scroll down there's this google drive app when you open this there's a little extension in the top right here and this shows you your synchronization activity it shows you notifications and in this little gear at the top you have the options for preferences and here you have the ability to link google drive to your computer different ways you can add folders to backup to google drive or i should say synchronized to google drive google drive honestly is is no different than icloud drive icloud drive is apple's version of it i'll link a video down below that explains icloud drive for your mac and i'll link another video that explains icloud drive for your iphone and ipad which use the app called files

but here inside of google drive the only thing related is this pictures here and if i click on this it gives you choices to sync with google drive and it says upload all files and folders including photos and videos and if you edit or remove files those changes will automatically be synced and it also gives you the option to backup two google photos but the thing is it's no different than the phone you would still use cloud service through google and you would still pay money for that and also i would caution that if you have these turned on which i do when i actually pause syncing because it it disrupts the synchronization of icloud photos this is the error message that popped up icloud stores all of your photographs into a library it's always constantly deleting and changing and deleting and changing things behind the scenes so i don't think google drive is designed to make that work the moment that i turned this on for both of these choices and actually had google drive syncing apple photos stopped syncing with my phone and my ipad it just gave me these errors and it didn't work and really when you think about it it's trying to synchronize one location of photos to two different cloud services and the way that they synchronize could be different and apple even recommends that if you synchronize icloud drive for your desktop and documents to turn off all other syncing of other services so for example you would never want to synchronize the desktop and documents folder from google drive along with the desktop and documents from icloud drive you will most likely have issues so this is pretty much for google and if you turn on if you turn this on also if i go on the the finder here you'll notice google drive shows up on the left-hand side and then i have my drive with all of my folders and files and this is no different than icloud drive over here on the left which also have

my folders and files it's just two different cloud storages that you have options for now as far as onedrive you would find it in the finder inside of the applications folder we'll scroll down to microsoft onedrive here it is onedrive and this also just puts a little option in the top menu bar and it shows you your history of syncing and you have a little gear that can choose preferences you have what they call files on demand which works very similar if not identical to icloud google does the same thing if you have a file physically stored on your mac and you don't use it for a while it actually removes that file from your mac to relieve that storage but keeps it in the cloud then when you need it you click on it it downloads and then you can use it so that's these are just settings microsoft does not have any editing software or anything like that for apple users maybe on the microsoft world or android world but if you are an iphone user or an ipad user or mac user there's no photo editing tools that come with microsoft now over here on the far left we do have onedrive just like google drive and just like icloud drive and there's a pictures folder and this is where the pictures go that we took with our photograph so notice camera roll we have 20 22 and it stores it by the month so january this would be march and then this would be april so here's the dog picture nothing in that one i think we deleted it and then i have this other photograph so if we go back to my phone here and we look at onedrive and go to files in the bottom and we go to this pictures folder here we have two options we have the camera roll which is that's where pictures go that were taken with this phone when you take a photograph with this phone it goes into a pre-created folder called camera roll so

if i go here it's broken down by the date so we'll go to 2022 and we'll go to yesterday which is the picture of coco which we deleted from the other devices we can go back and we can go to just the regular pictures and you notice you can have a whole other folder with photographs in here but these pictures weren't taken with this phone they were just uploaded to the cloud just like the icloud or google drive and again on microsoft onedrive here if i went back into that camera roll back into the 2022 back into this photo and i deleted this picture here touch the little dots in the bottom right and do delete and say yes delete it's going to delete it from onedrive on the phone which will also delete from my ipad now it's deleted and if we come to my computer here notice that photograph just disappeared so the whole concept is it synchronizes and keeps your information the same across the board and if we go out to microsoft onedrive here on the website and we'll refresh this you'll notice it also disappears now every cloud solution that you choose is going to have an additional cost so what does that cost google starts off at 200 gigs for 30 a month we have a 2 terabyte which is 9.99 10 a month we have a 5 terabyte a 10 terabyte and then for you courageous folks out there you can even get 20 terabytes and 30 terabytes for only 150 a month that's a lot of storage if we look at onedrive onedrive actually is a pretty good deal

they have their whole microsoft 365 personal plan for seven dollars seven dollars and you get one terabyte and all of their microsoft products it's actually a really good deal good job microsoft everything else is terrible but good job on the pricing and your feature here you can get an additional 200 gigs or 400 gigs 600 all the way up to one terabyte at an additional cost on top of the cost for your personal membership now the last option is icloud they have a 50 gigabytes plan they have a 200 gigabyte plan and a 2 terabyte plan as far as united states is concerned it's 99 cents a month for 50 gigabytes three dollars for 200 gigabytes and the same price across the board for ten dollars for two terabytes so in the grand scheme of things if your whole goal is to free up space because you don't want to pay for icloud storage picking google or picking microsoft or picking anyone else you're still going to have a price tag associated with that now let's take the whole cloud out of the whole equation you don't want to use any cloud so what are your choices well that's where if you take a photograph with this phone you have to do with the traditional method if you want that picture on this phone to go to your computer or your ipad you need to physically connect this phone to

 

your computer to offload those photographs or you would have to have a flash drive to plug into your phone and copy those pictures off i have a video that i'll link down below that shows that work in progress of some flash drives that i've used for that purpose so that's the whole purpose of the cloud is convenience you're you're paying for a service to quickly move your files from one location to another location to a third location that's really what it comes down to so that is my example of walking through the process of google photos versus icloud photos versus microsoft onedrive three cloud examples of how your photographs interact with all of your devices that you may have and keep in mind it's not only photographs it's any of your files that you store in the cloud pdf documents word documents videos they all work the same you delete it on one device it's going to delete it on another that's just how the cloud works so thank you so much for watching if you liked what you saw hit that subscribe button if you learned something tap that little bell and if you want to continue to show support for this channel click that little thanks button i would greatly appreciate it so thank you so much and we'll see you next time