Easily upload all your photos to Google Photos (for free)

Apple dropped the ball on photos. Big time.

For years, Apple products were my default photo locker, gallery, and sharing tool. Now I’ve switched to Google, but only because Apple forced my hand. My workflow was simple: shoot photos on my iPhone and dSLR, sync everything to Aperture and share from there.

Here’s a brief timeline on how Apple went off the rails with photos:

• September 2011 –  Apple rolled out iCloud without photo galleries.
• June 2012 – Apple dropped its MobileMe Gallery service  and replaced it with a confusing array of inferior photo sharing options.
• June 2014 – Apple announced that it was replacing iPhoto and Aperture with a new app called Photos.
• September 2014 – Apple switched its iCloud storage pricing to monthly billing (200GB for $4/mo., 500GB for $10/mo. and 1TB for $20/mo.)
• September 2014 – A vulnerability in Find My iPhone was believed to be responsible for targeted hacks on numerous celebrity iCloud accounts resulting in the leak of nude photos.
• April 2015 – Apple released Photos (with Yosemite) essentially killing iPhoto and Aperture.

In summary, After leaving customers hanging without photo galleries, Apple dropped support for its professional photo app (Aperture), jacked up its cloud storage prices, then released an inferior Photos app that didn’t support Aperture projects (whoops!). My six year investment in organizing my photos in Aperture is basically gone and I’m now locked into using an End-Of-Life (EOL) software application if I want to see my projects.

No thank you.

At I/O 2015 Google announced that Google Photos now includes unlimited free photo storage (up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p for videos). The best part? You can easily auto-upload your entire photo library to Google Photos in the background. Here’s how:

1. Install Google Photos Backup application for OS X
2. Point it at your photos (including your Aperture or iPhoto libraries)
3. Let it churn for a day or two
4. Cancel your expensive iCloud storage plan*

The spiffy new Google Photos app for iOS is the icing on the cake. It auto-uploads your camera roll to Google Photos and has a lot of amazing new features too. The cherry on top is all of the auto-awesome notifications you’ll get after uploading a large photo library to gPhotos, it’s like a trip down memory lane, only more awesome. (After I upload my Aperture library, I’m going to upload every digital photo on my 20 TB Drobo to gPhotos, you know, just because.)

Apple could have done all this in spades, but it hung its loyal customers out to dry and let the competition step into the void.

*You’ll still probably want some iCloud storage for your iPhone backups, but removing your photos should save you some serious money.