iCloud for Android users

My work is sending me a Samsung s20 Ultra phone to use for working on/testing our product. I’ve only ever used an iPhone/iPad device, which is a bit embarrassing for a tech developer, but here I am.

Question: on iOS, I use iCloud for pictures I take on my phone. I have like 11,000 images in my iCloud library, and the phone has lower-rez proxies of all of them on every device until on demand I can spool the high rez versions to my device or to desktop.

What is the equivalent for Android? Is it this easy or much more manual than that?

You have various options, but probably the most obvious is Google Photos, which I believe works about the same as iCloud.

Well, my use case is I’m not going to put the s20 on a phone plan, just use it on wifi because it’s a work device, not mine. BUT: it has an amazing camera so I want to use it for personal photography because why not? So I want to take boatloads of photos, not worry about filling up the device memory, and be able to access full rez photos on desktop without it being a full-manual ‘push each photo to some sharing thing like dropbox, 1 photo at a time’ thing.

Google photos does this?

With full resolution your free space will fill up quickly. You can pay for more space or go with lower resolution which is free.

Another “I’m a dumb iphone user” question: the s20 has a microSD slot. How is that memory managed? Does it just become part of the phone’s unspecified-use memory pool, or can I direct only photos to that card? I mean, Google Photos is $1.99 / mo forever for 100gb of storage, but I can just buy a 128gb microSD card for $20, which might be a better deal at some point.

I guess I’m hoping I can use the microSD as photo storage and eject it from the phone and connect it to my PC to transfer photos.

Personally, that’s exactly what I would do, and upload only those photos which I know I want to share, or view on other devices. With a cable you can easily back up the SD card to a computer hard drive, or move photos all together, should it get full. Or, as you say, just pull out the card and insert it in a computer.

With most phones, there’s a simple setting to tell which memory card to use (internal or “external,” i.e., the one you insert), and you set it by the application. So you tell it to put all the photos on the 128 GB card, and maybe select certain folders to sync with Google Photos/Dropbox/or whatever, for those photos you want to view on other devices, or easily share.

Thanks, that’s what I was hoping. I mean, I’d much rather have the simplicity of the Apple’s “take pictures and they’re available on all your devices” setup, but I’m not very comfortable having my endless photo stream on google hosted servers, so I’ll go “full manual” to avoid that if I must and if I can.