Google Photos is excellent at making cloud backups effortless, but it’s missing a crucial control: a per-item “Don’t back up this” option. With cameras capturing massive 4K and 8K clips, one or two casual videos can quickly fill up cloud storage. A smarter backup switch would solve this problem, which is only getting bigger.
Currently, Photos backs up nearly everything in the DCIM camera folder unless you jump through hoops. This approach was fine when unlimited storage existed, but now every megabyte matters. For users on the free 15GB tier or popular 200GB Google One plan, indiscriminate uploads turn a convenience into a quota panic.
The problem is twofold: modern cameras are storage monsters, and content creation is skyrocketing. Industry analysts project over a trillion images captured annually worldwide, with video growth even steeper thanks to higher frame rates and HDR formats. When volume and file sizes surge, backups need more nuance than a binary on/off switch.
While Google Photos offers some selective backup controls, none of them are true per-item controls for the core camera roll. Users must use workarounds like shuffling big files out of DCIM or stashing non-sensitive clips in Locked Folder to avoid upload. Neither method is intuitive, quick, or safe enough for everyday use.
The feature that would fix it is a one-tap “Don’t back up this” button on each photo and video, visible alongside existing info and edit controls. Tapping it would keep that specific item local-only while leaving everything else on autopilot. A smart prompt based on file size could ask users whether to back it up now, skip once, or always skip similar large files.
From an engineering standpoint, this is hardly moonshot territory. Implementing a local ignore list tied to media IDs and content hashes would persist across scans. Clear safeguards like warnings before deleting any local-only item would prevent accidental loss.
Source: https://www.findarticles.com/calls-grow-for-google-photos-selective-backup-option