Space Saving Hack for Photos and Google Drive

 

How much space on your smartphone is used up by photos? I am guessing quite a bit. Photos take up almost all the space on my phone. Some are photos for work and some are personal photos. Get your mind out of the gutter! Personal photos mean pics of my kids, screenshots of funny/not funny stuff, pics of my dog, etc. 

 

Yesterday was Fall Party Day. (Don’t get me started on why it’s not actually called a Halloween Party.) Anyway, we need pictures for the yearbook from all of our school events. 

 

So…..here is our workflow:

• Yearbook coordinator made a Google drive folder “Yearbook.”
• Within that folder there is a folder for every grade level shared with that grade level teachers. Or maybe every grade level is shared with every teacher? I don’t know but they are all shared with me of course. 
• We ask teachers to take as many pictures of as many events as possible and put the photos in that folder.
• Yearbook coordinator can see all the pictures and know what grade level. Yearbook is divided up by grade level.

Maybe a year or two ago they added a “use camera” option within the Google drive app on the iPhone and iPad. (This option is not available on the Samsung etc. I’m guessing there is an even easier way to save directly to a folder on a Google phone? Anyway, we couldn’t figure it out yesterday.)

Below is the screen cast created on my iPhone how to take a picture directly to Google drive instead of your phone. I was hoping this would be the only picture and there wouldn’t be a duplicate on my phone. Turns out there is a duplicate in my photos which is counter to what I am trying to do. I don’t want the photo on my phone but only in the Google drive folder. I hope that makes sense. There is probably an option not to save the original picture but I didn’t have time to figure that out.