I have a deep appreciation for Google Photos. It’s one of the company’s few apps that I’d feel naked without. Foregoing a service that automatically backs up my memories in the background? I couldn’t bear the thought! However, and rather ironically, its insistence on indiscriminately backing up every image I snap is problematic.
I took plenty of long, high-quality, high-frame-rate videos over the holidays with my new favorite camera phone, many of which exceeded a gigabyte. Google storage isn’t infinite. I upgraded to the 200GB tier several years ago to broaden my buffer, but even this is proving too meager. So, when Photos decided to start backing up these videos — many of which I don’t hold dear and don’t need mirrored in the cloud — it got me thinking: why can’t I tell Photos “don’t upload this”?