Google Photos and Lightroom CC

[James Hanson]

Hi All

Im trying to see up a new macbook as it has just 256gb HD I have put all my photos on Google Photos

I want to re cat them with lightroom on my new macbook

I have trying to import from Google Photos but lightroom does not see any of the images that at there

Should I just copy them to Google Drive instead ?

Thanks in advance

James

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Google Photos stores the actual images in the cloud, so you should copy them to a local folder first. I don't use Google Drive myself, but if Google Drive works with a synchronized local folder, just like Dropbox does, then copying the photos to Google Drive should indeed work.

 

[clee01l]

Hi All

Im trying to see up a new macbook as it has just 256gb HD I have put all my photos on Google Photos

I want to re cat them with lightroom on my new macbook

I have trying to import from Google Photos but lightroom does not see any of the images that at there

Should I just copy them to Google Drive instead ?

Thanks in advance

James

Welcome to the forum.
You can't import from the cloud. You can only import from locally attached drives are devices. Google drive has two components a local component and a cloud component. The google drive app keeps the files in both components in sync allowing you to access the same files across multiple computers sync'd to the cloud component.

If you are trying to avoid storing your original image file copies on the 256GB SSD, you will need attach a local external drive or a local network drive (NAS) to the laptop and use it to store the images that you import into the LR catalog. Even with the 512GB SSD, the new MacBook may not have specs suitable for an image processing computer. The MacBook is intended to compete against Android and Windows tablets and not run "industrial strength" apps like LR that require lots of resources and need a permanent storage capacity to hold terabytes of images that modern DSLR cameras are capable of delivering.

 

[rob211]

Google Photos has unlimited storage for JPEGs; Google Drive has limited storage and then it costs money. Images in Google Drive would take up space in the Google Drive folder (sort of an oxymoron of a name, but whatev's). Which would rather work against your goal of saving space on the boot drive. You could use something like ExpanDrive to mount the cloud-based Google Drive as a volume, which then acts just like a locally attached volume...but WAY WAY slower. Probably too slow and problematic to use in your case.

You'll probably have to set up a workflow where you download certain images to either the Google Drive folder locally to work on them, or use Cletus' suggestion of external storage. I am not even aware of a publishing service that works direct to Google Photos right now; I export JPEGs to local external disks and then let those get synched to Google Photos, but that's sort of the opposite direction from your intended workflow.