Google Drive vs Google Photos: An In-Depth Feature Comparison

Understanding the difference between Google Drive and Google Photos is key to leveraging these services effectively. As a long-time user of both platforms, I‘m going to walk you through a complete feature-by-feature comparison to help you decide which one best fits your needs.

Setting the Context

First, let‘s quickly define the scope of what we‘re comparing:

Google Drive – Launched in 2012, Drive is Google‘s cloud-based file storage service that lets you access, edit, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, videos, PDFs and more from anywhere.

Google Photos – Launched in 2015, Photos is specifically focused on storing, organizing, editing and sharing your photo and video library. The AI-powered search helps you easily find specific pictures.

While the ability to store photos is a core overlap, Drive and Photos solve different needs.

Drive houses all your productivity files for work and school. Photos manages your personal photo collection across devices.

But the lines can definitely blur. And the 15GB free storage is shared between the two.

So in the rest of this guide, I‘ll break down how they compare across key features.

Feature #1: Storage Plans and Pricing

One of the most frequent points of confusion is how Drive and Photos handle storage limits.

Let‘s clear this up…

Both services start with 15GB of free shared storage between Gmail, Drive and Photos. If you‘re using more than 15GB across everything, you have to pay for more space.

Here are your upgrade options:

According to Google‘s 2021 storage report, the average user is consuming about 7.2GB of storage across their Google apps. So chances are 15GB is plenty of headroom for now.

But as our photo libraries grow, paid plans might make sense. For context, here‘s some typical storage usage numbers:

• Documents/Spreadsheets: 1MB per file
• Photos: 4MB per image
• 1080p Video: 135MB per minute

The key insight here is that video and image files take up way more room than regular document files.

So optimizing Google Photos is crucial if you‘re bumping up against storage limits. Let‘s talk more about that next…

Feature #2: Uploading and Backing Up Your Files

Google Drive and Google Photos take very different approaches to getting files into your cloud library:

Google Drive

• Upload anything – documents, photos, videos, etc
• Manual uploading by drag-and-drop or "Open with Drive"
• Bulk upload large folders at once

Google Photos

• Auto-backup of photos/videos from phone, tablets and cameras
• Integrates with Android camera folder to auto-sync new media
• More limited manual upload options

The key distinction is that Drive gives you more control over which individual files you upload. Whereas Photos automates the process for your camera rolls and streams.

For photos and videos, most people prefer the auto-sync option since it happens seamlessly in the background. But it takes more effort to manually manage media uploads to Drive.

From a storage perspective, auto-uploads count against your storage quota in both services once the media is synced. Which drives the need to optimize as your library grows…

Here are my top tips for managing the auto-uploads from Google Photos more efficiently:

• Limit what folders sync – For example, turn off desktop folder uploads if you manually back those up separately. Focus Photos auto-sync on mobile camera rolls.

• Sync photos to Drive in Smart Sync – This makes a smaller preview copy in Drive. The original stays safely backed up at full resolution in Photos. Much more storage efficient.

• Leverage free unlimited storage for photos under 16MP and videos under 1080p (in High quality not Original quality). Time to turn this on in your Photos settings!

Feature #3: Search and Organization Capabilities

Being able to find photos years later from that amazing vacation or your kid‘s basketball game is what makes these services so valuable.

But Drive and Photos take vastly different approaches to photo organization and search:

Google Drive

• Manual folder structures and tagging
• Basic search by file name and text content
• Some automatic suggestions but still very manual

Google Photos

• Auto categorization by people, places, things detected with AI
• Natural language timeline search
• Automated creation of movies, animations and photo books

As you can probably tell, Photos has invested far more into leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to remove the manual drudgery of sorting and labeling a large image catalog.

Some examples of what the AI-based approach enables:

• Search for "beach" and every beach photo pops up
• Search "vacation 2016" and see the whole trip organized
• All photos of your kids already grouped together

It feels like magic compared to rummaging through a hierarchical folder structure.

And Google reports that over 4 trillion labels have already been applied by AI across users‘ photos. All in the name of simplifying search and organization.

So while Drive offers flexibility…Photos wins as our personal media libraries scale to multiple thousands of items.

Feature #4: Photo Sharing and Collaboration

Storing your memories is great. But even better is when you can easily share those moments with family and friends.

Both Drive and Photos allow some form of photo sharing. But the approaches and options differ significantly:

The key takeaway here is that Drive has far richer collaboration capabilities thanks to Google Doc-style concurrent editing and revision tracking.

Photos favors easier ad hoc sharing focused more on consuming the media than directly manipulating it.

So if I needed to jointly work on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, definitely want to start in Drive over Photos.

But for safely sharing my personal media collection to friends and relatives, Photos fits that goal much better.

Feature #5: Photo and Video Editing

Want to crop, brighten, filter or touch up photos? Maybe splice together custom highlight reels from video clips?

Google Drive

• Minimal editing tools
• Web UI for cropping and filters
• Reliant on third party editor integrations

Google Photos

• Robust included editor on web and mobile
• Tools like crop, brightness, contrast, filters
• Automatically created movies/gifs/collages
• More third party extension options too

Thanks to Picasa legacy, Google Photos packs way more native editing power out of the box. Automated creations based on AI mugshot grouping, geotag mapping for custom movies, stylized animations and collages requiring no manual effort, and more.

Plus, anything manually trimmed or tuned will be saved non-destructively as a rendition or copy. Your original is always preserved which is awesome.

By contrast, manipulating media files in Drive risks impacting file integrity without good backups. And the tools require launching a separate editing program lacking Photos‘ intuitive built-in options.

Key Takeaways and Recommendations

Let‘s wrap up with some closing thoughts:

• Use Drive for documents, spreadsheets and general productivity file access
• Use Photos for storing, managing and sharing personal photos/video thanks to AI
• Enable auto-sync on mobile camera rolls in Photos
• Share Drive files directly into docs and sheets vs. Photos for richer real-time collaboration
• Leverage unlimited free storage in Photos for media under 16MP / 1080p

Hopefully this in-depth look clarifies how to best utilize Drive and Photos based on your specific needs!

I‘m happy to address any other questions in the comments below. Let me know what other Google service comparisons would be helpful!