Joe Maring / Android Authority
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”?
Do you want a “Don’t backup this” button for videos and images on Google Photos? 21 votes Yes, I would love such a feature. 81 % I’m not sure. 14 % No. I prefer to just backup everything. 5 %
Part of Google Photos’ utility is its seamless background backup service. I snap a pic, and a few minutes later it’s copied to a secondary, safe location. It’s a core part of my backup strategy, and serves millions of users in the same way every day. But as it chugs along largely unmonitored in the background, it often gets itself into trouble.
Google Photos backs up everything in the DCIM folder — the default Digital Camera Images folder that houses all the images you snap and videos you record. Modern phones hold far more than the 15GB of free data Google gifts its users, so it’s essential that we’re allowed to choose which files occupy this space. In simpler terms, I want to tell Photos if I don’t want a file backed up, but we’re in 2026, and there’s still no sensible way to do this.
The problem is obvious, but where is the fix?
Joe Maring / Android Authority
This isn’t an insurmountable problem, though. An easy GUI solution would be to include a simple “Don’t backup this” button for each photo and video. This would allow users to cherry-pick which items Photos should ignore without affecting any other files.
Photos could add a visual indicator to these ignored videos and images (a small icon, a slight fade effect, or something similar) to warn users that these files are excluded from the backup. And to aid users even further and ensure that files are not lost in the Photos mire, the app could bundle these files into a Collection.
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