Some Canon cameras can now automatically upload pictures to Google Photos, over WiFi.
Of course, the biggest caveat there is that the camera needs to have WiFi connectivity. But the cool thing is that you don’t need to take out the SD card, plug in your camera, or anything like that to start backing it up.
This part of the Google Photos partner program that the company launched two years ago.
It’ll use the image.canon app
You won’t be able to get out of using the image.canon app, unfortunately. As that is how this works, behind-the-scenes. It’s an app that is available for Android and iOS for transferring files to your smartphone or into the Canon cloud.
Once this is all set up, you will have the ability to transfer images to Google Photos, as well as Google Drive and YouTube. It’ll backup in original quality too. There doesn’t seem to be an option for “high-quality” like there is on smartphones.
This is even better than uploading directly to your phone, as now any device that you have Google Photos installed on, can access these images. Not to mention the fact that it makes it super simple to share these photos with other people.
You will need to be a Google One member
The only real caveat besides hardware, is that you will need to be a Google One member. And this makes loads of sense.
Images at original quality coming out of DSLRs are not going to be small. Which means that 15GB of space that Google gives everyone, will be gone real quick. So you will need to at least spend $1.99 per month for the 100GB plan. Or you can jump up to 2TB at $9.99 per month. There are also plans for 10TB, 20TB and 30TB. But the 2TB plan is likely the best option for professional photographers.
Canon DSLRs, Micro Four-Thirds and point and shoot cameras will be able to utilize this new feature.
There should be an update rolling out to the image.canon app pretty soon, that will enable this feature. Being able to upload videos directly to YouTube may be the most non-useful feature in this update though. Since most people are going to want to edit the video before publishing onto YouTube. But the advantage here is that YouTube does offer unlimited video storage, so if you don’t publish anything, that’s a way to store lots of video.