Tag: iPhone

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Google Photos and Apple revisited

This post is a sequel to the article (see link below) that I wrote in November, and reflects a little more of what I’ve learnt about the crazy world of how Apple Photos and Google Photos interact (or work) with each other. I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last.

Getting photos to the cloud(s) and back

This one starts from an observation I made this morning that some recent photos I’d taken with my iPhone and which were in my Photos Library also seemed to have been added to Google Photos on my iPhone (but not my iPad) as well. From the outset let me assure you that this is the normal behaviour. You have to set Google Photos to see all the photos in your local Photos Library {Settings > Google Photos > Allow Google Photos to Access – All Photos} otherwise it can’t work. What you are seeing in Google Photos is the app getting a view of what’s in your Camera Roll on the iPhone/iPad – you haven’t added anything at this stage to the Google Photos app, and more importantly, nothing has been uploaded to Google Photos at photos.google.com.

What I did see however additionally in Google Photos were some edits of recent photos that I’d done in Lightroom which I’d exported to my desktop, and then uploaded to photos.google.com. They could be identified by the little cloud icon on the picture.

It got me to thinking; what is the best way of sending photos from the iPhone/iPad to Google Photos – if I don’t want to sync everything using Google Backup (which as I explained in the previous post, I most certainly don’t want to do as they’ve already been backed up to iCloud). Am I doing it the best way?

Method 1

As above. Share (export) the photo from the iPhone/iPad to a chosen folder in the Files app or Google Drive, and then upload from that folder to Google Photos from photos.google.com (see also Method 3).

Upload from iPhone/iPad Camera Roll to a variety of services

Method 2

This is by far the easiest, and simplest way (and believe it or not I didn’t know you could do this). Open the Google Photos app on the iPhone, select a photo and then select the Upload (cloud) icon …

… the photo will be backed up to Google Photos (and photos.google.com); you will also note (see above) that once you’ve done that the Upload (cloud) icon is removed from the screen. In the Google Photos app, the photo will now have a cloud icon. Simple, eh!

Method 3

You can do the process in reverse. Go to photos.google.com and select Upload. You will be offered a variety of options …

An upload to photos.google.com from the Safari browser on my iPad

Choose (in this case) Tablet – as I was using my iPad to get the screenshots and you will get this dialogue …

Choose Google Drive and you will get this dialogue …

Choosing an image you’ve uploaded to Google Drive

Choose Copy from other services and you will get these options …

From which you can see (something else that I’ve learnt), that you can copy from iCloud – where all my iPhone photos are backed-up – to Google Photos. Duh!!!

What a wonderful (and complicated) world Google Photos is, and think – this was just prompted by me seeing photos in the Google Photos app I knew I hadn’t “uploaded” to Google Photos. Rest assured, they’re just views into the Apple Photos Library, not copies!!!

PS This isn’t an April Fool!!

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iPhone Battery Replacement

I was in conversation the other day with someone who was complaining about the short battery life of their iPhone. I remembered that I’d put an alert in my calendar for later this year to take my 6s, and Jenny’s SE down to the Apple Store to get a battery replacement under their “special offer” scheme.
This came about as a result of them changing the way the operating system (iOS) worked on older models – slowing them down – to retain battery life. This caused a bit of a stink at the time, and so Apple responded with a replacement programme that means a replacement battery would cost £25, as opposed to £79, through 2018.
Apple also issued an advisory note to tell users a little bit more about how batteries would cease to work at full performance in this note which also explained how you could manage performance – which is of course what they should have done before they implemented it in the background without telling anyone. This article tells you how you can monitor and manage your battery health.
So … if you have one of the affected models (iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus) you should consider taking advantage of the Battery Replacement Offer, but for a few people with a 6S, it could be a free replacement.
The Apple Store calls …

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Thoughtgrazing, Forums, Buying an iPhone, online Fraud and Google Hangouts – 8th Feb 2018

Thoughtgrazing and Forums
https://thoughtgrazing.org/
https://thoughtgrazing.org/cardiff-u3a-computer-group/community/forums-and-topics/ – not active any more
Buying an iPhone (Marilyn), and a used one at that, contract free
The phone Jenny has is an iPhone SE, I have an iPhone 6s. Both of these (though not the latest models) are still obtainable from Apple, or from the Service Providers. So here are some links for you to chase-up. Unless you plan to hold a lot of photos/videos on your phone, I wouldn’t worry too much on having more than the minimum amount of memory (RAM).
You might consider buying a used model. This is a good article which explains the options. I can’t recommend, because I’ve never done it – https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iphone/how-to-buy-second-hand-iphone-3496606/.
However the Service Provider I use, and would seriously recommend using (GiffGaff owned by O2 and using the O2 network) do offer pre-owned phones and I would have no hesitation of thinking about buying from them – https://www.giffgaff.com/mobile-phones/pre-owned.
Can I also pleas stress that you should NOT consider buying a phone on a contract if you can at all possibly afford the up-front cost, as the long-term cost is SO much greater; the same goes for the instalment options. Your best option is a SIM-free purchase – I pay just £7.50 a month for my deal with GiffGaff, and I could quite possibly drop that down to just £5 per month.
So here’s the page for buying a phone from the Apple Store – https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/ – you’ll see that both of our phones are still current models.
The iPhone SE – https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-se/ – and The iPhone 6s – https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-iphone/iphone6s
Please feel free to contact me again for further advice/guidance before you make a decision.
I think I may spend some time on this in the Computer Group on Thursday. Always a good topic.
GiffGaff and 3 (PAYG)
https://www.three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Pay_As_You_Go
https://www.giffgaff.com/
https://www.giffgaff.com/mobile-phones/pre-owned/apple
Fraud website from UK Gov
https://takefive-stopfraud.org.uk/
and course from FutureLearn
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/cyber-security? 
Hangouts (and also Chrome Extensions)
https://hangouts.google.com/

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Beware the free upgrade

So … we’re all excited about the advent of iOS 11 for our iPads and iPhones aren’t we? Or we are if our devices can actually take the new operating system. And there’s the first challenge. Apple gives us free upgrades to its operating system software but it comes at a price in terms of the pensioning off of some hardware from ongoing support.
So, if you don’t have any of the hardware on the list below … stop reading this post and go and do something constructive.

So what’s wrong with iOS 11, nothing of course, it looks like a really feature-rich release with lots of goodies to enjoy and reports seem to suggest that it doesn’t slow down your device significantly … except it’s a wholly 64-bit operating system. This means that all applications that you run on the device must be written in code that runs on a 64-bit operating system, and the problem is that quite a few of your applications, even some you really like, may have been written using older 32-bit code. You may even have noticed some alerts coming up on your screen to say “contact the developer” when you’ve been running an application – that’s the reason for the alerts – your app is potentially going “end of life”. So … before you do the automatic upgrade just do these checks.
Goto Settings > General > About and you will see something like this …

… click on Applications, and something like this will be shown …

… read the warning message at the top of your screen carefully. What it is saying is that these apps are written in 32-bit code and will tend to run slower than if they were written in 64-bit code. What is more, they will stop working with iOS 11. Then clicking on any of the apps shown on your iPhone (similar to the ones above on my iPhone), will give you this screen message which effectively says that the app is end-of-life UNLESS the developer provides a 64-bit version.

Now most of these apps on my iPhone I can probably do without but I do know that I ought to approach Cardiff Bus to find out when their 64-bit version of the Timetable and Journey Map is going to be released, as I use that a lot!