0Google Photo Sync limits

Google have released a new tool to replace drive sync and pho­tos backup.  The new app, called Backup and Sync provides the func­tion­al­ity of both in a single app.  It is also claimed that it will sync folders as albums for pho­tos, some­thing the pre­vi­ous backup app did not do.  A couple of lim­its remain however.

Google don’t always make some of these lim­it­a­tions obvi­ous — I had sev­er­al pho­tos not back­ing up because “These files are too large to upload” or “These files are too small to upload”.

The answer is find­able (with lots of search­ing) on google for­ums and via that on google help pages.  How­ever to get the com­pre­hens­ive answer I needed to fol­low a “find out more” link dur­ing the install­a­tion of the sync pro­gram itself.  This took my anoth­er help page.  The fol­low­ing lim­its apply…

• Videos: Max­im­um size 10Gb
• Pho­tos: Max­im­um size 75Mb OR 100MPix
• Pho­tos: Min­im­um size 256 x 256

There are also file type restrictions

• Pho­tos: .jpg, .png, .webp and some RAW files.
• Videos: .mpg, .mod, .mmv, .tod, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .divx, .mov, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .m2t, .m2ts, .mts, and .mkv

Lastly — and not offi­cially doc­u­mented there are some appar­ent lim­it­a­tions to dimen­sions.  I cre­ate pan­or­amic images and I found that bey­ond a cer­tain width these were rejec­ted as too large, even though they were not over 100MPix or or over 75Mb.  I found that a width of 16160pixels was too big, but a width of 15360 was accep­ted.  I would guess that a height lim­it also applies, which is prob­ably the same, or as typ­ic­al pho­tos are usu­ally around a 3:2 ratio the max­im­um height might be around 10240