Transfering Photospheres Between Accounts: An Epic Journey

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1

Hello all,

Background:

I am currently a level 4 guide, due to the 53 photospheres I have uploaded and had approved. Recently I realized I had uploaded them on account ‘A’ that was an inappropriate place to list them, and I decided to see if I could migrate them to account ‘B’ whih is my everyday google account. Searching through here I learned that the only way to ‘transfer’ them was to download them, delete them from account A, and re-upload them. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Progress:

  • Thanks to googles privacy stance, I was able to download the photos easily to my pc as a zip file, uncompress, and confirm they were the full resolution of 8704x4352, or 37MP. Nice.
  • They could then be deleted from account A (location by location) easily enough.

Problem:

Transferring them to iOS and uploading them has proved challenging. Please correct me if there is another way to upload them on pc!!

  • Ios does not allow for direct transfer to iPhones :triumph:
  • iCloud might have worked, but I needed a lot of cloud storage for the transfer, and iOS has a tendency to ‘optimize’ the experience so that you can view the photos immediately, but it is unclear if the full resolution photo has completed the transfer.
  • Google drive seemed to work well, except the photos were inexplicably downsampled to 1334x667 when downloaded!?! There doesn’t seem to be a setting to keep the original file size. :tired_face: WHY??
  • Google photos: This could have been an option, but I did not investigate it very far.
  • Dropbox to the rescue: I was finally able to upload and download the full resolution photos using dropbox! The only issue remaining that I noticed was that all EXIF data had been removed somewhere in the process. I don’t care for most of that, but image author and copyright holder are important to me. 15 minutes of fumbling around in iOS and that was solved.
  • The last step was to reupload the photos using the google streetview app. If all goes as expected, they should shortly be approved by google, and count towards my local guides score once again on my main account.
  • EDIT: Please remember to disconnect the accidental account if you are in this situation.

Hopefully this helps someone!

3 Likes
2

Hi @andrewxy

Unfortunately this is not the right question.

According to the program rules you can only be registered into the local guides program with one account.

You should choose the account you want to use Asap, and close the second one

3

Hi @ErmesT

Yes, This is what I am doing and describing in this post. I only ever wanted to be using one account (Account ‘B’) and was accidentally logged into account ‘A’ while some 360 photos were taken. When I noticed this I realized the problem and began trying to move the photos without having to retake them. Account ‘A’ will be disconnected from local guides when the photos finish uploading to account ‘A’

Thanks,

–Andrew

4

Ok thank you. @andrewxy

Check your settings on Google Drive. In any case Google drive should not resize the photos, while Google photos will, if you have a setting for High Quality. High quality will resize your photos to 16 Mpx, Full resolution will keep the photo as it is

5

I will look into this. I believe you, and would expect that google drive would not alter or downsize the photo (unless there is a setting I missed). This was just my experience over the last few days.

6

The main difference between Photos and Drive is the possibility, in photos, to store for free an unlimited amount of photos at 16 MPx, while drive should store at full resolution, counting used storage.

Do you have a sync activated on drive to link also your contents in Photos through Drive?

Is so, have you loaded your photos on the photos folder.

I suggest you to upload in drive a compressed file (e.g. .zip)