Google Photos gives iPhone users unexpected advantage over Pixel 4 owners
In the midst of all the brouhaha surrounding the Pixel 4‘s incredible camera prowess, its unique live transcribing abilities, and the contextually-aware Assistant, a few flies managed to drop in the honey.
The Pixel 4 duo, however, comes with a changed promise – to backup all your imaging content in high-quality format, which is an euphemism for saving server rack space in Google’s data centers.
And yet, if you are an iPhone user, Google Photos will save your images in their original quality. How come? Well, remember the high-efficiency format that most every phone maker is now offering as an alternative to save in, after phones started recording 4K video in 60fps started gobbling up their storage amount like crazy?
If you go to Settings > Camera > Formats on your iPhone, and check the “High Efficiency” option, the resulting compression makes Google Photos upload your images as they are, since further compression by the service will actually make the files larger. No such uploading exists on the Pixel 4, although Android 10 technically supports the HEIC/HEIF algorithms. Not a dealbreaker, but bummer nonetheless.