The Lemon Fool

I have used PaintShop Pro to edit photos for many years.

Now in the smartphone era I use my phone as a camera, but this comes with the automatic transfer of photos to Google Photos.

How do I retrieve photos from the cloud to PaintShop Pro?

I do not really want photos cluttering up my PC.

Arfer wrote:How do I retrieve photos from the cloud to PaintShop Pro?

I do not really want photos cluttering up my PC.

If Paintshop Pro is on your PC then you need to download the photo first. I'd imagine Google Photos has this option.

Personally I don't want to relinquish control of my photos to Google, so I manually transfer them from my phone and camera to my PC, manipulate them there, and only upload/backup to the cloud when I want to.

Scott.

Three possible options are:
Login to google photos from your PC, you’ll be able to browse and download them as you wish.
Install google drive on your PC. This will run in the background and eventually all of your photos will be mirrored on to a local directory, of your choice, on your C drive.
Or you can ask google to create a massive zip (or set of zip files) of all your files, emails, pictures, etc which you can download to your PC and unzip.
https://support.google.com/accounts/ans ... 4190?hl=en

Google have an excellent reputation for good engineering, but accidents do happen.
If they lost your photos somehow where is your backup?

Arfer wrote:
I do not really want photos cluttering up my PC.

Buy a USB drive, cheap as chips - before this accident happens again

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47610936

It's important to understand how cloud storage works. Because otherwise you might lose your data.

Cloud storage means that your data is stored ONCE on some server somewhere on the internet. It is almost certainly a partially redundant RAID drive. Which means your data is fairly safe. But it isn't absolutely safe. It can go wrong. Neither google, nor any other cloud provider offer absolute guarantees (unless you pay a fortune). As Redmire's link indicates. So you do need to think about backing it up somewhere.

There are several ways you can access this data. I can think of one more than uspaul, the extra one being what you actually asked for (though not necessarily what you need )

1) You can login to the google server on a browser and view your pictures. VIEW the cloud data
2) You can login to google server on a browser and manually download your pictures to your PC. Manually CREATE a copy.
OR You can install Google drive on your PC. This has 2 effects:
3) It allows you to automatically synchronise a folder on your PC with the Cloud version. Automatically CREATE a copy.
4) It will create "Google Drive" device on your PC which allows you to VIEW the Cloud data directly in File Explorer on your PC. Although the data appears to be on your PC. What you are actually looking at here is not a copy, but a doorway directly into the cloud storage.
See "using google drive on your desktop" here
(Note for others: Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive all offer the same options too)

Option 3 will use a lot of space on your PC disk. Precisely what you said you didn't want. But you can turn it off in the GoogleDrive options, as my link explains.

Using option 4 will allow Paintshop or any other program to access and edit the data directly on the cloud. That's what you asked for. But it is important to realise that if you do this you are directly manipulating your ONE copy. If you muck it up, it's gone! If you delete it, it's gone!
I would suggest that before editing, you should ALWAYS create a copy somewhere. NEVER edit your original photos.

I also agree with the previous posters, that cloud storage is NOT sufficiently reliable to rely on for your precious photos. You need to CREATE a second copy somewhere. Either on your PC, or on a removable drive, or even a removable memory stick (they're huge these days).

Hope that helps,
Gryff

Thanks for all this advice.

I understand the fragility of og cloud storage nor, so then what is the best long term storage strategy for photos etc?

Depending on the number of photos you have, consider buying a couple of USB flash drives. Priced about £20 each for 128Gb, this will hold roughly about 15,000 pics. Copy the photos onto each stick and keep one at home and one away from home (such as your work place). Back up any new photos as and when. If you have more photos then use USB hard drives starting around £40 for 500Gb or if you really want to push the boat out then a NAS drive can hold all your photos, music, video's on a central server. But then there's the issue of making back ups of the NAS drive itself

I back up all my photos (mainly taken from smart phone camera) to my laptop and also to an external hard drive. The external hard drove has a 1TB memory so plenty of space.

Arfer wrote:Thanks for all this advice.

I understand the fragility of og cloud storage nor, so then what is the best long term storage strategy for photos etc?

Print them out and put them in a book

Seriously, DVD or USB Flash Drive (although quite small by modern standards, the former I think is safer as Flash Drives can fail), or an external Hard Drive.

As you have learnt - "Cloud" is little more than a fluffy marketing term for "a computer in a warehouse near Slough." [1]

Paul
[1] Obviously not ALL datacentres are in Slough, but some are.

Arfer wrote:Thanks for all this advice.

I understand the fragility of og cloud storage nor, so then what is the best long term storage strategy for photos etc?

At least two completely independent methods

--kiloran

kiloran wrote:At least two completely independent methods

...in different locations. If your house burns down, or is burgled, you could easily lose all the tech at your house, and all your precious photos with it.

Cloud, or a disk or stick stored at work or a friend's/parent's/child's house would satisfy this "other location" safety net.

Gryff