Canon Cameras Can Upload Directly To Google Photos With A Catch

Camera makers are pushing DLSRs, mirrorless ILCs, or even point-and-shoot cameras as the next step after graduating from smartphone cameras. But what they offer in power and quality, they often lose in convenience, especially in posting to social media or even transferring photos to the cloud. To their credit, they are doing their best to make those activities easier and Canon and Google have just made the ultimate next step in making Google Photos backups as painless and as seamless as possible.

Many modern cameras do let users post photos and videos to social media easily through a paired smartphone. Moving those photos and videos in bulk to cloud storage, however, is cumbersome and inconvenient, requiring a two-step process. You first have to connect the camera to a computer or remove its memory card, which you then also connect to a computer, before you can even begin uploading.

Google Photos has a partner program that encourages camera and accessory manufacturers to integrate with Google's cloud photo storage service. That has mostly meant things like being able to print photo books or display Google Photos on smart photo frames. Now we're seeing another fruit of that partnership, this time from Canon.

With a compatible Canon EOS camera, and there are dozens of them, and Canon's Android or iOS app, photographers can directly upload photos to Google Photos. And not just any photo but photos in their original quality. It's as simple as that, no cables or adapters, no transferring to a computer or even a phone first.

So what's the catch? You will need a Google One subscription for this to work, not just any plain old Google account. Canon camera owners are being given a free month of Google One, worth 100GB of cloud storage to kick things off. After that, however, you're pretty much on your own.