Gmail Can Now Save Photo Attachments To Google Photos Directly

There are many ways to share photos these days and most use social media for that purpose. Of course, those are mostly public by default and harder to control, and some resort to just sharing links to their online photo storage in private. Still, others go old-school and send photos by email. That can be a hassle for recipients if they end up having to upload images to Google Photos anyway but, fortunately, Google has finally heard the cries of Gmail users or at least some of them.

Some might actually remember the old days when you could actually send those photo attachments to your Google Photos from Gmail. That, however, was only possible because of how Google Drive and Google Photos shared storage space once upon a time. While Gmail still integrates with Drive, users had to go a roundabout way and download the images before uploading them to Google Photos.

The good news is that they no longer have to do that. With a new update that's happening server-side, Gmail users can hover over those attachments or click on the overflow menu to select "Save to Photos". This will instantly send those photos to the Google Photos storage of the user's Gmail account.

The bad news is that there are quite a few caveats. The most important is that it is currently available only for images in JPEG format. It also seems to apply only to Gmail on the web but these limitations will probably be slowly removed over time.

This new capability is open to Google Workspace and G Suite customers as well as those with personal Google accounts but it will take about 15 days before it becomes visible to most. Curiously, this feature to easily add more photos to your Google Photos storage comes at a time when Google is also killing free unlimited storage from Google Photos.