After a recent post, I’m suddenly paranoid about the sheer number of photos I have in Google. These are often the masters/originals and the only copies I have.

I want to keep original quality (many of them are saved in RAW and JPEG). It’s an issue because I have about 15 years of them, and I know of individuals who have lost access to their Google account, and one friend whose Gmail was vaporised never to return. What do people do to protect against this?

Does anyone have any good resources for this or can explain it to me like I'm 5? I'm a millennial and generally decent with technology, but remain completely baffled by how Google Photos works in terms of what is backed up and where things get deleted if I delete them from my phone.

All the photos I take on my phone back up to my Google account, which I can access from my computer. That's great. But every time I go to delete a photo from my phone, it says "Remove from your Google account and any other devices with backup turned on?" This makes it sound like it will remove it from everywhere. The photos seem to still be in my Google account, but I don't understand why, if it says they'll be removed? So I don't trust that because I don't understand it.

And then if I delete something on my computer, it likewise doesn't remove it from my phone, so if I want to actually cull photos I don't need, I need to remove them from both places separately? That can't be right. I'm just so confused. I just don't delete anything from my phone because I don't trust it to stay backed up, but then my phone storage is just perpetually full. How am I supposed to be using this???