Why is Google Photos Sync Read Only

Google Photos Sync is a backup tool only. It never makes any changes to your Google Photos Library in the cloud. There are two primary reasons for this:

• The Photos API provided by Google is far too restricted to make changes in any meaningful way. For example

  • there is no delete function

  • you cannot add photos to an album unless it was created by the same application that is trying to add photos

• Even if the API allowed it, this would be a very hard problem, because it is often hard to identify if a local photo or video matches one in the cloud. Besides this, I would not want the responsibility of potentially trashing someone’s photo collection.