Do I Need A Gallery App And Google Photos

What is Gallery App?

The gallery app is a simple tool to view, manage, and organize images and videos on your Android phone. Some phones have a dedicated gallery app preinstalled. For instance, you have the OnePlus Gallery, Samsung Gallery, Mi Gallery, and others. Of course, you can always install third-party gallery apps from Play Store. While each gallery app offers unique features, the inherent function remains the same. They all differ slightly by the user interface and customization settings.

☛The following picture shows a typical Android Gallery app with images organized into albums:

Gallery APP

Most Popular Gallery Apps for Samsung Users

Generally, almost every Android manufacturer (Samsung, Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc.) supplies a Gallery app to store your photos, and these Gallery apps vary depending on the manufacturer. For Samsung users, there are two most commonly used Gallery app: Samsung Gallery and Google Photos.

Samsung Gallery App

Samsung Gallery is a professional application for Samsung photos and video viewing that works for Galaxy users. You can view your image and video in a fast and cool way through the Samsung Photo Gallery used and recognized in Galaxy smartphones globally. Besides enhanced security helps protect your image and videos in safe, you can also enjoy your image and video anywhere in Samsung Cloud through cloud sync with signing in to the same account. Here is the picture of Samsung Gallery App for Android:

Samsung Gallery APP

Google Photos App

Google Photos a traditional app made for the way you take photos today and includes essential features like shared albums, automatic creations, and an advanced editing suite. You won't have to worry about storage either as you can choose to automatically back up all your photos and videos for free in high quality. You can then access them from any connected device and on photos.google.com.

Google Photos APP

Google Photos Vs Samsung Gallery: Which One Is Better?

To organize and manage your images and videos on the Samsung Galaxy smartphone, both Samsung Gallery and Google Photos have their own advantages. In the following contents, we will introduce Samsung Gallery and Google Photos from several aspects, please keep reading.

1. Cross-Platform Availability

Similar to other Google services, Google Photos is available everywhere. It has native app support for iOS, Android, and has a capable Web version.

While the Samsung Gallery app is only available for Galaxy devices. So, if you want to access images on another platform, you will have to perform a backup.

2. File Viewing And Searching

The search and face recognition of Google Photos is industry-leading that can help you search pictures, even an old one, easily and quickly. You can search for photos by typing more natural or descriptive terms, and even use facial recognition and other methods for identifying the contents of a photo to add relevant metatags.

However, Google Photos is limited in terms of viewing and accessing the images on the device as the default screen only shows the uploaded images. If you want to view a photo via Google Photos that you haven't uploaded to Google Cloud, you will need to tap on folders > search through a relevant folder and then access the pictures.

On the contrary, Samsung Gallery is designed for device folders. They provide a perfect interface for viewing and managing files. When you launch Samsung Gallery, it directly shows you the albums. You can customize the interface and organize the files in many ways. However, Samsung has a flaw in the file searching aspect as it doesn't offer the keyword search that Google Photos has. The Samsung gallery search didn't work for any keyword

3. Editing Options

By default, both Google Photos and Samsung Gallery support rich editing options. With Google Photos, you can apply various filters, change the intensity of light and colors, and use crop and rotate functions. Apart from that, you can create a Collage photo, make an animation using a bunch of images, and even create a video from scratch using default music and floating animations.

Samsung is advanced in this area. The editing options include the ability to apply filters, add stickers and typography, etc. One can also play with advanced options such as exposure, contrast, saturation, and highlights. The doodling is also there, which is quite useful on a Note device. And similar to Google Photos, one can also create videos using pictures, background, and animations. You can add text to the videos too.

4. Backup And Sharing

Google, by default, store all the images on Google servers. In the past, you can get unlimited storage as long as you upload photos at high quality or get 15GB of free storage with original quality. However, this service ended on June 1, 2021. Sharing is where Google Photos truly shines. You can select a bunch of photos and create a link, make a shared album, or add their Gmail ID to send an invite link.

Samsung has partnered with Microsoft, and as a result, the company has ditched Samsung cloud in favor of OneDrive integration in the Gallery app. Starting with One UI 2.0, the users will be able to enjoy the seamless integration of OneDrive in the default app.

How to Use Google Photos Instead of Samsung Gallery As Default?

While you can use both Google Photos and your built-in Gallery app at the same time, you'll have to choose one as the default. Luckily, Android makes it easy to set and change default apps by going into your settings.

On the Samsung Galaxy, images and videos are opened by default with the Samsung Gallery app. But if you prefer to use the Google Photo app and want it to open pictures, photos and videos by default, you can learn how to change the default Gallery app, which was opened for photos and videos.

How to set Google Photos as default on Samsung:

1. Open the app menu on the Samsung Galaxy, then select Settings.

2. Tap on the three-point symbol in the upper right corner and select Standard Apps.

3. Continue to Set as default. All apps that are set as default for a file type or action on this phone will be listed here.

4. Looking for the Gallery app for images and videos. In the next submenu, press Clear defaults.

Samsung Gallery Clear Defaults

5. Then open a photo or a video, your phone will prompt you to select a default app for this file type, with which app it should now be opened. Select Google Photos here.

Additional Information You May Want to Know

As mentioned above, Google Photos only supports you to view photos that have already been uploaded to the Google cloud. In the past, this restriction will not have much impact on users because Google Photos offers unlimited storage space for High-quality photos and videos since 2015. Therefore, users can upload photos and videos as much as they have and don't need to worry about storage space.

However, according to the latest news, Google ends the unlimited storage service on June 1, 2021. The photos and videos that you uploaded before that data will be kept normally, but the photos and videos that you upload after that day will occupy your storage space, no matter you are a free account or paid account.

Therefore, if you have too many photos and videos but don't want to pay for more Google Photos storage space, you can consider abandoning Google Photos or converting Google Photos to Amazon Photos, Flicker, SmugMug, and so on that offers unlimited storage space or more reasonable storage plans.

How to protect your photos on the computer in a safer way?

Actually, although photos cloud storage like Google Photos and Amazon Photos offers many advantages to you, your photos in these cloud storage are not absolutely safe. According to the questions and feedbacks of users, they may find that the photos are missing in Google Photos or Amazon Photos.

Therefore, if you want to keep your photos on a PC in a remote location to protect your photos, you are suggested to use a PC cloud backup service instead of cloud storage. Compared with Google Photos and Samsung Gallery, cloud backup services will back up your files in a more professional and safer way.

If you need a recommendation, CBackup is a good choice. It is a professional cloud backup service for Windows PCs. With it, you can backup many photos to its secure and stable CBackup Cloud with ease. It has advantages as below:

☛The features offered by cloud backup services are more abundant.

☛The storage plans of CBackup are more reasonable than photos cloud storage.

☛It also allows you to backup files to third-party cloud storage like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox.

☛You can combine all the accounts of third-party cloud storage to get a huge, even unlimited storage space.

1. Download CBackup and create a new CBackup account, and then sign in to CBackup desktop app.

2. Select the Backup Tasks tab, and then press + New Task button to create your backup task.

Create Task

4. Specify the Task Name, and click Add Source button to choose folders you want to backup to cloud. Hit Add Destination button to choose CBackup Cloud as the target location.

Select Destination Cbackup Cloud

5. Press the Start Backup button to execute your backup task.

Start Backup

Actually, besides CBackup Cloud, CBackup also allows you to backup files to third-party cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. If you want to backup files to third-party cloud storage, follow the steps below:

1. Click My Storage on the left side, and click + Add Cloud button, then choose the cloud storage and hit Add. Then follow the on-screen guide to allow CBackup to access your third-party cloud storage's files.

Add Cloud

2. Click the Backup Tasks tab, create your backup task. When you choose the backup destination, click Single Cloud and choose one third-party cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive).

Select Destination Single Cloud

3. Then, click Start Backup to execute your backup task.

Start Backup

Conclusion

After learning the battle: Google Photos vs Samsung Gallery, you may already have a decision in your heart. But if you can't make a choice because of their own unique features, you can use them simultaneously. On the Samsung Galaxy, images and videos are opened by default with the Samsung Gallery app. So, how to make Google Photos default has also been introduced. Don't forget to change the default app according to your needs.

If you need an offsite backup solution to backup your PC photos, you can use CBackup. The CBackup Cloud of CBackup is very safe and stable and it offers huge backup space that must be enough for all of your photos. Don't hesitate to use it!