New
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Back Up Photos in Shortcuts (iOS 16+). (#7) Add it to a personal automation — when the iPhone connects to power, at a time of day, or when it joins your home Wi-Fi — and set it to run immediately. Each run finds new photos in your selected albums and hands them to iOS to upload in the background. It works with Automatic Backup off, so a schedule of your own can replace it (#14), and it still follows Use Connection and Pause. Settings → Shortcuts shows when it last ran and what it did.
iOS gives each run about 30 seconds, so the action spends them finding and preparing photos, then leaves the uploads to iOS. With the app open it just adds to the queue — the uploads you are watching are not interrupted. Photos stored only in iCloud still wait until you open the app.
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Diagnostic reports you can attach to an issue. Settings → Support → Create Diagnostic Report builds a text file you can share or copy. It opens with What stands out — the likely reason backup is not happening, in plain words (Background App Refresh off, Low Power Mode, a paused or stopped queue, no background window from iOS in days, too little free space, and more). Below that: your settings, the last 40 runs, crash and termination data from iOS, the upload queue, and a timeline of what the app did and why.
It leaves out credentials, account addresses, photo identifiers, filenames, media, and links, so it is safe to post publicly.
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See when iOS actually runs the backup. Settings → Support → Diagnostics → Recent Runs lists every run — opening the app, Back Up Now, Shortcuts, and the background windows iOS grants — with the time it started, how long it took, what it did, and the conditions it ran under (network, battery and charging, Low Power Mode, locked or not). Background windows also record how long after the request iOS started them.
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Event Timeline. Every decision the app makes now leaves an entry saying why: why a background run was or wasn't requested, why uploads paused, which step an upload failed at and what Google said, when an item waited for iCloud, what iOS delivered while the app was closed. It keeps two weeks of history; repeats fold into one line, and warnings and errors are kept longer than routine entries, so a big backup does not push out the one failure that matters.
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Storage. Settings → Support → Storage shows what the app keeps on your phone — pending upload copies, backup history, transfer receipts, caches — and Clean Up Unused Data removes leftovers without touching pending uploads or your account.
Fixed
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One photo can no longer make the app close on every launch. (#13) If the app stopped while preparing a photo or video, the next launch started with that same item, so a single file that took the app down meant it closed again every time you opened it and nothing else backed up. Now an item the app stopped on goes to the end of the queue, and if it stops the app a second time it is skipped with an explanation — tap it to retry. Everything else keeps backing up.
Suspending the app normally never counts against an item, so iOS closing the app in the background does not skip anything.
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Checking a large video uses less memory. The file is read in pieces, and each piece is now released as soon as it has been checked, instead of possibly being held until the whole video is done.
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The app knows when it last closed unexpectedly. If it disappears while open, while starting, or during a background run, the next launch records it and the report says so — even when iOS did not share a crash report.
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Leftover transfer receipts are cleaned up. Receipts that no upload owns any more are removed a day after they were written, and Google's responses are no longer kept in a disk cache.
Explained
- "Storage saver" on photos uploaded in original quality. (#11) The file is kept in original quality. With Count Against Storage Quota off, uploads identify as an older Pixel phone so they don't use your Google storage, and the Google Photos app labels those uploads "Storage saver". The file size, or Google Photos on the web, shows the real quality. Settings now says this, and the diagnostic report shows exactly which profile each upload sends.
Notes
- 161 tests, 158 passing (2 opt-in live tests, and 1 Keychain test that needs a signed build, skipped).
- Checked on an iPhone 12 running iOS 17.0.3: launch, account and queue restore, background scheduling, and the event log. A background window granted by iOS overnight and a Shortcuts automation on a locked phone still need to be seen on more devices — reports from either are very welcome.
- Crash details from iOS are only included when Share With App Developers is on (Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements), and they arrive a day or so after the crash.
- The Simulator cannot run background uploads or schedule background tasks. Use a device to exercise real backup behaviour.