g8row/PhotosBackup 0.3.7

Photos Backup 0.3.7

on GitHub

New

• The Google Photos app now counts what this app backs up. (#24, thanks @saileshbro) Uploads showed as "not backed up" in the Google Photos app, and its own Free up space never offered them. It now recognises them, and its Free up space and Delete from device remove the photos from your iPhone. On one library of about 8,500 items, "Not backed up" went from 8,145 to 0 and Free up space from 2 items to 461.

  The reason was the version being uploaded. The Google Photos app only counts a photo it can match to the one on your iPhone, so an edited photo or video now backs up as it looks, not as its unedited original. A photo you edited in the Google Photos app also needs the version that edit was applied on, which is uploaded in an extra step.

• Back Up Live Photo Motion. Off by default. With it on, a Live Photo's motion is attached to the still already in your account, so it plays as a Live Photo and Free up space will offer it. Live Photos backed up earlier get their motion added as a backlog — this can be tens of GB, which is why it is a setting you turn on.

• Backup keeps going after you leave the app (iOS 26). While the app is open with work to do, iOS is asked to keep it running; progress then shows in a Live Activity, where you can also stop it. Up to 2 uploads run at once in the background. On earlier iOS versions nothing changes.

Fixed

• Automatic Backup never ran in the background on SideStore installs. This affected every sideloaded install and was not new in this release. SideStore renames the app when it signs it, so the background task the app registered no longer matched the one it declared, and iOS refused it — meaning Automatic Backup never got a background window at all. The app now reads the name from its own build. (#2)

• Google's rate limit no longer fails a row. When Google asked the app to slow down (HTTP 429), rows retried a second apart, met the same refusal, and failed. The whole queue now waits it out — a minute, doubling up to ten while Google keeps refusing — and carries on.

• Items marked "Cancelled" with no reason. (#19) If the app was interrupted part way through an item, that row was marked "Cancelled" and left with nothing to explain it and nothing to retry it, which is why the same photo could appear as both "Cancelled" and "Already backed up". An interruption now retries, and if it keeps happening it says what went wrong. "Cancelled" now only ever means you stopped it, and reads Stopped by you.

• The activity list got faster on big backups. (#8) As each item finished, the app was asking the photo library about it twice on the same thread that draws the list. It asks once now.

• Photos deleted while still queued. Freeing space on your iPhone deletes photos that may still be waiting to upload. Those rows are dropped quietly instead of failing with "no longer in your photo library" — about 2,000 rows had failed that way on one library.

• Hand-picked photos are re-checked even when the app already remembers them as backed up.

Verifying this release

• The .ipa is built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit, not on a laptop, and is attached with its SHA-256 as PhotosBackup.ipa.sha256. (#17, thanks @nonnapopoa, raised in #15) You can check the file you downloaded with shasum -a 256 PhotosBackup.ipa and compare, and the build log shows which commit and toolchain produced it.
• Every pull request and every push now runs the test suite before it can land.

Worth knowing

• An edited photo now backs up its edit, not its original. Originals already uploaded stay in your account, but a newly edited photo no longer uploads its unedited version. Google's own backup behaves the same way.
• After updating, the app queues a one-time re-check of edited photos already backed up. Most settle without uploading anything.
• A photo saved to your iPhone from Google Photos is never counted as backed up, even though it is in your library. Editing it in Apple Photos works around this.

Notes

• 191 tests, 189 passing (2 opt-in live tests skipped).
• Tested on an iPhone 16 Pro Max (iOS 26.6.1, Google Photos 7.92.0) across a full library, and on a SideStore-signed install where the background tasks now register and run.
• docs/google-photos-backed-up-rules.md records each rule and the on-device evidence behind it.