Google+ Auto Backup brings drive uploads to desktop

The same service you've been using with your smartphone for several months is hitting the desktop world this week with Google+ Auto Backup. This software ships – strangely enough – with the newest version of Picasa, uploading your photos automatically from a certain directory to your Google+ social networking account. This service works with photos that are 2048pixels on their longest end unless you'd like to devote Google Drive space to the effort.

This upload process could easily be done by you with a series of uploads from your folders of photos manually, but the idea is an extra added bit of simplicity. Here you're able to tell this internet-connected app to watch a directory in your computer, uploading any and all photos that come along from the point at which you start.

This app can also be configured to work with your media locally. While you're able to pull media from a variety of locations – folders and physical drives included – you'll be able to have all of this data copied to a single local hard drive while you're at it. It would appear – for now – that you don't actually have to use this Google+ Auto Backup app to connect with Google+ at all, if you don't want to.

In releasing this app with Picasa 3.9.137, we may be seeing one of the last signs before Picasa is fully folded into Google+. It'd be a strange idea, collapsing the service entirely, but it's not without precedent. Look at how similar the icons are already!

VIA: 9to5Google, Picasa