Google Photos brings low quality backups when only a crappy data connection is available

As part of a “Google for Brazil” event in São Paulo, the company announced new changes that look to improve many of their apps and services, not only in Brazil, but all around the world. For Google Photos, this means the introduction of a new feature that can backup low quality photos over poor cellular connections — even when a 2G connection is the only thing available. When user are able to connect to WiFi, Photos will replace these low quality uploads with high quality versions. There’s really no downside.

The obvious question is the use case scenario that would make something like this convenient. Should something happen to your device on a trip where you had a poor connection, there’d be some peace of mind in knowing that your photos were backed up to the cloud. Even if it was just low quality versions, it’s certainly better than nothing.

Google also notes that users will be able to immediately share low quality backups with friends and family on Google Photos and that they still look great on smaller smartphone screens. Again, these low quality photos will be replaced by high quality versions once a high-speed connection is established, so there’s no extra effort required from the user. It just works.

The update should be rolling out soon on Google Photos and it wasn’t clear if this was an option that will need to be enabled in the app’s settings, or if it will just work this way by default. In either case, you can download Google Photos free right now on Google Play with unlimited high quality backups.