Backup your Android photos & videos to Google Drive keeping the original quality & filesize

[soy_titooo (Juan Martin)]

Unfortunately, Google Photos API won't let us copy files from photos.google.com to a google drive rclone remote at the original quality (source), so I tried to find a way to upload them to my google drive at the original quality...
This is the best solution I could came up with so I'm sharing it just in case someone wants to do the same:

1. Install Termux android app
2. Install rclone on your android device following the wiki instructions
3. Setup your rclone.conf file wtih the following command to create a google drive remote: rclone config
4. Execute once the following command: termux-setup-storage
5. Now whenever you want to upload the photos and videos recorded from your smartphone to your google drive execute the following command in Termux app:

termux-setup-storage && rclone copy "storage/dcim/Camera/" "my-googledrive:Backup--GooglePhotos/" --stats=30s -v

PROS:
We can upload the exact same files we have on the phone
I guess the upload process could be automated with an app such as Tasker

CONS:
The upload is done from our phone rather than our dedicated server
Files are not uploaded in f year/month folder format

IMPORTANT NOTES:
Note 1: "storage/dcim/Camera/" might be a different folder on your device
Note 2: my-googledrive is the name of my remote and Backup--GooglePhotos the name of the folder where the files will be uploaded, yours can be different:
Note 3: you might want to exclude from the upload folders such as cache. I'm not sure how to do it so I didn't...

[alfred]

Yes, you can upload the original size, and you cant, upload using "umlimited". And yes you can download the original imagen using web inferface.

But if you use rclone to download the images, you will have a compressed photo (like using imlimited)

Read more: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

[soy_titooo (Juan Martin)]

Those limitations apply if you use a google photos remote.

But in the method I describe in the OP you upload the files from your phone directly, which means that there is no compression applied because the files you upload aren't touched by google photos algorithms.