Moving Google Drive Photos to Google Photos

I back up the family's several years of digital photos and videos to Google Drive. This strategy worked quite well when I also had Piccasa available to manage the photos. Google Photos was simply the publishing mechanism for the selected highlights.

Google has taken away Piccasa, so I now need a replacement photo management tool. I thought I would follow Google's recomendation and use Google Photos as the Piccasa replacement. The problem is that all my photos are on Google Drive and not in Google Photos. After lots of digging it seems the only way to get photos from Google Drive into Google Photos is to download them all out of Drive and upload them back into Photos. Sigh.