It was a normal morning for me at my home in beautiful Kelowna, BC. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I brushed my teeth quickly before going to the kitchen prior to my routine morning workout.
When I walked into the kitchen, the site of my boyfriend cooking bacon fully naked rudely awakened me. Not only was this a dangerous idea (I mean, who cooks bacon without even a shirt on?) but it was absolutely hilarious and out of the norm.
I reached for my iPhone to take an equally unwelcomed photo that I could save for future blackmailing. The next time a hockey game interrupted The Young & The Restless, I was sure to win the remote control.
He was quicker than me and ran to put on some clothes, so I was out of luck with getting any good blackmail material.
To my horror, the next day I realized that every one of my pictures taken on my iPhone auto-uploaded to Google+.
Uh oh!
I said a short prayer thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t get the chance to take that photo. Can you imagine the embarrassment I would have had to endure? It may not have been so bad if I didn’t own a social media marketing company. Ah, who am I kidding, I would have been horrified no matter what!
If you have the Google+ app on your phone, it’s a good time to check if the “Instant Upload” option has defaulted to “ON” or else you might find out the hard way! So this post is to show you how to disable instant uploading of pictures to Google+.
Steps To Disable “Instant Upload” On Your iPhone
- Go to Settings in your Google+ App
- Touch When to upload from the “Instant Upload” section
If you’re using an iPhone too, you should know that Apple requires location services to be enabled for an application to access the photos on the device’s camera roll. This means that “Instant Upload” will not function without location services activated.
I hope this post has helped prevent you from making the same mistake I almost made. Now you know how to disable instant uploading of pictures to Google+ so check your settings now. Save others from a potential embarrassing moment and share this by clicking the share buttons below!
Have you ever had a close call like mine on social media? Post your funny or embarrassing stories in the comments below.
The photos auto-upload, but they are not auto-shared by default (this isn’t Facebook, after all).
You can verify this by turning on auto-upload again, taking a photo of something less interesting than your naked boyfriend baconating, letting it upload, and then having said boyfriend look at your photos under his account — the photo should not be visible.
That said — I’m sure the Google employees that crawl people’s private photos to find new ways to sell you advertisements will probably enjoy seeing his bacon-making-buttocks.
But you won’t have to worry about your boss or clients becoming insanely jealous of you.
@Aaron & Matt: Thanks for pointing that out. Thankfully they don’t auto-share but I was still a bit surprised to see that feature on by default. I thought that was very Facebookish of Google.
That is one dangerous auto upload! I have been doing my best to keep my social media off my phone for reasons such as this. Glad you caught it in time.
Instant Upload is actually not that big a deal. Yes, it uploads all your pictures but they’re all private until you choose to share them. Google does nothing with them except store them. I think it’s kind of nice to have an online backup of all the photos you take, which you can access from anywhere. It’s a welcome feature for me
I realized G+ was doing this from my Android last year, and immediately turned it off. You got lucky this time! Just remember to turn it off the minute you download the app on your next phone, don’t let disaster strike twice!
Wow! Even though it’s just stored and not shared yet can certainly give you that uneasy feeling. All the what if’s and but’s that can run in one’s head can be very uncomfortable. Thanks for sharing this Melonie.
Love this story Melonie, thanks for sharing. I can’t cheaply upgrade to an iPhone for a few more months, but this will be the first feature I disable on my G+ app! Even if they aren’t auto shared, there are just some things you don’t want saved anywhere . . .
Thank you Melonie!!
I had no idea. I just checked my “Instant Upload” settings. But it is a great reminder in general to think before you click/post!
It doesn’t auto-share. I’m not sure why you were panicked. It merely backed up your photos to a private folder in Picasa. I know it gets traffic, but you hyperventilated over nothing.
@Jason: You’re right, Jason! In that situation it was briefly unsettling to simply discover that my photos were being backed up online without my knowledge. Either way, it’s certainly worthwhile info for anyone that isn’t aware of the feature as it seems that most people are not.
They may default to on, but they don’t default to public. They can only be seen by others if you manually make a specific picture public.
What Lonnie said.
You do realize that the pictures are saved privately and are not visible to anyone else unless you volunteer to share specific pictures, right? Just thought you might want to know so you’re not too worried by your false alarm!
You are spreading a bit of misinformation here. Nothing is shared on G+ via Instant Upload. Moreover, you had to overtly accept and agree to the Instant Upload feature when you installed Google+. It was not turned on surreptitiously. Lastly, Are you aware that Facebook’s new client does exactly the same thing?
The reason I have a concerned tone here is because this article suggests that Google slipped up with the privacy of your data, which could have the effect of scaring people away from a really great service. What, in fact, happened is that you installed the software, agreed to turn on intant uploading, and posted an article that makes it sound a bit like Google screwed up.
Unless you go back in to a photo that was “instantly uploaded” and tell it to share the photo and with whom, you were in no danger of enduring any sort of embarrassment.