How Do You Sync Photos between Samsung Phone and PC?

(1) Are there photographers here who can advice me on your workflow? I like to see how you do it to see if I can learn and apply your workflow.

(2) Do you use One Drive or Google Photos to Sync Photos from Samsung to PC? Is this a 1-way sync (backup) or 2-way sync?

2 years ago I moved from iPhone to Samsung S20 FE. One pain point is the camera/photo workflow on Samsung. I get by, but it is not ideal.

Apple syncs Photos Library across all devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud). It is seemless. If I mark favorites, delete photos, edit photos, make keyword edit, or basically any edits, those edits are sync'ed across all devices.

What I want to do is similar to that, and much simplier. Downloading photos to my PC. Identify some favorites. Edit on PC. Then I want to keep these edited favorites on Cloud drive and my phone, so I can show family & friends when needed.

I am currently using One Drive. But I'm low on disk space. Down to 3GB available (excluding photos). It is not enough to save my photos when I go on 1 week trips. I plan to also use Google Photos, which has 15GB limit.

If a photo is on Samsung phone (in Gallery), I download and edit that photo on my PC, and then save the photo to One Drive (and I have One Drive sync turned on), Samsung will ignore that One Drive photo and use the original version on the phone. I now realized that. So the fix is to delete all photos from Samsung phone after downloading. And then save the edited photos I want to One Drive. Then these photos will sync to Samsung phone.

Now the additional issue is that although these One Drive photos from my PC show up in Samsung Gallery, they are not really in Samsung Gallery folder on the phone. These photos are not in /DCIM or /Pictures folder on phone. They are actually under /OneDrive/Samsung Gallery/DCIM folder.

Google Photos just ignore (and will not sync) these photos that Samsung Gallery has synced with One Drive. I assume Google Photos is looking at the /DCIM folder, not the /OneDrive folder. I don't want to manage (move/copy) photos or folder on the phone. I just want to use One Drive (or Google Photos) to sync with Samsung Gallery and the cloud drives (that I add photos to from my PC).

TBH the simplest way is to forget about One Drive and indeed synching between phone and PC. Just sync your phone with Google Photos. On your PC I'd suggest you use Google Chrome browser, log in to your Google account and then access the pics from your Google Drive. You can download and mess with them easily as normal photos and then upload the results. Both the original and your edited version will be visible on your Google Drive Photos. You can then add whichever to albums or however you want to organise them.

Thanks for input. I have being playing with Google Photos. I can use it for "backup", but it is not what I want.

• One issue is that Google Photos doesn't sync with Samsung Gallery on phone. It just makes a copy. If I delete photos from my Gallery, those photos stays in Google Photos. If I delete photos in Google Photos, it stays in Gallery. Unless there is some setting that I overlooked to enable "sync".
• Then other issue is that I have to use web browser to manage my photos on my PC. Not what I want to do. A big waste of time.
• And the last issue is that once I get the photos onto the Samsung phone, I need to organize on phone into albums.

I still like how OneDrive does it, which is a sync. I can manage photos by copying and deleting on OneDrive folder on my PC; organize by directory. And it gets automatically updated on Samsung phone into different albums/directories

I know this is an old thread, but coming to it a little late...

I find it easiest to use Lightroom for this. Obviously this won't be helpful advice if you aren't a Lightroom user, so - sorry about that. I use Lightroom mobile for my camera app also because it gives easy access to the raw files without automatically making jpeg duplicates that I have to clean up*, and so Lightroom mobile automatically syncs with Lightroom on my desktop, and done.

*I don't know if it still does this in recent versions, but my recollection is that it used to...