Ask any pro photographer and almost all of them will say the thing they wish their cameras would do is automatically upload photos to a preferred cloud storage service just like their phones. It's not a lofty request, but few camera manufacturers have done anything to make this task a reality. However, after Canon gave up on its Irista cloud storage service earlier this year, it launched a new project called image.canon. This isn't really meant to be a storage service, at least not for the long term, but its job is to shuttle photos from your camera to another cloud service for safe keeping. Starting today, it now supports Google Photos
When image.canon launched back in February, it only supported Google Drive and Flickr. At the time, Canon planned to expand support to Google Photos and Adobe Creative Cloud in June, but that schedule obviously slipped a bit — likely due to the unusual events of 2020.
Connecting to the Google Photos and Creative Cloud services is now live and can be done through the image.canon app, available for Android and iOS. Just link your camera to the desired services, then it will automatically upload files in their original quality and format whenever it is turned on and can reach a known Wi-Fi signal. You'll need a supported Canon camera — there's a list here, organized by region and category.
There is a caveat to using Google Photos integration. It requires a subscription to Google One, the service that gives users additional online storage space plus some perks like discounts on Google Store purchases and enhanced customer support. Canon is offering one month of 100GB Google One for free, in case you want to try it out for a little bit before it starts to cost money.