Last week I was browsing my Google+ account on my PC getting more familiar with it and I stumbled across some pictures that were online from my phone that I did not upload!  I learned how it was happening and how to stop it and wrote this post to help others do the same.

Google Plus Instant Upload

Now, granted these were just silly pics of our cat and other things around the house but I was shocked!  I DID NOT authorize the pictures to be online. After some quick and frantic poking around I did see in the settings on Google+ that the pictures were private to me unless I manually shared them.  Nevertheless, I was wondering how that could happen?  So, I proceeded to delete the pics as they were hardly worth sharing.

Next I needed to figure out how this happened so I did some quick Googling and found that there is a feature called “Google+ Instant Upload” in the Google+ Android app.  (I have a Droid X2).  By default it is turned on when you install the app. That is how the pictures were being uploaded unbeknownst to me.  The way it works is every time you snap a pic, it automatically uploads a copy to your Google+ account.

I can see the merits in why Google included this feature and how it can be beneficial to have a copy of every picture you take simultaneously stored online, but at the same time I wanted that control. I want to decide when a picture is uploaded and who see’s it so I wanted to turn this feature off.

Here are the steps to turn of “Google Plus Instant Upload” in the Android App:

  1. Open the Google+ app on your phone
  2. Click the menu button on your phone and select “Settings”
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the settings screen and uncheck “Turn on Instant Upload”
  4. That’s it!

As a precaution you may want to shoot a quick picture and then check to see if it’s online afterwards but it should not be.

We hope you find this post useful and will consider sharing it online to your friends and networks.