In fact Google has recently made an update to its Google Photos app where it will now offer faster initial backup and image sharing. This is meant help users on slower connections backup their photos. How this works is that the photos that are uploaded as part of the initial backup will be a “lightweight preview”. However once it has been detected that the user has a better connection, the high-quality version of the images will be backed up and used to replace the low-resolution copy.
The idea is that at the very least, users will have some form of photo backup in Google Drive even if it isn’t necessarily the high-quality version. Google claims that thanks to advancements in data and image compression, these preview images will still look great on smartphones, although we guess that might be debatable as everyone has different ideas of what looks good and what doesn’t. The update to Google Photos should already be live so you’ll want to update it if you haven’t already.