How to back up original photo files as is in Google

This blog post explains how to back up photos on Google Photos and Google Drive as is, keeping the original images files, bit-by-bit identical, without any scaling or reencoding.

TL;DR If you want to keep the original image files, upload the photos to Google Drive, which keeps the original files (bit-by-bit identical as uploaded), and their size counts against your Google storage quota (see your usage). Don't upload any image file to Google Photos.

TL;DR If you want unlimited image uploads with the option of downloading the original image file (bit-by-bit identical), consider options other than Google Photos (such as Flickr and Deviantart).

On Google Photos you can upload some images for free (i.e. those images don't count against your Google storage quota). This is the most important advantage for uploading to Google Photos (rather than Google Drive). But there are some important caveats:

• You need to decide before uploading if you want free (it's called high quality) or not (original). Select it in the Google Photos settings. This setting won't effect photos uploaded from your Android devices by the photo backup app.
• If you decide non-free (original), future uploads will be counted against your quota, no matter the size, the file format or the quality. That is, even small, low-quality JPEGs will count against your quota.
• If you choose free and you upload a PNG file of at most 16 megapixels, the original file is kept, and you'd be able to download it later.
• If you choose free and you upload a PNG file of more than 16 megapixels, then it will be scaled down and reencoded.
• If you choose free and you upload a JPEG file, then the photo gets scaled down to 16 megapixels (no change if already small enough), and then reencoded with a quality loss (which is small enough so that most humans don't notice), removes or rearranges some metadata (e.g. EXIF), and only the scaled and reencoded JPEG file is available for download.
• Google Photos does deduplication of your images. This has an unintended consequence. If you upload a photo 3 times to 3 different album, and you move the photo to the trash, it will be removed from all 3 albums. There is no way to move some photos in an album to the trash without affecting other albums.
• Google Photos does deduplication even across qualities. Thus if you upload an image as original first, and the upload it again as high quality, the high quality version will be ignored, and the original version will be present in both albums. It's also true the other way round: if you upload high quality first, then subsequent original uploads of the same image will be ignored.
• Even with non-free (original), Google doesn't remember the original file name, as uploaded: it converts e.g. the .JPG extension to .jpg (lower case).
• Immediately after the upload, the image info page shows incorrect information, and the Download link serves an incorrect (lower resolution) version of the image. For example, when I uploaded a new 1.1 MB JPEG file in high quality mode, the image info was showing 1.1 MB, but when downloading it, it became a 340 kB JPEG file. After reloading the image page, the image info was showing 550 KB, and downloading it yielded a file of that size. This makes experimenting with image upload sizes confusing.
• This is as of 2016-06-20, the behavior of Google Photos may change in the future.

Because of these caveats and unexpected behavior, to avoid quality loss, my recommendation is not to use Google Photos for backing up JPEG image files.