If you’re one of the millions of people who love Google Photos, or thinking about potentially trying it, this is the guide for you! We don’t talk a lot about this service here on the blog for a few different reasons, but we can’t deny that their service has come a long way since its inception. It now makes managing your images fairly easy and helps you to find what you need, whenever you need it. Read on to hear more about some of its features!
Using Google Photos For Your Digital Collection
Anyone can relate to the idea of losing a mobile phone and all the photos on it. It’s not fun, and definitely something to try and proactively avoid. Our readers often say they know they should back up their precious memories, but they don’t always get around to it, and while we recommend having a solid backup strategy in place, there’s no denying that it takes a bit of work to get to that point. If that sounds like you, there’s one thing you can do fairly easy: use a one-way syncing platform, like Google Photos.
Google Photos is one of the most— if not the most—widely used gallery app for Apple and Android users. Google Photos helps you simplify your digital life and because it syncs memories from your camera roll, so you won’t lose your photos even if you lose your phone. Most people think of Google Photos as just a simple storage platform for photographs, but it comes with an abundance of highly useful and creative tools. When used right, you can totally revolutionize your experience and revisit old photographs with the tap of a screen.
In this blog post, we’re going to highlight some of the things Google Photos does really well:
Search for People and Places
Google Photos has an impressive ability to recognize and group the images of individual people, and it’s about as accurate as it’s going to get at this point in time. For example, if your friend’s birthday is coming up and you want to curate a collage for them, you can simply visit their folder that’s automatically generated and updated by Google Photos. This ability to identify the subjects present in a photograph also allows the program to recognize objects. If you type ‘dog’ into your gallery’s search bar, all your photos containing dogs would show up. And if you’re a pet owner you know exactly how many images you’re likely to find! Or you may choose to utilize the function where you’re shown where on the world map you took your photos. If you remember the location of a photo but not the date, utilize this place tag function. Unlike many other programs, its accuracy is incredible (and really helpful too!).
Share Photos with Others
Almost every successful digital platform is inspired by the global desire to feel connected and to actually be connected. The incredible power of technology to sustain and nourish relationships across the globe is truly amazing. Our reliance on and appreciation of this has become increasingly evident over the course of the past two years.
With Google Photos, you can share your photos with friends and stay connected to loved ones regardless of their geographic location. Plus, you can do all this without needing to send an email or instant message. Google Photos allows you to create shared albums, and you can even share your entire library. This means that, if you share an album with someone, you can both upload photos. These photos will automatically sync and are visible to both users. In this way, you can simply pop a few photos into your shared albums when you have a moment. This is a great way to maintain a connection with friends or family.
Digital Spring Cleaning Made Easier
Like any household or workplace, you need to stay on top of decluttering your space. We like to refer to this as digital housekeeping. Any cleaning task will feel overwhelming and impossible if you put it off for long enough, so to stop this happening, invest some time in a regular small-scale sweeps of your digital gallery. This will help you to stay on top of deleting unnecessary photographs. If you find that you want to scale down your photo library five years down the line, it’s guaranteed to be a time-consuming task. Luckily, Google Photos has a quick select function where you can effortlessly select a large volume of photographs to move them into a particular folder, export, or archive them.
Save Storage Space on Your Devices
One of the greatest uses for Google Photos is its ability to effectively manage your phone’s storage on your behalf. If you set up the ‘backup and sync’ function, then Google Photos will automatically detect new photos on your device and save them to the online gallery. This means that you don’t have to remember to constantly manually upload your device’s photos to an online storage platform. Furthermore, and this is where it becomes truly useful, Google Photos will know exactly which photos from your phone’s library have already been backed up. It can then use this data to allow you to conveniently delete all the local photos on your phone that were duplicated and stored on Google Photos. Just remember that, depending on your settings, these deleted photos remain in your recently deleted album. This allows you to resave select images that you would prefer to be easily accessible at all times.
Make Use of Utilities
This functionality allows you to add a bit of creative flair to the way that you display your photographs. Explore this tool to see what it has to offer. You will find that there is an expansive range of collage and slideshow options to choose from. This is particularly useful when you want to show off your summer holiday photos to friends and family. The Utilities function of Google Photos also offers suggestions for rotating images in need of rotation, creating a more level horizon line, and adding creative animations to photographs. You can even use it to edit together a series of videos and photos to create a diverse and engaging movie about your holiday, your pets, or a friend’s birthday party.
Don’t be afraid to go wild when playing with the various effects and editing options in Google Photos. It’s relatively easy to revert an image to its original form. If, however, you’re concerned about your ability to undo changes, you can always duplicate a photograph before making any adjustments to safely preserve the original image.
Make Google Photos Work For You
Google Photos is a simple way to take precaution against losing your devices, and with them – your photos. It makes storing images simple, and you can play around with the features with plenty of functionality for free. That being said, there are a few things to know: 1) If you do lose your phone, and you need to retrieve your images and perhaps move them elsewhere, the export options are a little clunky, 2) keep an eye on resolution settings, so that your photos don’t get compressed (you may have to upgrade to a paid plan), and 3) metadata will be retained in the photos if it’s already there, but not if you embed it while working in your Google Photos account. If these three points aren’t that important to you, then this solution might be just what you need to keep on top of that digital collection!
What say you, readers? Is Google Photos a service you like? Let us know in the comments below!
