Why I Use Google Photos

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll tell you why I use Google Photos as my main photo system.

A couple of years ago, I did a 4-part series on how I organized and managed my digital photos -- using a combination of Picasa and Google Photos.  I've since abandoned that system -- mostly because my computer crashed and lost all of my hard storage data, but since I already had all of my photos stored in Google Photo's cloud, I just started using that full-time.  

I've done some videos since then on how to free up space on your phone and how I use Google Photos, but I thought I'd restate my reasons for WHY I use Google Photos in the first place.  The first reason is to

Free Up Space on My Phone

I don't want every photo that I've ever taken stored on my phone.  I don't have unlimited data and I don't want to have to choose between deleting old photos or taking new ones.  Google Photos allows you to sync your photos to the cloud and then delete them off of your phone.  See my video on this if you want a step by step guide.  At any given time I have only 3-30 photos on my phone.  HOWEVER, I can always access them from the cloud as long as I have Internet access.  They don't take up space AND I can pull them down whenever I want.  In addition, I like to be able to

Access Anywhere

When my photos were only on my phone, that was the only place I could access them.  Now, with Google Photos, I can get to them from my computer, my iPad, Google Chromecast, and any other device that is Internet-connected.  My photos are whereever I need them to be.  So, let me run through some

Google Photos Basics

Google Photos stores all of your photos indiscriminately in a big vat.  Then you can use Albums to organize them.  So you can look at the big vat containing every picture by clicking on Photos (which also happens to be the default view), or you can view by folders (or albums) by choosing Album view.  Photo view does not give you any options for sorting.  It sorts by date only, most recent on top, and uses the date imbedded in the photo file metadata.  Fortunately, you CAN change photo dates within Google Photo, which I cover later on.

If you go into an individual photo (we are in the iOS App here), you can hit the edit button to do some light editing (apply limited filters, crop, basic lighting adjustments and rotation), but the editing is pretty limited. In addition, you can hit the dot dot dot up here or pull up to get access to the photo file's metadata. Here you can change the date on the file, add a caption, or add the photo to an album. You can hit the Google Lens button to see things on the Internet that might be related - I'll come back to this in a minute.  And hit the share button to save to your device, send to someone,  print it, or open it in another app.  Those are the basics, now let me tell you my favorite thing about Google Photos

Facial Recognition

This is not quite as good as Picasa's, nor is it as flexible, but it's pretty awesome.  Basically, if you turn on Group Similar Faces in settings, Google Photos will group together pictures of people who it thinks are the same person.  It will also do this for pets if you specify.  And it does a scarily remarkable job of determining who is the same person, even from age 4 to age 24.  Then, if you name those groups, which you can do you though the search screen (just click on the people, click a group and select Add a Name, you can search by a person’s name.  Searching by name is FANTASTIC for locating photos in what would otherwise be a needle in a haystack situation.  You’ve witnessed people scrolling through endless photos while they try to pull up something to show you — it’s excruciating.  As I said, it’s not super flexible, you can only identify people that Google Photos has automatically grouped, but it is still amazing and one of my favorite features. In addition to this, you can also 

Search by Other Stuff

I haven’t even found all the ways to search, but some of my favorites are searching by date (like all photos taken on 3/10 or just photos in March), by location (Paris, Mexico, New York City), or even searching by occasion (Halloween, Christmas, Marti Gras) or objects (beach, letter). For these last, Google Photos is incorporating quite a bit of artificial intelligence for object recognition. You can try to search anything that comes to mind.  For example, if I search for "Lizard", here is what I get. How about beach?  Or vase?  Obviously there are misses and overinclusions, but WOW. This is so helpful in searching for the right photo. I love this feature and it's only getting better.  As an aside, I'm obsessed with the confusion AI has in working out some differences. Hats off to @teenybiscuit who shares these on Twitter.  Is it a chihuahua or muffin?  Puppy or bagel?  Or my favorite - goldendoodle or fried chicken?

Google Lens

I don’t use this feature a ton, but Google Photos allows you to use its Google Lens technology to search the Internet for other related objects or places.  This comes in handy when you are looking for a product or trying to identify a location.  Obviously you are feeding your photos into Google’s giant Big Brother database, so there’s a trade off in terms of lack of privacy. You’ll have to decided whether the convenience is worth it to you.  I also use Google Photos to easily

Share Photos and Albums

You can share photos right from the app without downloading them to your phone. Want to send someone a text with a photo?  Just go into the photo, select the sharing button and decide whether to share within Google Photos (an option if you are sending to sending who also uses the app), or click on Share To for more options.  If you decide to text or email, it embeds the photo right in the text. How about if you want to email several pictures?  In the iOS app, you just need to press hard to select, so select the photos and hit the sharing button to include them all in your message.  

If you want to share a bunch of photos, that is also easy. Create an album of those photos by selecting the photos you want, choosing the sharing button, hit share to, and choose Shared Album. At this point, you can choose a previously created album or create a new one. I'm going to call this new album Test. Then you can Share by hitting that button and choosing contacts from your list or typing in new email addresses.  This will send them a link to your album so you don't flood their inbox with 50MB worth of photos.  You can also set it up to allow others to add their own photos for a collaborative album.

How I Use My Photos

Finally, I have a whole video on how I use my photos, so you can watch that if you want more details on this, but since all of my photos are available on the cloud, I can enjoy them in lots of ways including sending photos by email once a month to a small family circle, sending a collage to a larger group once a quarter, making albums for events or occasions, creating slideshows for special groups or people, and using our TVs as giant digital photo frames to display a random assortment of photos for my whole family to enjoy.  

So, that’s it.  I like Google Photos for saving space on my phone, being able to access my photos from anywhere, being able to search by person, date, location, event, or other objects, and it’s ability to share and use those photos easily.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!