The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll discuss my understanding of how sharing works in Google Photos. Like many of you, Google Photos is my choice for cloud-based photo storage, but I've always found that one of the more confusing and convoluted aspects of the service is how you share photos with others.   There are quite a few options, each of which has slightly different features and drawbacks.  Let's go through them one at a time. Share a copy of photo This is by far the way I share photos most frequently.  Say for example, you have a funny pet photo that you want to share with a friend on text or email.  You can go into the Google Photos app, find the photo, and hit the Share button.  Now, you can see that Google Photos is encouraging you to share with others who have a Google account -- those people are all listed down here -- we will come back to that in a second.  For now, hit "Share to. ....

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...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you why my family has switched over entirely to using Chromecast as our streaming technology after trying out almost all of the others. I'm definitely an early adopter for certain kinds of technology and apparently streaming tools are one of those.  We got an Apple TV back in 2007 when they released the first generation device and since then have tried Roku, Amazon Fire stick, Google Chromecast, and a bunch of different Smart TVs.  For a while, we were using Roku, but now we have entirely switched over to Chromecast and let me tell you why.  First of all it has a  Pros: Light interface - Chromecast works different than most other streaming devices.  Other streaming devices require you to fire up the interface on the TV, choose a channel like Netflix, log in with your credentials using their awful on-screen keyboard, laboriously type in a show name ...

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the process that I used to digitize all of my old photos. Occasionally, I have these morbid thoughts about what we might lose if our house burned down. I determined that as long as my family and dog got out safely, the only thing I would really mourn were our old pictures. I got my first digital camera in 2001, but I graduated from high school in 1989. So, that is 12 years worth of pictures that aren’t digitized and that don’t have back ups. Plus, there were some momentous things that happened in that period — like our wedding and honeymoon, for which I have like three albums of photographs. Would I be upset if something happened to all of those? Yes!  So, I embarked on a project to digitize them and put them up in the cloud.  I considered using one of the services online where you can mail away your photos and get them back digitized on a thumb drive. There were two issues...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I turn photos into usable text using Google Keep and the Plain Text Paste App.  *Okay — I’ve done quite a few videos recently about exporting text from PDFs, Kindles and the like. Since I’m in graduate school now, this is relevant to my life, but to be fair, I have always been a note taker.  My memory is not great and I read a lot of nonfiction.  It’s really the only way for me to retain more than the most superficial information from the books I read.  I’ve gotten so that I really prefer to read books on a Kindle.  My primary reason is that i like the ability to easily make highlights and quick notes while I’m reading. Then I can export those highlights to an Evernote note.   When I’m reading a physical book and I want to highlight something or make a note, I have to put down the book, go get my phone and then type in the quote.  Wel...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I make to if the main screens in my house into digital photo frames using Chrome and Chromecast!  This is part of a series of videos on how I manage and access digital photos.   The way we appreciate photos now is SO different now than when my kids were born.  When is the last time you sat down and looked through an album of printed pictures?  By far my favorite way to enjoy pictures is through a randomly scrolling slideshow, playing as I'm doing other activities.  Let me show you how to do this on both a PC and a TV.   If you have watched any of my series on organizing and accessing digital photos, you know that I use Google Photos to access and share pictures. All of my photos are replicated in the cloud through Google Photos.  The good news is that Google Photos has a variety of apps on a variety of platforms that allow you to play a...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I transfer my photos from my iPhone to my computer using iFunbox. This is part of a series of videos on organizing and accessing digital photos. I love many things about the iPhone and iPad, but one thing that makes me a little crazy is that in Apple's quest for ease and simplification, they have taken away a lot of the control that you have as a user.  One particular pet peeve of mine is that you don't have direct access to the file structure of your iPhone.   The reason I originally discovered the free iFunBox program is that I had a bunch of phantom photos on my iPhone. In other words, my phone said that I had 3GB of photos even after I had cleaned off the phone and only had about 10 photos showing in my Camera Roll.  I downloaded iFunBox on my PC and hooked up my phone to get access to my iPhone's full file structure and was able to find and delete al...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Google Photos to electronically keep kids arts, memorabilia and old photos.  This is part of a series on Organizing and Accessing photos digitally.  Those of us with small children or crafty older ones can find ourselves overwhelmed with the products of our kids talents -- paintings, drawings, crafts, 3D sculptures, pinch pots, etc.  Maybe you have an extra annex to house all of that stuff, but I do not.  I quickly determined I needed some policies for purging and saving.  Thankfully, my kids' egos seem to be able cope with watching me immediately recycle some of their treasures, but some are particularly dear to them or nice enough that it seems reasonable to keep them in some way.   Just like with non-artsy paper, there are 3 options: Pitch, Keep Physically, Keep Digitally.   Pitch  - I'm a little merciless in this area. ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the 4th video in a series about the processes and tools I use to organize my photos.  In the previous videos, we've covered storing centrally, simple physical organization and using Picasa to manage and group photos.  In this video, I'll discuss using Google Photos to access my photos anywhere and share them with friends and family. Access Anywhere I realized early on that I wasn't going to be able to store all of my photos on my iPhone.  I don't have unlimited storage after all, who does? -- and I don't like having to delete a bunch of photos so that I can make room for more.  Having central storage on my PC solved that issue (see Parts 1 & 2 of this video series for more on that).  Every time I do my quarterly photo chores, I transfer all of my photos to my PC and clean off my phone so that it is empty.  Great!  The problem was -- I still wanted to be able t...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and this is the third video in a 4 part series about organizing and accessing your digital photos. In the first 2 videos, I covered storing my photos centrally and physically organizing them simply.  In this video, I'll talk about how I manage and virtually group my photos using Picasa.  I've been using Picasa for photo management for years now. To give a brief history, Google acquired this desktop software in 2004 and then started phasing it out in favor of Google Photos.  By early 2016 Google had completely stopped providing support for it and its online component -- Picasaweb. So, why do I still use it?  Simple -- even though Google stopped updating this software, they haven't built all of its features into Google Photos yet -- so I will continue using Picasa until they do. I also use Google Photos, but more about that in a later video.  What does Picasa do?   Photo Viewer ...