How the New Google Photos Makes Your Image Library Look Awesome
Last week Google announced Google Photos , a new photo hosting service that combines the best of Google+ Photos with unlimited free storage for high-quality photos and HD videos. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying it for the first time or logging in to see what’s changed, here’s what’s new and how to get the most out of it.
Google Photos is impressive, but not new. Previously, the service was closely associated with Google+, but it still allowed you to do a lot of interesting things with your photos. Quick photo editing with powerful Snapseed tools , photo filters, autoloading and auto enhancement (which creates GIFs and short videos from your photos) are all features that Google+ fans will recognize, but can now be used by anyone, whether or not there is do they have a Google+ account or not. Let’s take a look at some of the other important changes that make managing your photos easier than ever.
Download everything from all your devices for free
Everyone loves free, and when Google announced free storage for all of your photos and videos, the audience cheered. There is one caveat, though: if you opt for “unlimited” free Google storage, you will only be able to upload photos up to 16 megapixels or 1080p HD videos. Anything with a higher resolution will be scaled down to fit. If you don’t want to, you can opt-out – this means you still get free space for anything less than 16 megapixels or 1080p, but higher resolutions will count towards your Google Drive quota (15 GB for most people, if only you buy an update ), which is accessed through Gmail and all Google apps. This setting is in your Google Photos settings , and this setting applies to all of your devices that have the Google Photos app installed.
However, the “unlimited” option is probably fine for most people. If your phone doesn’t have a really high-res camera or it can’t shoot 4K, you probably won’t notice much of a difference if you enable this feature, and the ability to automatically save everything makes the pot even better. Most of us still view our photos on web browsers or on mobile screens. However, if you are a stickler for quality or all of your devices have high-end cameras, “unlimited” may not be for you. If this is the case, you might consider giving it up or finding a service that does not degrade the quality of your images . Yes, and even though we’re talking about uploading here, if you want all these photos to be on your computer or saved offline (which you should), you can now upload them all with one click to Google Takeout .
Let Google organize everything (or create your own albums if needed)
The new Google Photos “Collections” feature automatically organizes your photos by date or location, a big improvement over how it used to be. The new Assistant is the place to go for newly created automatically awesome photos, highlighted clips and short videos. By default, your photos are still ordered by date, as always. Click or tap Collections to view photos of specific events, such as an afternoon photo walk or a trip to the beach.
Google Photos is good at automatically merging photos you took over a period of time and creating a collage from them – it’s not ideal for knowing where you’ve been (it has tagged some of the photos I took outside the Capitol as the National Portrait Gallery which is definitely not the same or not even close), but the collections are easy to customize and add details. You can even share them with others, and it will all be much more interesting than a simple photo album. Your notes and narration correspond to the photographs near the geographic locations where the photographs were taken. (Speaking of geo-tagging your photos, now your photos are automatically tagged with their location. If you want to turn this off, it’s a toggle in your settings .)
If you prefer to take matters into your own hands, you can still create your own albums, create your own stories or animations, or create your own photo collage. Click or tap the plus sign next to the search bar (or at the top of the screen in the mobile app) and select the photos you want to add to your album. Add notes, choose music and share it with your friends. You can let Google Photos do the hard work for you here, but even if you want to do it yourself, it’s surprisingly easy.
Fall in love with the new search bar
The large new search bar at the top of Google Photos is probably the most impressive update. Enter almost everything you photographed and it will find your photo. It’s a bit like a Google image search , but only for your photos – and it works great. Enter “people” and any photographs or portraits of individuals will appear. When I type in Air and Space, all the photographs I have taken at the aviation and space museums here in Washington appear instantly. Even when I type “salad”, I get a few photos of the salad I took (a fact that confuses me enough). However, this is not ideal – if you enter “people,” you can find art that you have photographed or downloaded, but that’s okay.
The search bar hides another cool feature you’ll want to try: quick access to all your photos in Google Drive, your videos, recently added photos and any of your creations (auto-add photos, highlighted videos or GIFs) ”I did. Just click or tap the search bar once and scroll all the way down to see quick links for each one.
The photo search feature is incredibly powerful. Ideally, you could start by simply taking pictures and letting them upload them automatically, and then looking for what you want to see, instead of painstakingly creating individual albums or folders. Google Photos allows you to create them manually, but the changes in the way you organize your photos make it less necessary than other photo sites, and the fact that I can just search generic terms to see all my relevant photos is a huge boon.
Share your photos with everyone
Sharing is much better than before. Back in the days when Google+ Photos was linked to Google+, your post options were essentially a link that brought the visitor to G + or shared your photo with your Google+ circles. You now have the option to share direct links to your photo or send your photo to Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google+. All of these shared links can also be tracked from the sidebar, so you can always see what photos are there and visible to other people, which is very nice.
Customize the look of your gallery
This feature is only available for mobile devices, but it will completely change the way you look at photos. By default, photos are organized by the day they were taken. If you take a lot of photos or just want a wider view, you can zoom in (zoom in on photos but display less on screen) for daily viewing, or pinch to zoom out, making photos smaller individually but displaying more on screen. As you zoom in, the scale changes to better match the view: the photos you took “yesterday” are combined with all the photos you took in the last week and again this month.
This zoom makes it easy to find photos from the past month or even last year, but it’s also great for viewing photos of an event or getting a good overview of all the shots you’ve taken in a week. long vacation, or when you walked around town yesterday.
Of course, these are just a few of the new and recently updated features. Everything that made the service great is still here, such as the ability to edit photos, crop and resize them, apply layers and download them to your computer, from the web, or to your mobile device. Google Photos now also lets you delete photos from your smartphone or tablet after they’ve been uploaded, giving you more space on your phone for apps or other things.
There’s a lot to love about the new Google Photos, as well as a great mix of new and old features that have been significantly updated. If you’re not already using it to manage your photos, it’s worth taking a look at – and even if you’re using another service like Flickr or Facebook, the fact that it’s free gives you another place to back up, organize, edit. and share your photos for free.