Information Technology Services

by Curt Price

Just about everyone uses their smart phone to take pretty much all of their photos nowadays.

And rightfully so.

You always have your phone/camera on you, the picture quality (especially on the higher end phones) is pretty phenominal, and it's super easy to share those photos with friends and family right away.

An extemely popular and very useful photo storage app is Google Photos. And it's been free since it's launch in 2015.

Here are some of the many things you can do with Google Photos that you may not have been aware of.

Backup/Save Storage and Space on Your Phone

One of the main features of Google Photos, is the ability to instantly back up photos and videos to the cloud. You can set it to do this at any time. If you aren't on WIFI, it will count against your monthly data quota if you have on on your data plan. But you can set it to only back up your photos to the cloud when you're on WIFI, so it doesn't count against your data quota. 

Once backed up, you can then remove the photos from your phone with one click to free up valuable space. And you can always view your photos using your phone by simply opening up the 'Photos' app. This allows you to view your photos on your phone that are backed up on your could storage account.

And one of the "neatest" features of backing up your photos, is that your space is unlimited! To get unlimited space, all you have to do is choose to reduce the resolution a bit to a more web-friendly version. You can back up your photos in full resolution, but it will count against your allotted space in Google Photos/Google Drive (depending on your type of Android phone. If you have a Pixel phone, you are given unlimited full resolution backups for 2 years after buying a your Pixel phone). To be honest, the reduced resolution is pretty large and more than big enough for just about anything you want to do with it. It's bigger than most monitors/screens, which is probably where they'll be viewed 99.9% of the time. 

And with your photos backed up automatically in the cloud, you never have to worry about losing your photos or videos if you lose or bust up your phone. When you get a new phone, you just set it up with the same Google Account, and all of your photos and videos are right there in the Photos app again. Super simple.

Message Individual or Group Photos

You can easily share a photo. Just choose the photo you want to share and click on the share icon. You can choose anyone in your Google contacts.

Filter Your Searches

Over time, you'll build up a LOT of photos. Google Photos has a timeline feature on the right side when scrolling, so you can see the months and years in which the photos were taken.

You can also search for items within your photos. If you're looking for a photo of a hamburger that you took, you can search for 'hamburger' and you'll be shown all photos that contain a hamburger. You can also search by location, whether it be by a city or a business.

The 'Lens' feature will identify what is in your photo. If you take a photo of a Great Pyrenese and click on 'Lens', it will bring up info on that breed of dog. Or if you take a photo of some foreign language, Lens can translate it for you. (the translate text option is available directly from the camera without even taking the photo on some Android phones, such as the Google Pixel line of phones, just point the camera at foreign text and the "Translate Text" option will come up)

Tag People & Pet Faces

Google has an excellent facial recognition tool within Google Photos. You can set this up and tell Google who is who when it asks you to identify faces in photos. And it will learn based on that. So all past and future photos with that person's face, will easily be searchable or categorized for you. So if you want to see all of the photos of your pet "Sparky", just search for "Sparky" and it will pull up all of the photos you've ever taken of your pet! This is an amazing feature for people who take a lot of photos and don't want to scroll and scroll forever, looking for a particular photo.

Edit Photos

Google Photos has some pretty robust photo editing features built right in. You can apply "instagram-like" filters, or fine tune light, color, contrast, pop, etc settings. Or click on the "enhance" button to auto tweak your photo to improve any lighting issues and bring out more detail, and it does a very good job at this. You can also crop photos quite easily.

Create and Share Albums

Creating an album for the big vacation and sharing that album is a piece of cake. Very handy feature.

Same Day Photo Printing

Google Photos can assist with same-day printing of your selected photos at thousands of Walmart and CVS photo-printing locations across the U.S.. Customers have the option to print 4 x 6, 5 x 7, or 8 x 10 images directly instead of waiting and paying the price for photo books from a photo book service.