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Google Photos is a great way to store and edit your images. This free browser-based app is packed full of features that will make your life a whole lot easier. Let’s have a look at five of our favourites.
With smart phone cameras getting better and better (see: iPhone 7 Plus portrait mode), and photo printing becoming rarer, deciding how to organise your mass of photos is truly a modern-day dilemma.
Many of us upload our favourite snaps to social media, but we don’t want to bombard our friends with a continuous stream of family photos. We end up leaving our photos as-is on our phone or computer, only looking back on them when we get the dreaded ‘storage almost full’ message.
1. Google Photos Offers Unlimited Storage Space
If you have a lot – as in a lot – of photos you’d like to store, Google Photos has space. Unlike other cloud-based storage options, you do not need to pay for the space you need. It’s completely free!
That sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it almost is. Although you truly do get unlimited storage space for free, Google Photos will compress images bigger than 16 megapixels and videos with a resolution of 1080p or more. You can save images and videos without compressing them, but that will eat into your general Google storage allowance (i.e. the storage that is shared between Gmail, G Drive, and other Google Apps).
The good news is the compressed photos look just as good as your non-compressed photos to the naked human eye. So unless you are a professional photographer or videographer, you shouldn’t have any trouble with Google’s mandatory compression.
2. Save Valuable Space on Your Phone
We are all guilty of take 20 or more photos of the same thing, picking our favourite, and leaving the rest on our phone or computer. Do this a few times a week over a whole year, and your phone’s storage capacity could be running low.
You can download the Google Photos app directly to your smart phone, making it quick and easy to transfer images from your camera roll to the cloud. The app will even give you the opportunity to delete local copies of your images and videos, freeing up valuable space.
3. Google Photos Makes Editing Quick and Easy
If you’re not quite a Photoshop pro, the editing tools on Google Photos should be all you need. These include:
- A range of filters, including an auto-fix feature, black and white, and other Instagram-esque options.
- Sliders that allow you to adjust ‘Light’ (brightness), ‘Colour’ (saturation), and ‘Pop’ (contrast).
- Crop and straighten features.
4. Google Photos Creates Fun Animated GIFs & Stylised Versions of Your Pictures
With Google Photos, you can do much more than simply edit your images as mentioned above. Google Photos can automatically generate animated GIFs, panoramas and ‘Stories’ with your images that you can share with friends and family.
The ‘Stories’ tends to be the most valuable. This feature groups together a number of your images and photos based on the date and location they were taken at. You can modify these if they aren’t completely accurate. You can then add descriptions and comments to personalise the story, and send it off via a sharable link.
5. Google Photos is Smart – Search for Anything or Anyone
The future is here – and Google Photos artificial intelligence is proof. Through a process called ‘deep learning’, this photo storage app allows you to search for specific things, objects, or places in your photos. For example, if you type in the word ‘beach’, Google Photos will show you all the photos of beaches you have saved. If you type in ‘trees’, it will display all images you have containing trees. You can be even more specific – it’s really impressive.
What’s more, Google Photos can recognise faces. Search a name, and you will see all photos of that person. This is a really cool feature, especially if you use Google Photos over a couple of years. It allows you to quickly and easily see how young kids grow and change over time.
BONUS: Google Photos is a Great Cloud-Based Back Up System
We’ve been through five fantastic features of Google Photos, but here’s a quick bonus. If you don’t currently back up your photos using a cloud-based system, Google Photos is a great way to get started. Without a sound back up system (we suggest using both cloud-based and hardware – such as a hard drive – to ensure 100% security), you risk losing your precious family memories for good.
Even if you have no interest in editing your photos or playing around with GIFs and panoramas, it’s worth setting up Google Photos as nothing more than a free back up.
Get Reliable Tech Help
If you need assistance with Google Photos or any other storage or back up system, don’t hesitate to get in contact. We’d be more than happy to help get things up and running, and teach you how to get the most out of your tech. Give us a call on 1300 553 166 or fill out the form on this page and we’ll get right back to you.
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