Why I Use Google Photos

In this video, I'll tell you why I use Google Photos as my main photo system.

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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 . . .

[BrotherBrown]

I really enjoy Google Photos. Finding photos is so easy! I also love having all my photos available to me in the cloud. I can not tell you how many times I am having a conversation with someone and I want to show them a photo that relates to the conversation and I am able to find it without it getting awkward. Nice Video!

[amitgb]

Thanks to your videos, I am finally making the jump. 12000+ items to be backed up. Just started. I will get relief once it gets done. Thanks !!

[lawful]

Hello, thank you for your video. How can I see my photos in full resolution on my Mac trough an app, in case I don’t have internet. Like Mac Photos app. Thank you.

[ameeraldabagh]

I only have one question is it really safe and private and no one can access my photos when i upload it?

Is there a chance accounts can get hacked?

[karinahernandez]

google photos is just about done backing up all of my photos from my iphone. but I have encounter an issue with it, is telling me that google photos is unable to bavk up 48 items. Why is that and how to fix this problem?

[danaelmasry]

I backed up my photos to google photos but my iCloud is still full. Can someone please tell me how I can fix this?

[theamerican]

Google photos is the most cumbersome and convoluted train wreck imaginable. The sorting mess is one feature that makes it so useless because they are so poorly categorized. If Google let it's staff design the app instead of management, it could have some potential. It's a deliberate disaster, especially the tendency of Google to duplicate as many images as possible in order to trick you into buying more useless storage space.