The Google Photos app has become, since it came out in 2015 as part of Google+, the most used to organize photos on mobile phones on Android smartphones and iPhones, especially for its inimitable and exclusive offer of an unlimited online space where keep your photos, even by the thousands .
So we talked about how to use the Google Photos app for unlimited backup of photos and videos from Android, iPhone and PC, therefore letting all our photos, including those on the computer, be copied in their original size on the cloud space of Google Photos to be always visible on the internet, privately. The only limit, however quite wide, is that the images are not larger than 16MP and that the videos are of maximum 1080p resolution (larger photos and videos are automatically resized.
This Google app, however, is not only a backup or photo viewing app, it also has tons of features that we can gather here in a cheat guide for Google Photos . You can then manage photos of a lifetime, view them in albums or in other formats such as slideshoew and photo books, share them, edit them, download them and get any type of information or hidden data.
1) Upload photos and videos from your PC
Aside from auto-syncing via the PC program and mobile apps, you can also upload photos from your PC manually by simply opening the photos.google.com website and then dragging them from a folder on the web page, at any point. With the same drag, you can also upload entire folders to Google Photos at once.If you set up automatic backup and synchronization of photos in the Photos app on smartphones, they will automatically be saved to the Google Photos cloud. On the PC, to do the same thing, you need to install the Drive and Photos backup and synchronization program .
2) Download photos from Google Photos
To download a photo from Google Photos, you can use the Download button that appears by opening a photo and then pressing the button with three dots at the top.To download a group of photos, you have to create an album and then open it and press on the three dots to find the Download all button. In this way, you can download a maximum of 500 photos at a time, within a ZIP file.
To download all the photos uploaded to Google Photos to PC in one go, you can use the Google Takeout service instead.
3) Photo sharing
Photos uploaded to Google Photos can be shared with users using the share button on smartphones or on the website. Sharing can be made of both photos and videos and compositions (such as collages and slideshows) and a link is generated that can be opened by anyone, even if they do not use the app. You can also share photos directly on Facebook via the same button, if you prefer.Sharing in Google Photos can also take place automatically with another user who uses the app, if sharing album is used. All photos added to the shared album are also displayed by the other person.
Even better, by going to Settings> Shared collections, you can choose a person from the contacts who uses Google Photos making him a partner and share with him all the photos or only the photos in which specific people and faces appear (activating the automatic recognition of faces as we will see below). Once confirmed, that person will have access to all the images of our Google Photos or those where the face of the selected person appears (for example to share photos of a couple's son). Sharing is one-way, so if you want the other person to do the same, they need to enable the same option in their Google Photos account.
READ ALSO: How to create a shared and collaborative Google Photos album
4) Turn off location sharing
Images taken with smartphones add location data and Google Photos uses it to improve search capabilities and to generate travel albums. If you do not want this information to be extracted from photos shared with Google Photos with other people, you can deactivate the geolocation of the images (only those shared) by going to the photos.google.com/settings website by activating, under the Sharing section, the " Remove geolocation in shared items " option.When generating a new link to share an image, the person who sees the image from that link will not receive any geographic data. (This doesn't work if you share on Facebook or other social networks)
5) Intelligent research
Google incorporates a truly phenomenal photo search engine into the Google Photos application and website. For example, you can search for the word food to find all the photos of dishes or the word " vacation " to find photos of beach holidays and so on. Surprisingly, Google also allows you to search for photos with colors, such as "red", "green" or "black" to find photos where these colors predominate.6) Photos organized by date and place
Although there is the possibility of creating albums, the photos uploaded to Google Photos are listed in chronological order and also, when possible, by location. Open the search page or the album page to be able to see the places where the photos were taken. In the end the photos are organized so well that it becomes comfortable to go and see photos of 5 years ago or taken when we went to visit a certain city. These live albums have a limit of 20, 000 images each.The photos on the main page are listed by shooting date, but you can also check and see the photos uploaded today on the site, using the application or the PC program, by going to the link //photos.google.com/search/_tra_ .
7) Recognition of faces and people
If you enable automatic face recognition in Google Photos, you can go to the album section and browse photos only where a certain person appears. However, you have to use a trick to activate face recognition in Google Photos on iPhone and Android.In photo backup, if the program finds the same image multiple times, only one is copied online while the others are ignored.
8) Automatically add photos to albums
For each album created and also those that are created automatically, it is possible to automatically add other photos based on facial recognition . Open the album, press the button with three dots at the top right, go to Options and then click to automatically add photos by choosing a person or animal to whom the name has been given. The new images will begin to fill that album automatically.9) Easy selection of photos
Selecting multiple images or videos in Google Photos is easier than in any other application or program.On the app for Android and iPhone, just select one and then drag your finger to the others. All the touched images will be selected.
On the website you can select a photo by pressing on the left corner of its thumbnail and then pressing on all the others. Hold Shift and click on the last of a series to select groups of photos.
This trick makes it much easier to delete many photos together or add them to an album or other creations.
10) Pinch to change view
In Google Photos apps for Android and iPhone, you can pinch or spread two fingers on a single image to zoom in or out . If you press the button with three dots and use the wide view, then you can pinch or spread the two fingers to zoom or to switch to the daily view very quickly. Zooming in on an image, it appears full screen and then zooming out returns to the photo grid.11) The Assistant to create collages, animations and more
The Google Photos Assistant opens by tapping the Assistant option at the bottom. This section reports new automatic compositions, collages or created stories that can be saved or deleted.These compositions are different from albums, which are often created automatically by Google Photos to organize photos of a trip or a trip or a party in a nice way.
READ ALSO: How to use Google Photos automatic composition.
12) Rediscover this day
Inside the Google Photos Assistant, you can activate the Rediscover this day function to see every day photos taken on the same day in past years and activate the appropriate memories. Go to Settings> Assistant Tabs to turn it on or off.13) Editing images
Google Photos is also equipped with a basic photo editor, very simple and very immediate to use.Click on an image and then press the edit button represented with the cursor icon at the top right of the website or at the bottom of the smartphone application. The Edit button opens a new toolbar to crop the image, change colors and lights, exposure, contrast and apply automatic filters similar to those of Instagram.
On PC, when you edit a photo, you can click and hold on the image to see its previous version of the changes.
If you do not want to delete the original version of the modified photo, after a modification, press the icon with the dots to save a copy and have both versions.
14) Apply the same changes to several shots
On PC only from the Google Photos website, changes on an image can be applied to a group of photos. While editing an image, go to the top menu More options and select Copy changes . On the rest of the images, use the same menu to paste the changes. You can also copy and paste keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, respectively).15) Edit a video
Google Photos does not only have a photo editor, but also a small video editor . Video editing tools are only available on the phone app, not on the website and allow you to use tools to crop the video or rotate it 45 degrees at a time.16) Create movies with music
In Google Photos you can create and edit movies with music, as explained in another article.17) Upload videos to Youtube
If you shoot videos with your smartphone, it's easy to add them to your personal YouTube channel all at once. In fact, with the option of Backup and synchronization activated, videos and photos will be automatically uploaded to Google Photos. By going to the YouTube video upload page, you can press the button to import videos from Google Photos .18) Upload images generated by other apps to Google Photos
Google Photos Backup and Sync feature automatically saves images from your phone's root folder. On Android it is also possible to go to upload other folders, such as that of the images received on Whatsapp or those taken with Instagram. In the Google Photos app, tap the three-line menu, go to Settings> Backup & sync> device folders to choose which ones to include in the backup.19) Free up memory from your mobile phone
A very important feature of the Google Photos app on Android and iPhone is to free up space from the phone's storage memory by deleting the local copies of the photos already saved in the cloud.We have seen in another guide how to free up space with Google Photos on Android and iPhone .
20) Add all the images saved in Google Drive to Google Photos
In Google Photos, there is an option that makes it possible to synchronize the photos or videos in your Google Drive account (with the same username) with the rest of the Google Photos images. Only images larger than 256 pixels and supported file types ie JPG, GIF, WEBP, TIFF and RAW will be added. The files are not moved from Google Drive, also if you edit one of these images from Google Photos, those changes will not be shown in the image in Drive.If you delete a single image or video on Drive, it will be deleted on Photos, unless it has been placed in an album. If on Drive you press the gear icon and open Settings, you can create a Google Photos folder. If you delete the whole folder, the individual images remain in Photos. (So many rules!)
21) Deleting photos
If you delete a photo, it goes to the Google Photos trash and stays there for 60 days (and can be recovered) before being permanently removed.If you delete a photo from your mobile phone with Google Photos, it is deleted from the memory and also from the online service (while if you delete a photo from the phone memory with another application, it still remains online on Google Photos and remains visible on the mobile phone if there is internet connection).
22) Scan old photos
Google Photoscan is an app that is not part of Google Photos, but if it is installed on the smartphone it integrates, integrates into Photos and can be launched from the main menu. With this application it is possible to scan old paper photos, to digitize them.23) Print a photo book
Photo books allow you to share photos with friends or family using paper to keep. You can create and order the printing of a photo book from the main menu of Google Photos at a price of about 12 Euros or more depending on whether you want the soft or hard cover (shipping excluded). The photo book can be created by choosing the photos to include and the cover, reaching at least 20 pages, with a maximum of 100 photos per book.24) Scan photos with Lens
If you want to know what appears in a photo, for example if there is a sign, a logo or an object that we cannot identify, you can use the Lens button at the bottom of the app for Android and iPhone, to know what it deals with. The app to recognize things or places in photos Google Lens is now an option built into Google Photos, which provides search results based on the image or its hidden information. For example, you can try taking a photo of a book to search for the image with Lens and know what book it is.25) Show albums in a slideshow
Any photo album can be viewed as a slideshow, by pressing the button with three dots in the upper right corner. This is especially useful when you want to view photos on TV via Chromecast .In conclusion, Google Photos is the best online service to organize our photos, which allows us with minimal effort, to put together the photos of a lifetime, keep them safely online and review them from all our PCs or smartphones. It certainly feels a bit strange to put all of our personal photos on Google servers and one wonders why they give us so much free space.
However, if you have nothing to hide and since so much of our private life can be of interest to Google up to a certain point, I would not worry too much about the implications of privacy considering that the photos are still private and not visible to strangers.
READ ALSO: How to use Google Photos and all its automatic and manual functions
