Internet users are not at a loss for services that automatically back up photos and provide access to them on any device. There’s Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon Photos, and iCloud, just to start. But Google Photos has grown fast since its launch in 2015.
The news about Google Photos lately hasn’t been rosy, though. It once offered truly unlimited backup of all the photos (and videos) you take for free, even if it did downgrade any pics over 16 megapixels. Not anymore. Now, every picture you upload, no matter the size, counts against your allotted 15GB of free online storage with Google, which is shared with Gmail, Google Drive, and other Google services.
Google Photos came about by salvaging the best part of the Google+ social network that no one wanted to use—the photo storage and sharing. Google Photos also replaced our former Editors’ Choice pick for photo software, Picasa, the desktop program Google acquired in 2004. You can still use the Picasa desktop software, but it’ll never get an update. It’s time to let it go.
You may be so mad at Google that you want to switch after its bait-and-switch, and we can’t blame you. If so, there are plenty of alternatives. But if you’re with Google for the long haul, maybe even willing to pay that $1.99 a month for 100GB, read on for how to get the most out of it. (Note: The stuff you uploaded before June 1, 2021, doesn’t count against your 15GB.)
Show a Slideshow
Go into any album of images and display it as a slideshow, which is especially nice when you pair your device with a Chromecast With Google TV on a big TV. On the web or in the Android app, tap the ellipsis menu at the upper right. Select Slideshow and the album you’re viewing will display photos in order.
Play With Search
Try some searches in Google Photos, using terms common and obscure. Google’s auto-tagging of images is pretty amazing, beyond just face recognition (which will ID people in photos even if they’re in the background). For example, a search of the term “dog” got just about every image I could conceive of with my pups in the pics—even some with just a pup statue or paw. I didn’t tag any of those pics with “dog” or “statue,” by the way: Google just knows. Useful and creepy! (It also pulled in pictures of stuffed animals, a woodchuck, and my brother in a Chewbacca costume, so usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.)
Location searches are also easy with geo-tagging, making it easy to find, say, all your vacation pictures at once.
Label People and Create a Live Album
If you’re on the mobile app, tap Search (or on the web app, click Explore at the left), and at the top of the screen, you’ll see People & Pets. It features a row of headshots from your photos. Click a person without a label and enter their name. In the future, searching by name in Google Photos will make it easier to find (almost) every picture of that person, dog, or cat. Google’s face-matching takes care of the rest. (You may have to turn that feature on in the Android app.)
Once you label people and pets within Google Photos, use them to create a Live Album, which will automatically add photos of certain people to that album as they’re uploaded or backed up to Google Photos. They have a hefty limit of 20,000 images each. When you create a new album on mobile, tap Automatically add photos of people & pets, select the people or pets you want to include in the pop-up menu, tap Confirm, and you’re good to go.
To help Google fine-tune its facial recognition, go into a Live Album, tap the person’s name, and Google Photos may bring up a menu button that says Same or different person? to allow you to go on a face-matching binge that improves results.
Create a New Live Album From an Old Album
To make an existing album a Live album, open it, tap the ellipsis menu and select Options. The option to automatically add photos is right there—click the + icon and add a person or pet that has already been assigned a name. New pics will flow into the album as you take them.
Share a Library Auto-Magically
Sharing is a hallmark of almost everything you do with pictures online, and Google Photos is no exception. Specifically, you can share your entire photo library with your partner.
On the desktop, select Sharing on the left-hand navigation and click Partner Sharing (on mobile it’s under your avatar > Google Photo Settings > Partner Sharing). Pick a person from your contacts who also uses Google Photos, and then you can choose to share either All photos or Photos of Specific People (made easy with the built-in facial recognition). Specify if you only want to share images from a specific date forward. Once confirmed, that person will have access to all images or that one face whenever recognized.
This is sharing one-way only. If you want to see the same person in your partner’s photos, they have to share it back with you. Which is easy; when they accept, have them click Share Back at the top right.
Don’t Share Your Location
Images taken with almost any device these days, especially smartphones, have location data. Google Photos uses that to actively map where your pics were taken. That’s a nice feature for you, but when you share an image, you may not want the recipient to know exactly where the pic was taken. Turn it off by navigating to Settings > Hide photo location data (mobile) or Settings > Sharing > Hide photo location data (desktop). Then, when you generate a link to share an image, the person who sees the image at that link won’t get any geo-data. (This doesn’t work if you share by other means, such as social media.)
Quick Select Pics
On a mobile device, hold your finger on a picture to select, then drag your fingertip. All the pictures you touch will be selected. That makes it a lot easier to delete or move a bunch of photos in a batch, or use them with special tools like creating animations, movies, or collages.
Save Device Storage
With Back up & sync, Google Photos will upload and store any photos from your phone automatically. And once an image is backed up, the app can delete the local version from your phone or tablet to free up precious space. Do this in iOS and Android via Settings > Manage device storage > Free up space. It will ask if you want to really remove all the pictures Google Photos has backed up because it means deleting them from your Android Gallery or iOS Photos app (though they will temporarily reside in the recently deleted folder).
Deep Edit the Deep Blue
Basic photo editing on Google Photos is a breeze—click on an image, click the Edit icon, and you’re presented with filters to apply; sliders to adjust, light, and color (plus a “Pop” slider to make the image pop more); and a speedy crop/rotation tool. They’re simple tools that work on mobile and desktop.
When you adjust light and color, you get a few extras by clicking the down arrow next to each slider. Under Light, there’s exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and vignette (to put a spotlight on a section of the image). Under Color is saturation, warmth, tint, Skin Tone, and Deep Blue. That last one adjusts the color blue only, which is nice when the shots involve water. (For lush greens, crank up the saturation, then decrease Skin Tone and Deep Blue).
When making edits on the desktop, click and hold the cursor on the image (or hold the letter “O” on your keyboard) to instantly see how the edits look compared to the original.
Apply the Same Edits to Multiple Shots
If you’ve perfected edits on one image, apply them to a bunch of photos. On the desktop, while editing an image, go to the three-dot menu and select Copy edits. On the rest of the images, use the same menu to Paste Edits. You can also just use the copy/paste keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, respectively). This isn’t an option on the mobile apps.
Save a Copy When Editing
When you go to save an image after editing, the app will ask if you want to save the changes, and then overwrite the original image stored on your device. If you don’t want that to happen, hit the three-dot icon to either go back to the original or to Save a Copy, so you’ll have both versions. (The opposite is true if you are editing a picture with any depth of field features, like with an iPhone X or higher using the Portrait mode feature; then it Saves a Copy by default.)
In the web-app version, it says Done instead of Save, and will not ask you first about overwriting, it just does it. But you can access the menu again to save a copy. And you can always undo previous changes when you use the desktop/web version, even if you edited in the mobile app.
Make a Movie
Google Photos is obviously not just for photos, and neither are its editing tools. You can do some rudimentary edits on video, too—but only on mobile devices. Open a video and hit the Edit icon to access some quick tools for trimming length, applying filters, exporting a frame, cropping to a new resolution, and even rotating the vid up to 45 degrees.
The fun comes in placing multiple video clips together into one movie. Go into Search > Videos to find your clips, select those that would go great together, and from the Plus (+) menu, select Movie. The app will “download clips” and display an interface with a little bitty clip from each of your vids, strung together with music picked by the Google AI. Trim each clip to pick the best part. Click the musical note to change the music that Google chooses for you, pick from your own tunes, or to remove it entirely.
Create Collages, Animations, and More
Don’t be afraid of that Google Photos section calls Utilties. These tools offer suggestions, like making collages of photos that are similar, rotating images that appear to Google to be oriented wrong, even creating animations of images in a series or from videos. Or create your own Movie, Collage, Animation.
Recover Items for 60 Days
Deleted an image you want back? Go to the left navigation on the desktop, or among the top buttons on the mobile app, and select Trash. Deleted images hang out here for a couple of months before they’re truly gone. Unless you hit the EMPTY TRASH option. Then they’re toast.
Download All Google Photos
The editing tools on Google Photos are, indeed, pretty weak compared to pro editing tools. If you need to import a picture or two from Google Photos into a desktop image editor, it’s easy to download. For a single image, click the photo, then Download. The same goes for Albums (select Download All), or downloading multiple selected thumbnails. If you do it that way, you can only get 500 at a time; Google Photos provides them as a ZIP file.
The best (and only) way to download every image in Google Photos is to use Google Takeout, the service Google provides so you can grab everything you’ve stored on a Google service.
Archive Images Worth Keeping, But Not Seeing
Your smartphone camera is used to take pictures of more than just friends and family. Use it for vaccine cards, restaurant menus, store hour signs, notebook pages, license plates of vehicles that fill you with rage, etc. It can all be useful info later. Of course, it’s not pretty and you may not want to see those images in your Google Photos stream. The service knows: Go into the Utilities and select Move photos to archive. Go crazy. Just like with Gmail, an archived item is not deleted, and you can find it later with a search. Or click Archive on the left (on desktop) or under Library (on mobile). Sadly, Google Photos does not search in the text in a picture, so you can’t just type in words you’ve got in a picture (like a restaurant name on a menu) to find it.
Live Photos Live
Apple’s Live Photos—which add 1.5-second videos on either side of a photo—have been around since the iPhone 6s, and Google Photos supports these little mini-movies. Live Photos have a little toggle button at the top, which allows you to turn off the animation if you want. If you leave animation on, it plays in an endless loop, with sound. If you edit a Live Photo in Google Photos, it gets saved as a still.
Sharing a Live Photo from an iPhone to someone who does not have an iPhone 6s or above typically means losing the motion, and that’s true if you just do a straight share from Google Photos as well (say, try to send it via iMessage). However, Google Photos has a workaround—use the menu on a Live Photo to Download Video. It’ll save the vid right in Google Photos, even loop it three times for you. Use Google Photos tools to trim the length or rotate it, then share it anywhere. You can’t save it as an animated GIF from Google Photos, but Google offers a free iOS app called Motion Stills to handle that.
Lock a Folder
Finally, there’s an overdue option for those of you with some photos on your phone that you don’t want anyone else seeing, but it’s limited. First, you’ll only find it on phones—you can’t see (nor create) this folder on a desktop, at all. Second, it’s currently only on Google Pixel phones, and coming soon to other Android devices. The gist is, you create the folder and anything you file in it is not going to show in a grid or any albums. The only way to see what’s inside is use your phone’s security (be it fingerprint, facial recog, or a passcode).
Print a Book
Photo books let you share photos with a Luddite friend or family member. It’s $9.99 for a 7-inch square softcover or $19.99 for a 9-inch square hardcover; each has 20 pages minimum, but you can add extra pages for 35¢ in soft or 65¢ in the hardcovers. There’s a max of 100 photos per book allowed—that’s 100 pages. Shipping is not included. Here’s our full tutorial on how to create a Google Photos photo book.
