What if I told you that you could…
- Automatically back up all your photos & videos from your iPhone, iPad, and/or Android devices, in the background & for free
- Automatically back up all your images from your Mac and/or PC hard drive
- View, manage, edit, and share all these images via the Web and native mobile apps
- Have automatic & ever-improving enhancements like automatic panorama stitching, collage, & animation creation applied
And you could do it all for free, right now? That would be kinda great, no?
I don’t know quite how I overlooked all this before joining Google. I love having my iPhone shots seamlessly mixed in with my SLR images (including galleries I export from Lightroom right into Drive folders), and I’m finding the little animations fun to share.
Now, a couple of details for my fellow nerds:
- From your hard drive you can back up an unlimited number of images at 2048×2048 (i.e. 4 megapixel0 resolution. These do not count against your storage quota. You can also back up a full 15GB for free at full res. After that pricing is as low as a penny per gigabyte per month ($10/mo. for 1TB).
- You can back up your raw files by installing Google Drive, then view, share, and edit them via Google+.
- You can download Picasa, then let the separate new Auto Backup utility automatically find & upload JPEGs (not raw files at the moment) from your hard drive & memory cards.
What do you think? What else do you need for this to be the most mind-bendingly awesome photo storage & sharing system in the world?
Does Google Photos require Picasa? I don’t really like Picasa as a photo editing tool. Also, I don’t love that Google backs up photos I take from my phone automatically. I often use my phone as an impromptu scanner and recently my drivers license and social security card wound up in my Google Photos online. I quickly deleted them but worry about if they don’t still exist “in the cloud” somewhere.
Nope, Google Photos doesn’t require Picasa but they do work in tandem.
Selective Auto Backup sort of defeats the purpose – a large percentage of our users want a ‘set it and forget it’ model when it comes to backing up everything taken with their mobile device(s). With that said, we do support deleting of any sensitive photos from your account (you’ll want to make sure that you empty your Trash under the ‘More’ link) and every photo that is backed up is done so privately, so only you have access to them until shared.
Hmm, the Windows version was a complete fail for me. Here’s why: I run Win8.1 (via Bootcamp) on my Mac. I keep all of my photos on my Mac partition, which is mounted with MacDrive and appears in Windows as another drive “D:”. Unlike any other Windows app, Picasa simply could not see the MacDrive partition. So it ran off and found dozens of useless folders (email attachments, saved web pages etc) but missed my photo folders. Maybe forward this issue to their dev team?
BTW, it shouldn’t run off and scan my whole hard drive unless I ask it to. That’s creepy.
We are working on improving the signals of what we back up (photos) and what we should bypass. Good feedback, though.
I was able to indicate where Picasa should, and shouldn’t, scan…I think you missed a step during set up.
I just discovered this myself, when you mentioned the new and extremely attractive pricing plans for Google Drive.
I want to move most of my pictures (old ones that I don’t use but want to keep around) off my MacBook Pro’s hard drive, since I could use those 50 GB for other stuff.
So what I’d like is a “magic” folder on my computer which will take whatever images I drop into it and upload them to Google Drive, but let me set a size limit (say, 10 GB) to it so that the oldest ones are removed once the folder grows beyond that limit.
In that case, it should also be easy to access the archived images – maybe through Picasa or at least a web interface.
What does Google’s Terms and Conditions say, about rights they claim over using photos that you upload?
http://www.google.com/policies/terms/
And the Auto-Awesome movies! I never had time to edit videos, so I just shared a raw video or nothing. Now with Auto-Awesome, I’ve been sharing a lot of videos. I even shoot a lot of small clips now that I wouldn’t have before as I know they will all be put together automagically on my phone. That’s been the biggest “win” of Google Photos for me.
FYI: Android only (for now?), but you should check out the Nexus 5 anyway…
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 🙂
How do “tags” work in Google Photos? I have many old photos scanned and on GP and when I try to tag a face, Google looks for a google member to associate. If the photo is 100 years old, John Smith won’t be a Google member, yet Google flashes a message saying:
“This photo and the related album Old Photos were shared with John Smith. Undo”
Is it emailing a different John Smith? Is it doing nothing at all? I can’t tell.
Also related: living grandparents who aren’t on Google Plus. Can they or can they not be tagged?
I think that the bottom-line here is actually a neglected aspect of the online photo storage, display and sharing services. That is: display. Unless what you elect to store can be easily found and viewed in a high resolution format on a variety of platforms (both mobile and fixed), and with the original capture looking the best that it can be (or that the user can tune it to be), then all else is nearly naught. $10 per month will buy a lot of mass storage capacity these days, even in a solid state format.
Some of the social networks (and photo sites) have done a lousy job on this bottom-line.
Facebook, for example, does high-quality photographic expertise a real disservice. Their standard image resampling and presentation scheme is poor – starting right here: https://www.facebook.com/help/266520536764594 and updated here: https://www.facebook.com/help/167931376599294 (just a total nonsense). And things get even worse there for video.
Google+ certainly does a much better job, especially when you can get an image into a full-screen format and use the slideshow mode (even for a single image). But then, right next to the “Slideshow” button is another one called “More” … and there can be found “Download” (sorry, but this still makes me queasy …). Personally I’m pretty sure that the expanding membership of many of the fine art Google+ Communities (for example here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/106146140640887985105) has to be linked to the superior display (and image information section) provided.
Then there are the more specialized service providers. One I did not know about until just yesterday (thanks to the Nackblog!) is VSCO’s Grid: http://grid.vsco.co. Many of the great images there can be re-viewed via the VSCO Google page (where they are reposted). To me, the best Google viewing options are actually superior (even though the Grid has more layout options). But at the VSCO site there is no “Download” button that I could discover. Please note also that they have terms which are very clear, including: “YOUR STUFF IS YOUR STUFF! These terms do not give us any rights to your stuff or your intellectual property except for the rights we need to provide the Service to you. … Don’t post stuff that you don’t have rights to post or share.”
… and, a good project – just now hitting the boards – on improving image display (and network efficiencies also):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620645-93/programmer-crowdfunds-work-to-improve-chrome-image-support/
“The average web page is now more than 1.6 megabytes. Images alone account for more than 60% of that, making up a full megabyte for the average page.”
Creative control would be nice. It’s great having something made automatically, but maybe allow us to add or remove from a GIF, pano, movie, etc.
“Artificial intelligence: Good.
Your intelligence: Better.
The two together: Best.” —John Nack
In the Android app, you have the ability to select photos and videos to be made into an auto awesome movie. No selection for gifs, panos, etc, however.
“Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps)..”
Gosh, that second paragraph from the terms of use sure seems to make moot the first. “You own your pictures,” but, “once you’ve uploaded them we — and those we work with — can do anything we want with them.” Granted, I am keeping my copyright, but I’m giving google an unlimited license to reproduce or distribute (no word about whether that’s for free or for compensation to google) my images anywhere in the world at their discretion. How is that not a terribly irresponsible thing to do, as a professional photographer? Google claims this is only for limited purposes, but how is sharing someone’s photos from Picasa to, say, Coca Cola or Samsung for advertising or any other use not fulfilling the “limited purpose” of promoting google?
Thanks for the info. Do you have any suggestions on how to automatically merge auto upload photos. My wife and I have all of our photos currently merged into picasa. I’d like to enable auto upload and move everything to the cloud, but I’d like each of our google+ accounts to be able to manage pictures. Any suggestions?