Heh—I enjoyed this mental image from Fast Company:

With its new Photo Scan (Android, iOS) app, Google basically donned a leather motorcycle jacket, strutted into a party full of regular photo-scanning apps, knocked everyone’s drinks out of their hands, kissed the prettiest one straight on the mouth, and told the DJ to take a hike.

They go on to say,

If you’ve got old photos to digitize, this should be your first stop. The app is fast, accurate, and best of all, free. And it’s a complete no-brainer if you already store your snaps on Google Photos, as it’ll zing all your scans there automatically.

[YouTube]

So, now that you’ve downloaded PhotoScan & digitized a bunch of images, how can you give them proper dates? Here’s how:

On photos.google.com, just select the group of photos you’d like to adjust and click “Edit date & time” in the menu dropdown. You’ll be able to shift or set the time stamps, and preview the changes before saving.

Here’s a quick video demo (showing how to edit one image, but applicable to multiple simultaneously):

[YouTube]

The first batch of movie concepts (“the kinds of movies you might make yourself, if you just had the time”) that Photos introduced in September have been really well received, and now the team is rolling out more:

More automatic movies, made for you: baby’s first months, holiday traditions, highlights from the year, and more.

As before, just live your life, back up your pics, and keep an eye out for movies arriving via the Assistant in Photos.

[YouTube]

I’m loving the little galleries I get like “John + Finn,” “Recent highlights of Henry,” etc. The team writes,

First, Google Photos will now help you rediscover old memories of the people in your most recent photos. As your photo library continues to grow, we hope that features like this one make it easier to look back at your fondest memories.

Second, we’re making it easier to look over the most recent highlights from your photos. If you take a lot of photos of your child, for example, you may occasionally get a card showing the best ones from the last month. (Hint hint: grandparents would love to see these!)

Check it out!

When we find sideways pictures in your collection, you’ll get a card that helps you easily put them right side up.

You don’t have to do a thing – machine learning in Google Photos does the work for you. Cards will automatically show up in the Assistant tab of Google Photos when they’re ready.

All features are available now on Android, iOS and the web.

[Via]

I think you’ll find this rather slick:

Now, with Google Photos, you pick the photos, tap “share” and select the people you want to share with, instead of the apps—and we take care of the rest.

• If your friends are on Google Photos, they’ll get a notification.
• If you share via phone number, they’ll get a link to the photos and videos via SMS.
• Email addresses will get an email with a link from Google Photos.

So you can spend less time toggling from app to app to share photos — dealing with failed texts or email attachment limits along the way — and more time enjoying life’s photo-worthy moments.

[YouTube]

Wait for it, wait for it…

R!!!

Sorry, had to be done. Now when you go into the image editor at photos.google.com, you can tap R both to enter Crop/Rotate mode & to exit it.

Side bonus: When you’re editing multiple images in sequence (by using arrow keys to move from one to the next without leaving the editor), the crop tool will remember whether you chose Original or Free aspect ratio.

You spin me right ‘round baby, right ‘round
When you press Shift-R, baby…

Check this out: Go to photos.google.com, click one of your images, and press Shift-R. Boom, super slick, hardware-accelerated 90º rotation—no need to click the pencil icon, go into crop/rotate mode, click a button, and save changes.

Each time you press Shift-R, the image will rotate another 90º. This is a godsend especially if you’re dealing with a bunch of old, mis-rotated images: Just click, Shift-R, right arrow, Shift-R, etc.; rinse, repeat, rock out.

 “One year, 200 million users, and a whole lot of selfies”—so notes the team blog, which provides 10 great tips plus some fun facts:

We’ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You’ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices—it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We’ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 million of those have been for … selfies.

So, what’s next? BuzzFeed interviewed Photos VP Anil Sabharwal to get some perspective. Among the hints dropped:

Photos might become smarter about the albums and movies it creates by giving them a stronger perspective and point of view. It might, for example, automatically select a wedding shot in which you and your partner are looking at each other for the hero shot in an anniversary album.

And:

“Twenty-five million photos a week are shared by Bluetooth… How do we make proximity sharing easier? How do we help you to remember to share? How do we make it so every time I take a photo of my daughter, it’s shared with my wife?”

Onward, and please keep your ideas & requests coming!

It’s now faster & easier to navigate right to a spot you want on photos.google.com: Just roll over the towards the scrollbar & notice the date indicators that appear. This makes it easy to jump to just about any date with one click.

Long a popular request from nerds like me (especially those with DSLRs), the ability to easily adjust the date & time of multiple photos has arrived on photos.google.com:

You took a bunch of great photos with your camera. But when you uploaded them to Google Photos, you realized you forgot to correct the time zone after your last trip. So now you’re stuck with a disorganized photo library, and the thought of changing each time stamp individually makes your head hurt.

On photos.google.com, just select the group of photos you’d like to adjust and click “Edit date & time” in the menu dropdown. You’ll be able to shift or set the time stamps, and preview the changes before saving.

In addition, you can now delete photos directly from an album (rather than just removing them from the album): just select photos and click “Move to trash” in the menu dropdown.

[YouTube]

In Google Photos for Web, I fly through editing my images by using a few quick keyboard shortcuts. I click to open an image, tap E to open the editor, tap A to apply (or reset) Auto Enhance, press O to see before/after, and tap the arrow keys to move among images. This might help your memory:

• A: Auto Enhance (first press toggles it on; second in sequence resets sliders to zero)
• E: Edit (press it in lightbox to jump into the editor)
• I: Info (press it in lightbox to show/hide the Info panel)
• O: Original (press & hold it while editing to toggle between original & edited)
• U: You (know I’ve run out of steam with this mnemonic ;-p)

If nothing else, remember that you can Press Shift-? to see all the shortcuts with which you can edit, enhance, delete, download, search, and more.

Good stuff is rolling out across iOS, Android, and Web. TheNextWeb writes,

Now anyone who has joined a shared album can add comments to both individual photos and entire albums.

Meanwhile the company is also adding a ‘smart suggestions’ feature to make it easier to contribute to albums you’ve been invited to. As the name implies, Photos will guess which of your photos you might want to add to the album, analyzing them to see which ones might correspond with a particular event.

As always, feedback is most welcome!

Available now on Android & coming soon to iOS, the latest release features a redesigned search experience, customizable movies, and more:

Find your photos faster with a new search bar. Start searching in one tap, or scroll down after tapping on the search bar to see faces, places, and photo types from your library.

I’m especially pleased about this long-requested enhancement:

In addition, Google Photos now offers the ability to customize automatically created movies with your own music, photos, and videos, so it’s easier than ever to make the perfect video after a holiday or trip. It’s also perfect for Mother’s Day – which you knew was coming up on May 8, right?

Finally, it’s now possible to rename or delete device folders you’ve created and manage your photos on SD cards by adding a new folder, copying, and moving photos.

These changes make Google Photos faster and easier to use than ever, and will be coming soon to iOS.

[Via]

TL;DR: Use shared albums to migrate without downloading/uploading.

There’s no one-click way to move images from one account to another. In the past I’d suggest the following:

1. Browse to photos.google.com in Account 1.
2. Select the first photo.
3. Scroll scroll scroll to the end.
4. Shift-click last photo.
5. Click “Download.”
6. Browse to photos.google.com in Account 2.
7. Drag all the downloaded images into Account 2 to upload them.

That works, but here’s a better way:

1. Browse to photos.google.com in Account 1.
2. Create a new album.
3. Add up to 2000 photos.
4. Invite Account 2 to the album.
5. Browse to photos.google.com in Account 2.
6. Select all photos.
7. Choose to add to account.

 The big advantage is that you don’t have to download, then re-upload everything. Slightly nerdy details:

• Make sure that Account 1 isn’t set to remove geo info when sharing.
• Make sure that upload quality for Account 2 is set to “Original.”
• Any edits you make in Account 1 (cropping, etc.) are baked into pixels when adding images to Account 2.

Stephen Shankland is delighted that he can now selectively sync directories in Google Drive:

[F]or me, it’s a profound transformation. Not only does it improve the cloud storage service, it also unlocks the potential of Google Photos. […]

I’m particularly happy about this because now I can let Google’s artificial intelligence smarts sink their teeth into my photo archive. Sorting photos by person, identifying landmarks and locations, picking favorites and culling the duds — Google Photos has a lot of interesting features, and I expect they’ll get better.

I too constantly run out of SSD space, but I prefer to use the Google Photos desktop uploader (which just uploads instead of syncing). Diff’rent strokes…

As I learned in Nepal, sometimes even WiFi can be so crappy that automatically backing up all your images is no fun. In those cases, you may want to leave auto backup switched off but then back up just selected images on demand. Now that’s possible in the latest release Google Photos on Android. (It already was available on iOS.) Just select photos, tap the three-dot menu, then choose “Back up now.”

[Via]

Ever want to rotate an image instantly, without even opening the Web editor? [Whoops, the rotation shortcut works only in the editor right now. Stay tuned.] Open the image on Google Photos Web, then press Shift-R. Want to Auto Enhance a photo in the editor? Just press A. Per the team page:

New keyboard shortcuts
Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly edit, enhance, delete, download, search, and more. Press Shift + ? to see them all.

Upload to albums
Save time by uploading photos from your computer directly into an album. Yes, even in shared albums.

The latter has been a godsend for me & my Nepal team. I just drag images directly from my desktop into our shared album & goodness ensues.

The Assistant screen on iOS & Web now features buttons up top that make it easier to create albums, collages, and animations. (Previously you needed to tap an unlabeled “plus” menu to get to them.) Enjoy!

Watch this:

The team post offers a nice summary:

You take a lot of photos, but you don’t always have time to organize and share them. Picking out the best photos and making an album – especially after a trip – is time consuming. More often than not, you never share those photos and they end up sitting on your phone or computer.

Starting today, Google Photos will suggest a new album for you after an event or trip, curated with just your best shots. It’ll add maps to show how far you traveled and location pins to remember where you went.

You can customize it, add captions, and turn on collaboration to let others add their photos. Before you know it, you’ll have a beautiful album ready to share.

You should see the change automatically as long as you’re on the latest version of the app.

[YouTube]

 I haven’t tried these third-party tools & can’t vouch for them, but the seem potentially useful:

• To import your Dropbox images directly into Photos (without having to download/upload), check out this tool.
• To browse your Photos library from within WordPress, check out this plug-in.

…plus enhanced navigation (as debuted on Android & Web a few days ago) and more. Per the App Store notes:

• Improved app navigation, so you can spend less time flipping hamburger menus 
• Back up and view Live Photos 
• Reduced cache usage when your device is low on space
• iPad Split View and iPad Pro support
• Performance improvements

Also, you can download Live Photos as ZIP files (one JPEG & one video each) via photos.google.com.

So, remember that cool carousel dealio I told you yesterday was on Android & coming soon to Web? Yeah, now it’s here. (iOS next!) Feedback is, as always, most welcome.

I’m delighted to say that you can now edit multiple images sequentially via photos.google.com.

Just open up an image, click the pencil icon, make your edits, and then use left/right arrow keys to move among images. (Previously you had to keep hitting Save, exiting the editor, navigating, and re-entering the editor.) This is a much, much faster way to move among images, apply Auto Enhance, and make other tweaks. You can also now choose among new aspect ratios when cropping.

More refinements are on the way, so check it out and let us know what you think!

Let me guess: Like me, you seldom remember to adjust your DSLR’s internal clock while traveling, resulting in lots of shots that don’t align with what you capture via your phone. Good news: You can now select an image on photos.google.com, click the date, and then change the time zone. Here’s a screenshot:

And yes, before you ask, it would be nice to do this on multiple images at once. 🙂

Just as you’ve been able to do on iOS & Android, you can now select multiple images on photos.google.com, click the plus button up top, and create an animation or a collage (animated screenshot). For animations, if the source images are similar, they’ll be stabilized and animated quickly. If they’re diverse, you’ll get a slower-animating flipbook. Enjoy!

In addition to shared albums, this week’s release makes backup more reliable & up to 4x faster. Also:

There’s also a new way to free up space on your device – without losing a photo. Just navigate to Settings and tap “Free up space.” Photos that are safely backed up will be removed from your device’s storage, but will still be available in Google Photos.

Yes, you can finally stop worrying about running out of space on your phone.

Also in this update:

• Chromecast support: Cast your photos and videos to your TV, even if they haven’t been backed up yet. And don’t worry – when you’re casting, people will only see the photos you tap on.
• When selecting photos, you can now pinch to zoom in and out.
• Performance improvements.

Days of miracle & wonder, man. 

You can browse performances and everything that goes on on- and off-stage at more than 60 institutions—including the world famous Carnegie Hall, to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Moving east, I’ve selected some highlights from our partners in Asia-Pacific—the Queensland Performing Arts Center in Australia, the Dilli Gharana and Natural Streets For Performing Arts Foundation in India, Aomori Nebuta Matsuri in Japan, and the National Theatre of Korea, National Gugak Center and Kukkiwon in Korea.

[YouTube] [Via]

Yesterday I talked about how you can now free up space on your phone via the latest Google Photos update. But what if you want to free up space in the cloud?

Now you can visit photos.google.com/settings and click “Recover Storage” (screenshot below) in order to convert images & videos that you uploaded at original resolution to High Quality. This means that:

• Images will be stored at 16 megapixels (or at original dimensions if those are smaller)
• Videos will be stored at 1080p (or at original dimensions if those are smaller)
• The compression applied is visually negligible (as tested by PetaPixel)
• These photos & videos won’t count at all towards your cloud storage quota

Happy shooting (and storing)!

Available now on Android & arriving soon on iOS, the latest Google Photos update makes it easy to reclaim space on your phone:

Just tap “Free up space” in Settings, and Google Photos will remove device copies of your backed up photos and videos.

Or Google Photos can keep track of your phone’s storage space for you. Get notified when your phone is running low on space, and easily remove the device copies of backed up photos older than 30 days right from the Assistant.

All your photos and videos will still be accessible when you’re connected, both in the app and on the web at photos.google.com.

[Via]

Having long had a weird penchant for masked wrestlers (e.g. peep our wall art), I love this totally strange new ad (below) for Google Photos. Even better, I love that I just searched my own image library for “luchador” (which I’d never tried) and got tons of results!

https://youtu.be/JqfCxPdrv1U

[YouTube] [Via]

Good stuff has arrived in the latest version (1.8). According to the team post,

• Hide a person from appearing under People. This also prevents events with that person from appearing in “Rediscover this day” cards in the Assistant.
• Face search is available in more countries: Face grouping will be available in Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand. It will also be available in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
• When viewing search results, pinch to zoom in and out.
• Spooky fast performance improvements and bug fixes.

You can also save animated GIFs as videos (as you already could on iOS) to enable sharing them via Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.

Like an unfortunate number of friends’ families recently, we recently lost a loved one. I thought I’d briefly share a couple of things that worked well for us.

• In Google Photos search, you can tap on a person’s face to see all your pictures of him or her, then select a number of them and tap the share icon to create a sharable gallery.
• Friends & family viewing the gallery can download these images, or if they’re logged in with a Google account, add the images to their own Photos library with one click. This makes it really easy to gather together content (e.g. to make a memorial book or video). Before this feature was available, I guided a friend through a patchwork process of trying to get things via email, Drive, etc. The new approach is far simpler, and in the near future, collaborative albums will make it simpler still.
• Discovering animations that feature your loved one can be a surprisingly moving experience.
• A friend asked how to make a memorial video for her dad. You can do so directly in Photos (select images/videos, tap the “+” icon on iOS or Android, and tap “Movie”), or you can download content to your Mac or PC, browse it via Picasa, and make a face movie or regular movie using whatever music you’d like. (Select images, then choose Create->Movie.)

The circumstances mean that these tasks aren’t exactly fun, but I’ve found that the results can be very meaningful.

Fifty billion photos & videos backed up since the product launched in May; yeah, that’ll happen when you say “free & unlimited.” 🙂 

Here’s a concise demo of how Photos will help you pool photos with friends & family, let people sign up for email updates, label people, and display your images via Chromecast. (Oh, and I really hope that “Dutch Thunder on the beach in Cancun” become a thing.)

If the video below doesn’t start at the correct point, jump right to 39:17.

[Vimeo]

If you just got a new iPhone & see Google Photos seeming to upload tons of images you already uploaded, don’t worry: it’s just double checking that everything is backed up. We’ll work on making this interface clearer.

Google Photos automatically makes cool looping animations from your bursts, but you can’t share these GIFs directly on Instagram. Fortunately there’s a workaround (only on iOS for the moment):

1. Select the animation.
2. Tap the Share icon.
3. Choose “Save as video.” Photos will automatically replicate the sequence a number of times to preserve the looping effect (useful on platforms like Facebook that don’t auto-loop the video).
4. In Instagram, select the video from your camera roll & post it as you would any other.

And voila, you get something like this:

 

That thing where you’re just glad that #TheMountain didn’t eat your children. #HighlandGames

A video posted by John Nack (@jnack) onSep 7, 2015 at 4:08pm PDT