I’m delighted to say that Lynda.com has just published my half-hour tour of Google Photos. It’s split into really small, focused chapters (e.g. explaining storage & backup options), so you can jump right to what matters most. Even if you’re not yet a member, you can see one chapter for free, and you can start a free trial to see the whole thing.
The creation process gave me a new appreciation for just how good the Lynda staff is. Scott Erickson, Susan Varnum, and Zach Bobbit were enormously patient in the studio and did heroic editing to keep me from sounding like a tongue-tied doofus. Scott in particular offered great on-the-fly direction, channeling a new user’s perspective & challenging me to rethink, streamline, & clarify. Thanks, guys; you’re a real credit to the whole organization!
Google Photos is of course rapidly developing, adding a bunch of new features in just the last few days, so it would be great to work more with the Lynda team as the product evolves. Feedback, questions, and requests are of course most welcome.
Ever gotten a notification that a new animation, collage, story, etc. has been created for you, then forgotten to save it (or accidentally swiped away the card)? Creations like these stay in your account (not counting against your storage quota, by the way), and you can view them on the Web by visiting photos.google.com/unsaved.
Change the cover photo of your albums: Go into an album, tap one of the photos, and then tap the overflow menu (three dots in the upper right) and choose “Use as album cover.” (This also works on Android & Web.)
Share animations directly to Facebook: Photos will insert a link so that your photos can animate inline on Facebook.
Save animations as videos to share to Instagram, Whatsapp, and more: Open a GIF, tap the share button, and tap “Save as Video.” Frames are replicated several times to preserve the looping effect as much as possible, and the resulting video appears alongside the original GIF.
Reorder your photos in an album: Click the pencil icon within the album, then drag photos to reorder them.
Edit the time/date stamp of a photo by opening an image: Click the little “i” icon to show the sidebar, rolling over the date, and clicking the pencil icon (here’s a screenshot).
Every day now—literally every day—I look forward to my Assistant showing me memories from this date in the past. I find myself sharing these with lots of friends & family with whom I otherwise wouldn’t connect. Here’s how it works:
Google Photos will now ask whether you’d like to see memories past days. If you say yes, you’ll start receiving Assistant cards containing collages like this one, and tapping them will take you to galleries (example) that you can share with just a tap or two.
It’s kind of like Timehop and Facebook’s memories — but not really. It won’t bother you daily unless you had a worthwhile group of photos to show you. […]
[PM Chris Perry says] “Visual quality of photos is taken into account. No screenshots. We’ll look at photos taken over a longer timespan, something that was more of an ‘event.’ Something that’s going to emotionally resonate. We look at the presence of landmarks. Those get promoted to collages. People are a strong signal that we’ll use to help remind you.”
I can’t tell you just how much I’ve been enjoying this feature as we’ve been testing it, and I hope you enjoy it, too. As always, feedback is most welcome.
American Ninja Warrior, you’ve got some big fans in our 6- and 7-year-old sons. Inspired by the competitors on that show, the boys put their skills to the test in Lake Tahoe by scrambling up a pier, then leaping off into the sand. It was particularly fun to set my DSLR to burst mode, then capture Finn’s jumps from all angles. After I inserted my memory card & let auto backup run, Google Photos presented me with a bunch of GIF animations. In a few cases there wasn’t enough visual similarity to trigger animation creation, so I simply drag-selected the photos on my iPhone, tapped the “+” button, and chose Animation. Here are a few results if you’re interested.
If you go to google.com/maps/timeline and have Location History turned on, you (and only you) can click on specific places you’ve visited, and/or specify particular dates, then see the photos associated with those places/dates. Here’s a screenshot from my travels last month (click for full res):
You can edit or remove any location, or give places personalized, private names like Mom’s House or Sketchy Café. When you’re logged in you’ll see those names right in Google Maps.
Actually giving friends photos (vs. merely sharing them in a hard-to-download/keep manner) is one of my favorite things about Google Photos. When you share a link to one or more images or videos, your recipient can simply click the little “cloud download” icon to add the content to her library. (Try it now with some aircraft/missile photos I shot Monday evening.)
The slightly frustrating thing is that if the images you’re given weren’t recently captured, it can be hard to find them in your library because they’re sorted according to capture date. Fortunately you can easily show recent files: bookmark this link or just click the search bar, then click the “Recently added” tile at the bottom. And boom, whatever files you just added from your friend will now show up at the top of the list.
Last week Aravind Krishnaswamy (Google Photos engineering manager & my former Photoshop teammate) and I had the pleasure of sitting down with author Jan Kabili to record an episode of This Week in Photo’s The Fix. You can enjoy our handsome mugs (plus demos!) here, or you can listen via iTunes. The 45 minutes flew by for us; hope you dig ‘em.
I’ve often wanted to demo the negligible visual impact of the compression applied by the High Quality option in Google Photos, so I figured I’d register a memorable short URL for the purpose. To my great surprise, I discovered that tinyurl.com/googlephotoscompression was already taken. Clicking through, I found that back in May Brian Young of PetaPixel did a detailed review of compression in Photos. Hopefully it’ll help put folks’ minds further at ease about choosing this option (which I use for everything that comes off my iPhone).
The father of Linux commenting on one of my product areas:
So Google Photos seems to want to make odd videos of the random movie clips I uploaded from last week.
And apparently, with dramatic music, some color tinting, and by making the cuts be frequent enough, you can make even my blurry fish butt videos entertaining.
There is a shark in there. And Daniela, who got certified last year and did very well as a dive buddy. But the real star is definitely Google Photos.
Forget re-uploading what you’ve already backed up. That’s a sucker’s bet. 🙂
Instead visit youtube.com/upload, then click “Import your videos from Google Photos.” You’ll see a browser like this that lets you pick one or more videos, then click “Select” to add titles, etc. & publish them.
Bonus tip: To see all the videos in your Photos account, click the search field, then click the “Video” tile (or just bookmark photos.google.com/search/_tv_).
To make images & videos in your Drive show up in Photos, go to Photos settings, then enable “Google Drive: Show Google Drive photos & videos in your Photos library.”
To sync images & videos from Drive to your computer, go to My Drive, click the little gear icon, then choose Settings & enable “Create a Google Photos folder.”
One small note of caution: If you enable auto-upload of images & video from your computer (via the desktop app) and enable auto download of Photos content to your computer, you’ll likely end up with two copies of many photos/videos (as they’ll get uploaded from their original locations, then downloaded into your Drive folder). In the cloud you’ll have just one copy of each item, but you’ll obviously use up more space on your local hard drive.
One of my areas of responsibility has been movie creation. Every day Google Photos analyzes millions of photos & videos, looking for the most interesting parts & combining them into bite-sized visual summaries. These then show up in your Assistant view, from where you can view & save them. You can also apply a different theme, change the soundtrack, or remove/reorder clips.
To make your own movie, select a number of items using your iOS or Android device, then tap “+” and then Movie. Here’s the one I made after the Micronaxx visited our Toontastic friends during Google’s Take Your Kids To Work Day:
I was pleased to hear The Verge’s Thomas Ricker reporting surprise & delight with movie creation:
I’ve been testing Google Photos with a few thousand pics from recent holidays and family events. The behind-the-scenes Assistant feature is downright magical (to borrow another Apple buzzword). It combined five separate videos I shot of my daughter’s gymnastics competition into an almost perfect one-minute highlight reel set to music. Amazingly, it identified her amongst all the other children of the same age and wearing the same uniform, culminating with a still photo of her on the trophy stand.
Give it a whirl and please let us know what you think!
To upload quickly, drag and drop images & videos into the browser window. It’s additive, so you can keep dragging in multiple batches & the dialog will respond.
To select a range of photos quickly, select one, then hold Shift while clicking another.
To zoom into an image, click it to open it in the 1up view, then use trackpad scrolling.
To navigate quickly, hold down the right (or left) arrow key in 1up; it flies!
To exit 1up view (returning to the grid), press Esc.
To scroll fast through your whole library, grab/drag the date tooltip (next to the scrollbar).
To jump to the top quickly after scrolling far down the photos grid, click any white space in the app bar (the top area that holds the search bar, etc.).
To find recently uploaded files, go to the search page, then click the “Recently added” tile.
To filter the Collections view, click the “Collections” title, then show just Albums, Movies, or Stories.
Please go, kick the tires, and let us know what other refinements you’d like. (More good stuff is on the way!)
I consider it the best photo backup-and-sync cloud service I’ve tested — better than the leading competitors from Apple, Amazon, Dropbox and Microsoft.
The coolest aspect of the new Google Photos is that once you click the search button — before you even type anything — the app presents you with groups of pictures organized by three categories: People, Places and Things.
The new Google Photos brings the company’s expertise in artificial intelligence, data mining and machine learning to bear on the task of storing, organizing and finding your photos. And that, combined with its cross-platform approach, makes it the best of breed.
I’m one of the three engineering leads on Google Photos and handle a lot of the recruiting, so I’m biased and have a vested interest in making you think well of our team. 🙂 That said, I’ve worked on Photos for 5 years (and Google for a total of 8 years), so I know the team well and can explain why I’ve stuck around and why we’ve been successful in recruiting a great team.
I really enjoyed The Verge’s hands-on discussion of Google Photos, including interviews with my teammates Anil & Dave in which they answer frank questions about privacy & trust. It’s a great six-minute overview.
My teammate & fellow Photoshop veteran Aravind Krishnaswamy has shared a few notes on his setup:
Most of my photos are in Lightroom but I also take the occasional picture with a phone and I like having a unified view of everything. I also like stuff like search & explore and the creations made from both my LR photos as well as my mobile ones. I don’t really have an interest in doing major editing on a phone and having sync back to Lightroom or anything like that, I just really like the idea of having access to all my photos on my phone as long as I have an internet connection.
For this I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Folder Publisher to auto publish to a Drive folder which then syncs to Photos. The folder names get indexed in search and come up in auto complete. And if for some reason I want the folder structure they are still Drive (haven’t wanted it in the few months I’ve been doing this). The only downside is that it requires storage on Drive: my 100k photos take up about 460GB. But I shoot with high megapixel bodies (36, 80) and the plugin is configured to export full size, high quality JPG. If I resized them to something more sane, that number would be smaller.
Note that that amount of storage would cost you a princely ten bucks a month & still leave you with more than half your Drive space free.
Update: A couple of readers have asked why Aravind exports from LR instead of just uploading the raw originals. You can certainly do the latter (as I do), but only Lightroom & Camera Raw can interpret the edits that LR applies & stores as XMP metadata. (Google Photos & other raw rendering engines just ignore one another’s parameters.) If you want to see the results of those edits, you need to render out JPEGs.
Grab Google Photos Backup for Mac & Windows, and enable Auto Backup when you install the app on on iOS and Android. You can also manually upload stuff via photos.google.com, but it’s tough to beat the simplicity of letting the robot do the work.
You can also flip a switch to make your Google Drive images show up in Photos: open the Photos settings page, then flip on the Google Drive switch. Everything you store in Drive counts against your Drive quota, regardless of its size.
PS—If you’ve previously installed the backup on Mac, please download a new copy (updated yesterday) as it plays much nicer with the latest networking changes in OS X.
It gives you free unlimited storage for what Google calls “high-quality” photos and videos. At the free tier, the service compresses images, maintaining resolution up to 16 megapixels. Google claims these maintain near-identical visual quality.
It’s true: check out these comparisons. Honestly, if we never said anything about compression, I don’t think a single human (myself included) would ever notice, but it’s important to be transparent so that people can make informed choices.
Mat continues:
Videos are maintained at 1080p. If you want to keep your original photos, Google offers 15 GB of storage for free and an additional terabyte for $10 per month. [Also, 100GB = $2/mo.] To keep your photos current, Google Photos has automatic backups for iOS, Android, and the desktop. You don’t have to actually do anything to make them happen.
If you shoot raw images with a DSLR (as I do), you can choose “Original” from the desktop app and “High Quality” from your phone so that your phone pics don’t count against quota. (Every iPhone image besides panos will fit comfortably under the 16 megapixel cap.)
Bradley Horowitz led Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr & now runs our group. He had a really interesting conversation with Steven Levy, and I’ve pulled out some of my favorite bits here.
On what problems Google Photos addresses:
To give you enough storage so you can relax and not worry about how much photo bandwidth you’re consuming, and enough organizing power so you don’t have to think about the tedium of managing your digital gallery. It will happen for you transparently, in the background. I don’t think there’s another company on earth that can make that claim.
You almost need a second vacation to go through the pictures of the safari on your first vacation. That’s the problem we’re trying to fix — to automate the process so that users can be in the moment.
On why it was important to separate Google Photos from Google+:
We heard from our Google Plus photo users that we had great technology, but they didn’t want their life’s archive brought into a social product, any social product. It’s more akin to Gmail — there’s no button on Gmail that says “publish on the Internet.” “Broadcast” and “archive” are really different.
I’m really happy about this separation. It’s something I oh-so-gingerly suggested during my interview back in 2013, and happily it was already under consideration. Separating things thoughtfully took time & care.
On search & computer vision:
The key to getting that last percentage [of accuracy] which tips it over will come now, when we deploy it at scale. Getting all that data will create a virtuous cycle of getting better and better. […]
We also want to bring all of the power of computer vision and machine learning to improve those photos, create derivative works, to make suggestions…to really be your assistant.
This last bit has been my jam: If you Tron-ified the best Photoshop artists, animators, and illustrators in the world, kept them in your pocket, and had them just try to please you by creating amazing things from your photos & videos, what would you have them create, and from what? We’re already doing a lot in that regard (making movies, stories, collages, etc.) and have a lot more ideas, but we’d of course love to hear yours.
Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A huge amount of that information is photographic (a trillion+ photos per year), and a huge amount of that is private.
Today Google Photos brings amazing search power to your pocket, letting you back up a lifetime of photos & videos—for free*—and have a virtual assistant organize them, then create amazing movies, stories, animations, and more. Check it out now on iOS, Android, and Web.
The search stuff is amazing. As my teammate Vincent Mo writes, “Can’t remember the name of that beer you had while on vacation? Search for ‘beer in Los Angeles.’ Ya, it actually works.” (I just tried it & dang, he’s right!)
My part of the team has been working hard on an ultra-streamlined yet powerful image editor, and I’ll post more details about that (and about how it relates to Snapseed) soon. I’ve also been responsible for the Movies feature that automatically creates movies from your moments (or lets you make them on the fly), plus collages, animations, and more (we’re just getting warmed up). From the team blog post:
The app can also help you quickly enhance photos and combine them in new ways to help you relive your life’s moments. In one tap, get instant adjustments tuned to the photo’s color, lighting, and subject to make each photo look its best. Press the “+” button to create your own collages, animations, movies with soundtracks, and more.
If you swipe to the left, you’ll open the Assistant view, where we’ll suggest new things made with your photos and videos, such as a collage or a story based on a recent trip you took. After previewing the creation, you can choose to keep, edit, or discard it.
As I say, I’ll share more details soon. In the meantime, we’d love to know what you think! If you have questions, ask ‘em here or check out the new help community.
Happy shooting, J.
*Seriously? Yes, seriously. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos. If you want to store really high-res stuff, uncompressed raw images, etc., you still get an additional 15GB of free storage, and after that storage is super cheap (two bucks a month for 100GB, ten for 1000).
