Using Google Photos

I've been using Google Photos for a while to backup my photos, but honestly it's a lot more than just backup. Today I thought I'd share a few of my favorite functionalities.

It's hard to pick an absolute favorite thing about Google Photos, but one really fantastic feature is that you can share your entire library with someone. This makes it very easy for me to collect any photos from Jordan that I may want without pestering him to share them with me. He granted me access to his library, so I can just browse all his photos and add any I'm interested to my own library. This makes collecting all the photos for my weekly pocket spread very easy.

Now obviously there aren't a lot of people in your life who you want to share your entire photo collection with. But if you want to collect photos from an event, or a trip, creating a shared album is an easy way to do it. You can invite whoever you want to be part of a shared album, and then they can easily add their photos. You can then save whichever ones you want to your own collection.

This has been a really great feature for us since Magnus was born. We have family members who are very happy to receive daily photos and videos of what Magnus is up to, but trying to regularly update a social media account with these photos would have take more time and effort than we had, especially in the early days when he was a newborn. But simply selecting whatever photos and sticking them in a shared album made it very easy to keep everyone updated. You can even comment on the photos, so family can leave whatever thoughts Magnus has inspired. Also, it's super easy to scroll back in time or find a photo, unlike on other social media accounts.

A recent innovation that's been added to Google Photos is the "favorite" star. I've been waiting for this feature for a while, so when they finally rolled it out my life was complete. I know some people like to delete any extra photos, but I prefer to favorite the ones I like, and just leave the rest in case I want them for some reason. I had been putting these preferred photos in albums, but now I can skip that step and just browse through my favorites.

I do my basic photo editing with Google Photos as well. Sometimes it will suggest fixes, which are usually good. Or else I usually just apply the "auto" filter to my photos. For more dramatic filters I use the A Color Story App. The benefit of editing within Google Photos is that they save the original in case you ever want to revert the photo, similar to Adobe Lightroom if you've used that. If I do use an outside editing app, I'm always annoyed because now I have two copies of the photo: one edited and one not. If you edit within Google Photos, it will just show you the edited version, but the original is still saved "underneath".

I remember back in the day when I used to spend a lot of time tagging my photos so that I could find them easily. Now Google is smart enough to find what I want without any effort from me. It will recognize faces, places and things, so all you have to do is type in what you want, and Google will find it. You can search by date as well.

Google Photos also has what they call the "assistant" which I always make fun of, but secretly really love. The "assistant" will bring up photos from this day in the past, as well as make animations, collages, photos edits, etc. My favorite is when it makes a movie. I love to see what music it picks to go with my photos.

That's a lot of things I like about Google Photos (which is basically everything). I didn't even talk about backup, but it does that too. I just use the free version. So everything I just mentioned is free! Do you use Google Photo? Are you also obsessed with it?