Almost everyone has a great camera in their pocket all the time now. Iphones and Android Phones both have incredibly capable cameras that are better than point and shoots from just a few years ago. This creates a problem for most people. The cameras are so easy to use and take such good photos that we all have thousands of images just sitting there on our phones. Remember that day at the zoo from 6 months ago, or the family road trip last year? After a little scrolling those can be found somewhat easily, but what about the day a year ago you want to find one specific photo from? That is when it gets much more difficult. I am going to be doing a series of posts on what has now become my favorite app/online service that can help solve these problems, Google Photos.
This first post is just going to be a quick overview of the service and how to set it up. The next few weeks I will have posts on all the main aspects of the app including assistant, photos, albums, sharing, and photo books. The app can be downloaded on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.
This is the first screen you will see after downloading the app. You will want backup & sync selected so all your photos on your device will get backed up. The next two options are up to you and can be changed by clicking Change settings. Upload size you can select high quality or original. With high quality google will resize your photos and video but gives you unlimited storage. If you choose original you will get the files backed up as the original size you took them. Everything you upload will count against your 15GB of google storage on your account. More space can be purchased ($1.99 100GB or $9.99 1TB). For most people I believe that high quality will be good enough. The second option is to upload over Wi-Fi only or to use cellular data. I have an unlimited data plan through T-Mobile so I want my photographs backed up as soon as possible and use cellular data. If you have a cell phone plan with limited data and take a lot of photos you may want to leave it on Wi-Fi only. Next you need to login and select your google account. Then click done.
Google photos will then start backing up all the photos on your device. It will say Backup complete when they are all backed up. For this series of blog posts I uploaded about 75 photos from the past year.
Now that you have gotten the app set up on your device and finally have a backup of all those irreplaceable photos of your dog and the meal you ate last night and maybe a few of your friends and family mixed in there somewhere I am going to show you all the great things you can do with Google Photos. We will have a post on assistant, photos, albums, and sharing coming in the next few weeks.