Google Photos

 When Google launched Gmail in 2004, it bundled 40x more free storage space than competing webmail services. It seemed to solve all storage woes and they did not include a “delete” button in Gmail because, with a gigabyte available, why would anyone ever delete their emails. They’ve adopted a similar approach with Google Photos but gone a step further.

Google Photos offers unlimited online storage space for your digital photos and videos. The original images are compressed after uploading but the difference is barely noticeable, at least on our mobile and computer screens.

I started dumping all my pictures to Google Photos, the day it launched, and couldn’t be happier. The initial purpose was online backup but now Google Photos has become “the” place where I go to explore my photos. The files do not consume a byte of local storage space and yet the entire collection is always available on every device that I own.

Upload your pictures to Google Photos

Google Photos has desktop uploaders for both Windows PCs and Mac OS X. Alternatively, you can drag folders from the desktop to photos.google.com and they’ll be uploaded instantly. Android, iPhone and iPad users can install the Google Photos app and their mobile photo will be backed up automatically.

Organize your Google Photos

Google Photos will arrange your picture library by location and by the date taken automatically. It can also recognize the visual theme of photos so if you search for, say “food” or “dinner”, you will most likely see all your family dinner photos. You can find “selfies” too. The results aren’t always accurate but a useful option nonetheless.

If you have painstakingly organized your photo on the computer in albums manually, you’ll be disappointed to know that Google Photos will ignore these albums and instead dump all the photos in one big pool. You can create photo albums inside Google Photos but it will not maintain the local album structure during upload.

Google Photos - Tips & Tricks

• You may use the Google Takeout tool to download all your Google Photos on another computer.
• Use Chromecast to view your Google Photos as beautiful slideshows on your TV.
• If you would like to check the status of your upload queue, go to this secret link and confirm whether files are getting added or not.
• Google Photos are not available inside Gmail but if you have linked your Photos to Google Drive, you can easily attach any of your Google Photos in email messages.
• Your friends can comment on photos that are shared with them. Go here to view all the comments posted on your Google Photos.