Photo Organization - Google Photos

First off, a little disclaimer:

I don't claim to be an expert on all the ins and outs of how Google Photos works. I just know what I am doing with it, and what works for me. There may be faster, better ways of doing things, but this is what I've discovered in just playing around with it.

If you are okay with that, then here we go!

Google Photos, (as I understand it) is a free photo storage service with unlimited storage capabilities.  In their own words, they offer a way to store your pictures with "Great visual quality at reduced file size."

I have my phone set up to automatically sync the pictures I take into Google Photos, since I have the Google Photos app on my phone. I can't remember how exactly I set that up, but it must have been pretty automatic when I downloaded the app, because I don't remember a whole lot of setup after that. If you have questions about setting your phone up to auto upload your photos....Google it. LOL

My iPhone doesn't have a ton of storage, so the fact that I can "off-load" photos to save space is a life-saver for me. Once I'm sure that my pictures have made it into Google Photos and into an album there (read on for info about creating albums in Google Photos), I delete the photos off my camera roll on my phone.

For me, it's easier to do the organizing of my pictures on Google Photos on the computer rather than my phone using the app. I'll try to be specific when I'm talking about the things I do on the computer in Google Photos versus in the app.

On the computer, I can see all the photos that have synced from my phone by clicking into the PHOTOS menu (one of the main buttons on the side, once you're in Google Photos).

From here, you can click on individual photos to select them. When you hover over the picture with your mouse a little checkmark icon appears in the top left corner of the picture. Click that circle to select a single picture, or a whole bunch at once. 

You'll get a blue bar across the top of your screen telling you that you have X-number of photos selected. On the right side of that blue bar is a + icon. Click it. 

This gives you couple of different options, such as creating a new album. In Google Photos, albums are like folders where you can store pictures in categories. I use the albums just like that, as a way to organize my photos.

When you click the Album option, a new screen appears asking if you want to create a new album, or if you want to save the pictures into an existing album and then lists previously created albums. Select the new album option.

Creating a new album puts your selected pictures together on the screen.  Now it's time to give the album a name. I name the folder with the year and then a short description of what the photos are all about. For example, I have albums named 2016 Graduation, 2009 Easter, 2014 Yellowstone, etc. Type a name for album and then click the checkmark in the blue banner across the top of the page to save it.

And that's it. That's how I organize my pictures within Google Photos! 

Now, once I have the pictures arranged into albums, I slowly work to get them scrapbooked. From the Google Photos app on my phone, I select an album that has the pictures I want to scrapbook with, and re-download the pictures to my phone. That process is really simple. 

First, I pull up the photo the Google Photos app, and then tap Albums along the bottom of the screen, to pull up all my albums. Then I use the Search bar to find which album I'm looking for using keywords or years (depending on how I named the album).

Once in the album, I scroll through until I find the photo I want. Then I tap the photo to bring it up, and then tap the download icon located below the photo. 

It asks me where I want to save the photo to, and (there are lots of options: send it as a text message, email it, share it with contacts, etc.) I choose to save it to my camera roll, because from there, I can access it in the Project Life app as I would normally.

I don't know why, but my phone always cuts off the bottom of these options at the edge of my phone. And I can't scroll up any further. Weird. But I've circled the button I'm talking about here.

I repeat this process for each of the pictures I want to use on my scrapbook page. 
Then I scrapbook the page like normal using the Project Life app. After I have created a page with the pictures, I delete them off the phone's camera roll again, knowing they are still saved in Google Photos.

Then I go back to Google Photos on the computer and click the ALBUMS button to bring up all my albums. I find the album the photos came from, open it up, and I change the name of the album by adding an asterisk (*) to the beginning of the album name (for example: *2016 Graduation). This is just an indicator to me that I have scrapbooked those photos. 

Believe me, you will be glad that you have some way to know what's been done and what is left to do after you've made a few hundred scrapbook pages like I did using this process last year!

I have already talked about how I back up my finished PL pages (and the editable versions)  in Dropbox. You can read about that HERE (scroll to the bottom of that post). But, if you want another backup of your finished page somewhere other than Dropbox, you can at least save the JPG version of your finished pages on Google Photos as well. 

To do that, from the Project Life app, export an image file onto your camera roll. Because I have Google Photos set up to pull photos from my phone, those finished page JPG files already show up under the PHOTOS menu in Google Photos on the computer. Then I just save the finished page photos into an album. Personally, I have a separate album labeled simply with the year: 2017 PL Pages, but I suppose it could make sense for you to save the finished pages in the same folder that the individual pictures reside. It's up to you and how your mind works!

Now for a couple of cool things that Google Photos does.  (This is best done on the computer). Once you have a several hundred photos saved in Google Photos, try clicking the ALBUMS button. One of the options along the top should be PEOPLE.

I've found that you have to have several hundred or  even a thousand or more individual pictures saved in Google Photos to get the People option to appear.  Keep saving photos and it will eventually show up!

Click on PEOPLE and you will see a collection of individual people's faces from your photos.

If you click on one of the faces, it will open a new page where it asks you to Add a Name to the face. Basically you are telling Google who this person is, and it will use some behind-the-scenes-magical algorithm to locate and "auto-tag" that person in other photos within Google Photos.

So if the person's face you clicked on is Bob, your son, where it asks you to Add a Name, type "Bob".  Google will already list all the albums that this person's photo appears in, and as the program detects that you add more photos of "Bob", it will continue to list those additional albums here on the bottom portion of the page.

Google is first and foremost, a search engine. And once you have tagged some of the faces using the above method, you will actually be able to perform a search within Google Photos for "Bob" or "Aunt MaryAnn" or any of the faces you have named, and it will locate every picture with them in it that you have stored! How cool is that? This is super helpful, especially if you know in your mind what a photo looks like, but can't remember the year or event album it's located in. Just search for the person's name and all the photos they're in display, making it visually easy to find what you are looking for (if you know what you are looking for--lol).

In my experience, (and I have stored thousands of pictures in Google Photos), I have found that the facial recognition search engine is highly accurate, even across faces that have aged considerably. But, at times, it will "mistake" a face. This happens a lot with my wife and her sisters. It thinks Janet is Carolyn, or that my mother-in-law is my wife (much to my wife's horror!) But before we get into how to correct that problem, let's talk about another similar one.

Let's say that you have begun tagging faces as described above, and you've already labeled your son's face with his name, but it pulls up another picture of your son that is doesn't recognize as him. Tap on the face and it will prompt you Add a Name again. Type in the first few letters of the name, and it will show a list of matching names you have previously added. Tap on your son's name in that list and it will ask you if the photo you tapped on is the same face as one you previously added.

If it is, click YES, and Google Photos will "learn" to recognize those features as the same. This happens a lot in photos of babies/children and their grown up counterparts.

Which leads me to the opposite problem. What if, when you do a search for "Cousin Edgar" it shows in your search results some photos that quite obviously to you aren't your dear cousin. You can also teach Google when it has made a facial recognition mistake.  When you are looking at the list of matching results, select the photo that is mis-tagged by clicking the little circle icon on the photo itself (in the top left corner). 

This will add a checkmark and select that photo (you can select multiple photos this way, too). At the top right corner of the page, click the MORE OPTIONS (three vertical dots) button, and select Remove Results. That photo will now longer show up in "Cousin Edgar" search results. Easy peasy!

So, in a nutshell, that's how I organize the pictures I keep stored on Google Photos. And every few weeks as I've upload more photos, I do a quick face-tagging round and call it good.  Pretty soon, when you click on PEOPLE, you will have a big collection of faces you've identified, and you can click on any of these to quickly open a collection of photos that person is in.

But.....you will have a collection of faces that you don't/can't identify. Google Photos pulls in EVERY face from your pictures, even those of bystanders in the backgrounds of photos, so I just identify the ones I can and leave the rest alone.

Google Photos has recently added PET face recognition! So if you have taken photos of your dog or cat (haven't had it work on pictures I took of my ducks, though LOL) you can tag those with your pet's name just like you did Cousin Edgar!

And one last thing. You can also search your Google Photos for other keywords, too. Want to quickly find pictures from the beach? Try searching for the word "beach", or "palm tree" or "ocean". Google finds pictures in your albums that it thinks match your search words!

Well, that's all I know about Google Photos, and what little I know I have learned from playing around, and from this awesome little free course by fellow Project Life scrapbooker Stephanie Clay.

Let me know your experience with beginning to use Google Photos (or if you are experienced, some tricks you've learned) in the comments!