1 Step to Save Your Photos, use Google Photos

Yep, that’s it, now every Boomer male can save photos in one, simple step.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced their new Google Photo app for your phone (iOS and Android) and on your Windows computer. This means you can take pictures on your iOS or Android phone and have them immediately backup to Google servers. And those photos are also available on your computer once they upload.

Any photos you take with your camera, whether a DSLR, mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, or simple point-and-shoot, are backed up once you load the images on your computer–and then immediately available on you iOS or Android phone!

So, what’s the catch? Nothing. Zip. Nada. And….it’s free!

Sample of the Google Photos Collections page.

Your photos are stored online as well as remaining on your camera or in your computer, safely stored in two geographically separate places. The online images are saved at full resolution up to 16 MegaPixel and compressed using a special codec to make a significantly smaller image. Google will ask you to pay if you want to store RAW or photos higher than 16MP, but from what I’ve seen there is no need to buy more storage.

Along with being online, these images are stored privately, you decide which images are shared, along with where and how to share them (currently shareable on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and by private URL, which you can delete if you change your mind). This applies to videos, too, although not all files formats are covered. Sure, your cache of photos could be hacked, consider yourself warned to keep your clothes on, but keep your password complicated and use two-factor authentication and you should be safe for years to come.

I am not recommending this without testing it myself. I set up the upload and left for a five-day business trip. When I returned there were 37,000 photos in my Google Photo account. The photos are a mix of business images, I take a few photos for my clients, personal images. I keep a backup of the images on two separate hard drives, one a live backup and the other a cold backup on a traveling hard drive, but now I have the security of an online backup that I can access on any of my devices through a web browser.

What else do you get besides unlimited storage?

That’s the really beautiful thing, you also get:

• 1-step sharing from your phone or computer (the computer app operates just like a familiar phone app)
• A few simple image editing tools for cropping, sharpening, filtering, etc.
• Access to the exif data, that information stored in the photo itself
• Tagging and description opportunities
• The ability to create albums at will
• Automatically generated “collections”, which are albums created according to location or date, as well as automated “stories” and suggested image edits, including some surprising animations
• A quick file download

But the most amazing feature is facial recognition & other search.

Yes, you now have an almost-instant collection of your children’s photos. You can watch them age from birth to the latest photo you took. Or view your own collection, or anyone else you have photos of and care about.

A quick example of searching on my face, doesn’t seem to matter how much is obscured or aged.

But this search feature also extends to anything else you photograph. Fireworks, mountains, flowers, dogs, cats, horses, waterfalls, anything you can name is available for search and Google consistently drags up excellent collections of images from your years of photos.

Example of a Google Photos search for Paris. Even without location data, no GPS on this old point-and-shoot image, and a jiggly image, Search finds the Eiffel Tower and Jardin des Luxembourg

This story is long enough. Just try Google Photos for yourself and see how powerful this tool can be. Just read before you delete or you may lose some or your personal Boomer Male history.