As a follow-up to the last time when we looked at Google Photos due to the number of emails I received, we will continue this week.
We will look at a few more of them that may surprise you. First, how about grouping all of your friends and family by face. So if you need to look up Aunt Claire you can just type her name in the search and see all of the pictures of her you have. Keep in mind for all of this you must be logged into your Google account.
Google Photos creates models of the faces in your photos in order to group similar faces together. Open the app on your phone, go to Albums and then click on People. Click on a persons face and then choose, “Add a name” and type it in. If it finds the name on your contacts it will add the full name you have for that person from there. If not in your contacts it will only add the name you typed. Then it will search through all of your photos and match the face to the name in all the photos you have taken in Google Photos. Again, not 100% perfect but really close.
That way, you can search your photo library for photos of certain people (like “Mom” or “Jenny”). Faces’ labels are private to your account, and won’t appear to anyone you share the photos with. Now you can use the search box in the app and find all that you have of that person. That is pretty neat. As unbelievable as it was for me, it found pictures of my kids when the photos were separated by 10 – 15 years.
Next, you may have hundreds of photos on your phone taking up sometimes precious space on your phone’s memory. Why not delete them? I know you do not want to lose them, they are vital. Go to “Assistant” then in the upper left click the three horizontal bars and choose, “Free up space.” It will then calculate how much space you can save on your phone if you store them only in the cloud on your Google Drive. The thumbnails will still appear in your Google Photos app but will not be downloaded for viewing until you click the picture. Then you will see it full sized. This is a phenomenal space saver.
Let us say you do want to select multiple photos to delete or put in a Google Album (not mentioned here but you can figure Albums out now). If you wanted to select 50 photos to work with you could tap each one individually but that could take a while. Try long pressing on any one picture, it will get a check mark. Then do not lift your finger but drag up, down, right or left. This will select all of the contiguous photos until you lift your finger off the screen…easy.
One quick last one for you today. Make a collage of photos you can share with others under, “Assistant.” Click the “Collage” link which will allow you to pick two to fifty pictures that you can mash into one collage image which you can share with others. There are also other neat options under the Assistant feature you can try out.
Have some fun experimenting.
