Tag: Google Photos

Google Photos continues to be one of the fastest growing app & services from the Mountain View company.  With over a billion active users each month, Photos is the go-to place to store your photos online safe and sound.

But as a Google Top Contributor for Google Photos, there is one concept with the app that is a mystery to many:  Albums.  In the Product Forums for Photos and contacts here at the site, the idea behind Albums in Photos is one of the more confusing elements.  Hopefully this little tutorial will help explain things a bit.

First, let’s talk about the underlying structure of Google Photos itself.  The service leverages your Google Drive storage to store your photos.  If you store them in High Quality (you let Google compress your photos under 16MP in size), they don’t count against your Drive quota.  If you keep them in Original Quality, regardless of size, the count against your quota.

Second, there is no folder hierarchy concept in Google Photos.  Everything is in one folder which you view when you are viewing your library.  So what about albums?  Think of them as labels.

The latest update to Google Photos is rolling out and bringing a new local video caching feature so you don’t have to stream videos in your library.  The update, version 3.4 for those keeping score at home, will cache a video after you have played it and, when you replay it, will use that local cached version of the video so you are not eating up your data plan to stream it from your online account.

The feature is purely aimed at saving mobile data, something that Google is continually working on across their apps as they try to expand them into parts of the world here mobile data is expensive.

Google Photos has been getting a lot of attention in the past week.  The photo app was reported at Google I/O last week to have 500 million monthly users, had a new archive feature added, and a new photo book service where you can order a hardcover book of photos from your library.  All of this makes sense when you consider the update to the listing for the app in the Play Store.  Photos now has been downloaded 1 billion times for Android.

The update to the listing comes nearly two years to the day from when Google Photos was originally announced.  My fellow Google Top Contributor in Google Photos, Paolo Amoroso, reminded me this morning that the launch date of Photos was May 28, 2015.

Google has begun the process of rolling out a new Archive feature to Google Photos.  The new feature will allow you to select photos and move them to an Archive album, hiding them from your main photos view. You will still be able to view the photos in Albums and you can still search for them.  It just removes them from your Photos view.

This feature can be quite handy for more-or-less cleaning up your Photo stream.  As a Top Contributor for Google Photos, I take a lot of screenshots of my Chromebook, Mac and Android devices to help people in the forums.  That means I have dozens of these screenshots in my Photos view.  Well, I did until yesterday.  Now I have them archived but if I ever need to refer to one, I can easily do so.  They aren’t deleted or altered in any way.

Google has announced that a new backup feature is rolling out for Google Photos.  The update will be for both Android and iOS and will offer users the ability to backup low-resolution copies of their photos while they are on a slow mobile network.  The photos, which will look fine on smartphone screen, will be replaced by a High Quality version of the photo once a stable Wi-Fi connection is established on your phone.

The feature is aimed at users who do not have a high throughput mobile signal.  This gives users the option to have photos backed up so in case something happens to their phone, they will not have lost the photos.  To this point, backing up in Google Photos on mobile networks was done at full original or Google’s compressed High Quality.  Those can take a lot of time to backup on a slow connection.

Google Drive is a great service for storing your files and photos.  You get 15GB free and if you want or need more storage, you can get an additional 100GB for just $1.99 per month.  But let’s suppose for a minute you signed up for 100GB, use about 30GB and decide you want to cancel your subscription?  You are 15GB over the free limit so what happens to your files, photos and other things you have stored in Google Drive?  In short, not much.  It comes down to the service you are using tied to Google Drive but the data that you have there will remain there and not be deleted.  That’s the good news.  The not-so-good news is that your Gmail will start bouncing incoming messages.

Let’s deal with Google Drive itself first.  If you are over your quota, you won’t be able to upload new files.  Period.  Equally, syncing between your Google Drive folder on your PC or Mac will stop.  But, and critically, you can still create Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides files as they don’t consume any space anyway.  It isn’t necessarily a loophole in that the Google apps never used your quota anyway but it certainly is a way to keep on creating documents.  But keep in mind that the sync between your computer and your Google Drive stops so any Google Docs files created will only show up online in Chrome.  Those PDFs and Microsoft Office files? Yeah, no more uploading and syncing.

An option you would have – which I have done – is to convert your Microsoft Office files to Google.  This can be done via the web app or the Android app quite easily.  Just open up that Word document then go to File and convert it to Google Docs.  You can do the same for Excel files and PowerPoint files.  Once you have done your conversions, be sure to go to your Google Drive trash folder and empty it.  That will delete the Office files and reclaim your quota.  Keep in mind that reclaiming can take up to 24 hours to happen.