Google Photos Celebrates 1st Anniversary by Sharing 10 Top Tips

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 30 May 2016

People who keep track of these things will remember that Google introduced a new product a year ago: Google Photos, a web and mobile app that backs up your precious photos and videos, automatically organizes and labels your pics, lets you easily share photos with others, and more.

To celebrate Google Photos' first anniversary, the Photos team shared their favorite 10 tips. Check them out below.

1. Use keyboard shortcuts to be more efficient

Go to photos.google.com to access Google Photos for the web in your browser. Once there, press Shift + ? to bring up a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use to get things done faster.




2. Find things faster by using more keywords

If you want to find something faster, then you should search for more than one keyword at a time. If you want to find pics of that bear you shot at Yosemite, search for “Yosemite bear”. And if you want to find those pics your mom took with the bear, search for “mom bear.”


3. Free up storage space by changing the quality setting

If you take a lot of photos and you find that you're running out of storage space, you might want to change the quality setting. Go to the Google Photos website, go to Settings, and switch from Original to High Quality. While Original quality offers limited free storage, High quality offers unlimited free storage (see here).



4. Search using emojis

What started as an April Fools’ Day joke turned into an actual feature. Google Photos actually lets you use emoji to search through your photos.




5. Easily find recently uploaded photos

From Google Photos for the web, click on the Search box, then click on Show More. A Recently Added option will show up.




6. See which folders are being backed up

Google Photos can back up your photos to the cloud. To see which folders are being backed up, tap into your device folders from the top of the albums page on Android.


7. Create shared albums

If you want to easily share photos with your family for example, then you should create a shared album. When someone adds a new photo to the album, a notification will be sent to everyone else. This way, everyone can check out the newly added photo.


8. There’s a hidden Easter Egg

I’m not going to tell you what it is. I’m just going to tell you that there’s an Ester Egg in the photo editor on Android. Can you find it?


9. Edit the time and time zone

When photos are out of order, it may be because the date was incorrectly set on your phone or camera. From Google Photos for the web you can edit both the time and time zone for an individual photo or for a group of photos.



10. View the videos in your gallery

On Google Photos for the web, videos are displayed at the top of the album page. Things aren’t as straightforward on mobile. To see all the videos in your gallery, you have to scroll the carousel to the right and tap on the videos tile.


In related news...

Back in October 2015, Google announced that Photos is used by more than 100 million people. That number has since doubled. Google Photos is now used by 200 million people.

"Now 200 million of you are using Google Photos each month. We’ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You’ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices—it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We’ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 billion of those have been for ... selfies," said Anil Sabharwal, Vice President, Google Photos.

Get Google Photos for Android from Google Play.

Get Google Photos for iOS from Apple’s
App Store.

Use Google Photos for the web by following
this link.


Latest News


Sony's 'Attack of the Blockbusters Sale' Slashes Prices in Half for a Ton of PS4 Games

17 Aug 2017

How Samsung's New T5 Compares to the Old T3 Portable SSD (Infographic)

17 Aug 2017

See all