- We are on a roll talking about the basics
of using your Google account and we have reached part five!
Today on Dotto Tech, Google Photos.
(lively music)
Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day?
At Dotto Tech, we make technology easy so you can do more
and we have reached the fifth in our series of Google Basics
where we talk about all of the benefits
of the Google ecosystem, of using your Google account,
and all of the amazing
and sometimes scary things that it does.
And today, our topic is Google Photos
which is perhaps one of the most amazing
and definitely one of the most scary parts
of the entire Google ecosystem because of privacy issues
and just the incredible advances in technology
but my oh my,
Google Photos is one terrific piece of technology.
It's convenient, it's flexible, it is ever so useful.
I think you are gonna enjoy
taking a look at it with me today.
But before we do, perhaps a word from a sponsor.
(light rock music)
Before we jump into this week's demo,
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Tell an old person.
(lighthearted rock music)
All right, Google Photos.
Then there's about six areas that I wanna talk to you about
to give you a really good picture
of how Google Photos works.
Now, I kinda have two caveats that I wanna put out.
First, I'm not gonna be talking very much
about the privacy aspects of Google Photos.
You're gonna have to obviously be concerned
about your personal privacy,
and Google Photos is one of the scariest apps
that Google has in just how much information we are sharing
with the cloud service and what the ramifications could be
but we will deal with the privacy issues
in a later video in this series.
The other thing is based on different licensing
and different capabilities or different laws
in different countries especially on privacy,
Google Photos has different technical capabilities
depending what region you live in.
So if I show you something that I can do here in Canada,
there's a chance that you might not be able
to do it in your region and in fact there might be things
that you can do in your region with Google Photos
that I can't do here in Canada and you're going,
Steve, why aren't you showing this amazing feature
that we all use?
That's because it's different depending on where you are.
So let's dive in and talk about
setting up your Google Photos account
right from the beginning.
Now, it is included, Google Photos is included for free
with your Gmail account.
Now, you're going to use Google Photos both on your desktop
but you're also gonna be using it mainly on your smartphone.
Now, when you first set up your account,
if you're on an iPhone,
you have to download the Google Photos app to your iPhone.
If you're on Android, the Google app Photos app
is probably there already in your Google account
but let me just walk you through the entire process
of setting it up on the iPhone.
What you do is you basically, you go to the App Store
and you do a search for Google Photos.
When you find Google Photos,
you can then download the app to your smartphone
and then you will sign in to that app
using your normal Google account.
So the accounts that we were talking about
in the earlier episodes of this series,
that's exactly what you use in order to sign in
to your Google Photos account.
Once you've done that, once the app is on your smartphone,
you will give it permission
to look at your library of photos
and then it will sync all of the photos
from your smartphone to the cloud
to the Google Photos account in the cloud.
Once it's syncing to the cloud,
you can then access your Google Photos
either on your desktop or on your smartphone.
Now, be warned that the very first time
that you set up Google Photos, it will take some time.
In fact, it may take several days
for it to sync all of the photos from your library
depending on how many photos you have.
It takes some time for it to sync
but once that initial sync has happened,
then the subsequent syncs are gonna happen very quickly.
Now, I'm not sure if it's the same in the Android world
as it is in the iOS world
but unless I open my Google Photos app on my smartphone,
I find that it doesn't sync the photos.
Now, that might be something unusual in my setup,
I don't think it is,
so what you have to make sure you do is you start to rely
on searching through your photos in Google Photos
as opposed to in the iPhone Photos app.
It's all the same photos.
The same images are there.
Mainly the same capabilities are there
but though if you use the Google Photos app
when you're on your smartphone,
then you're sure that everything synced
and you're working with the same copy
of your photos all the time,
regardless of whether you're on the desktop
or in the smartphone.
That's just kind of a little tip
or the way that I like to run using Google Photos.
Now, let's spend some time
talking about basic photo management and sharing.
And we can do all of the sharing,
all of the management of the photos
from either our desktop application or our smartphone.
I've got them both open here for you to see
and the exact same file is available to us.
Now, let's just actually take a look at the desktop
just for a moment.
And as you can see down the left-hand side here,
we've got a series of different menu items
that allow us to sort the photos which is set up right now
as a chronological offering.
We could also view them by albums
because you can sort your photos into albums,
and the Google Assistant will use artificial intelligence
to sort your photos for you into different collections
for you automatically.
There's a sharing menu here which allows us to manage
how we share photos and albums
and then a photo book option
which allows us to create digital products from our photos.
Before I leave this, if you want to create,
sorry, upload other photos from your desktop
that are not on your smartphone,
you can do that right from the desktop here,
the desktop uploader,
will allow you to upload additional photos
so you've got total flexibility of dealing
with the exact same collection of photos on your smartphone
or on your desktop.
Let's go to the smartphone for a moment
and take a look at the exact same photo library
and we see the same options along the bottom here
with photos, albums, the Assistant,
and sharing all available to us there.
Now, we have some basic editing capabilities
that we can do right in Google Photos on the smartphone.
For example, if I wanted to take this photo
that I took of Farley kinda having a nap there on the floor,
just kind of all chilled out, I can do basic simple editing.
Adjusting filters, the color, the brightness,
that sorts of cropping the photo
by tapping on the little sliders here
that brings me into a simple editing mode
that allows me to do some basic correction
and basic cropping and brightness and contrast adjustment
of the photo right here that is available to me immediately.
Now, I am going to discard that.
Additionally, one of the things
that we wanna do the most with our photos
is not necessarily edit them,
although that's pretty darn useful,
but we wanna often share that photo with others.
So that ability, the ability to be able to share the photos
as far as on iOS is concerned,
it's a little upload icon over here
that allows us to open the photo,
choose which photos by putting the blue check mark on them,
and choosing what tool we want to use to share those photos.
So if I wanted to publish them to Instagram,
I could do it directly here.
If I wanted to share with any individuals,
here's all of my individuals I can share with
or I can say put it straight into a text message here,
I can share the photo through any
of these different sharing mechanisms
that are available to me.
So it's a very social aspect.
Google Photos actually grew out of Google's social network,
the Google+ social network.
It's kind of the most valuable piece of that network.
So sharing and social sharing of your photos
is a big part of the entire Google experience.
Now, that's on the smartphone.
If we wanna do the same basic things on our desktop,
we have a few extra features.
If I go in and grab that same photo here,
let's rotate the photo here so that it's a,
let's just go in here to manage the photo
and let's rotate it.
There we go.
Oops!
There we go, that way there.
Ah, there we go!
We've got it nicely rotated.
And we can again go in
and we can do the same kinda basic adjustments
of color, lighting, et cetera.
What's pop?
Oh, pop makes it really pop.
Oh, isn't that cute?
Okay.
It allows you to do all of those same basic editing things
to the photo but once again, we have the sharing menu.
Now, it looks slightly different here.
It's got this kinda three points is the sharing menu here
but again, we can go and we can share this photo
to the people by email, by link,
we can share it in Facebook, Twitter,
other social platforms,
we can do all of the sharing of photos from the menu here.
So that is for sharing our photos
which works pretty much the exact same for albums
is all done through either the desktop
or the mobile interface.
Now, before I leave this menu,
I should talk to you about some of the other features
that we see here.
One of the most important is the information one
which basically tells us where it was taken,
it gives us all of the information about the date,
the camera settings, the location,
all of that information is available in the information
which is the metadata which is within the photo.
And I'm gonna point out something here right away.
I haven't done anything with this photo.
I just took it the other day.
And look at this.
It already identifies this as Farley.
How the heck does it know it's Farley, are you asking?
I'll get into showing you that in a few moments.
That's one of the most amazing aspects of Google Photo
is its face recognition technology.
Well, in this case, it's not even recognizing Farley's face.
It's more recognizing his hiney,
but it is recognizing it as Farley quite accurately.
Next, let's talk about those digital products
that I was gonna talk about.
And for that, we can go back into our main menu here
and we can go to Photo Books and this allows us
to choose collections of photos that we have
and to turn them into books,
coffee table books that we can share very quickly
and very easily.
Now, this is something that you wanna spend some time
pulling your best photos together, laying it out,
putting together a wonderful memory book
but it's one of the really nice aspects of Google Photos.
And the fact that we're uploading photos
in fairly high resolution means that these Photo Books
are gonna look spectacular when we create them.
It's never easier to do than it is now.
So that's one of the nice additional features
that are built into Google Photos.
This leads us to one of the most amazing aspects
of Google Photos and it comes down
to how it recognized Farley.
Google Photos recognizes people's faces
and will attach those faces to the contacts that you have
in your Google Contacts and how it all works
is through some amazing machine learning
as they look at images and parse out the information
from all of those photos.
So there's a variety of different ways
that you can put people in to this, bring people in,
but let me show you.
I found this photo.
Here's a Christmas lunch that we had
with a couple of buddies of mine,
the old school computer friends of mine
and when I open this photo,
do you see that this one guy here,
it says I see him in another picture.
Google recognizes that Steve is in a different picture
so if I now click on this picture here, it says add a name.
Who is this?
Who is this fine-looking young man
who is in several of your photos, Steve?
So I'm gonna add his name.
I'm gonna do it privately so you can't see.
I'm gonna blur it out but...
There he is.
And so now, anywhere that Steve is,
it recognizes him
and now I can search on his name for other photos.
See?
It's recognized him from this lunch in December of 2018
and way back at our wedding with his lovely wife Barb.
And look, here he is.
Where was he in this photo?
Look at how unbelievably good this is.
It found him here in this photo here.
This is one of the most creepy
and one of the most amazing aspects of Google Photos.
So remember how I said Farley was in there?
Let me start typing in Farley's name.
So this is now instead of organizing by album
or organizing by date or organizing about location,
now your photos can be organized by people, by individuals,
because if you assign somebody's face to an image,
Google does the rest of the work for you
so now if I wanted to see a picture of Farley,
I just type in Farley and I click
and here's all my photos with said (laughs) Farley!
Oh, good heavens!
He was doing that weird one with the hat,
there's some nice photos of Farley,
there's Farley in the background behind Emma and I.
Look at all the photos of Farley
that we have available to us here.
Isn't that great?
And it's not just for dogs, no, no, no!
It also does our family cat.
So here's all our photos of the cat, Mimi.
Mimi gets short-shifted here at Dotto Tech.
I always have the dog but seldom do I have the cat,
but there she is.
She's a beautiful cat, isn't she?
She is just a lovely cat.
So there's my pictures of Mimi.
But this gets better.
People, pets, locations, watch this.
Let's type in Christmas
and up comes all the photos
that look like they're Christmas-related.
Family, presents, all of the different
photos Christmas-related
including the sad eaten wreath, it recognizes.
Do you wanna do more?
Let's look at fishing photos.
Fishing!
It's photos of us fishing,
different photos of me on the water with fish
and in different fishing-type environments.
That's the magic
of the Google's Photos automatic recognition.
We take so many pictures now with our smartphones.
We take dozens, hundreds of pictures.
Some of us take pictures every single day
and organizing those photos
that we take so many pictures now
that the sheer volume of pictures that we take
can mean that we lose photos or photos completely get lost,
organizing our photos would be an absolute nightmare.
This intelligent ability to be able to search
and discover based on content of the photos
using a computer search, using Google Search
which is what Google is best at, search!
Using Google Search to search for the images that we need,
that we want means that we're gonna find the images
that are important to us when we need to find them.
The final thing that I wanna show you is, again,
something which is just amazing and that is Google Lens.
Now, Google Lens is Google's artificial intelligence
that's built in that analyzes photos.
Let me see if I can find a good example for you here.
So you go and you take a picture.
I got something.
You take a picture of something
and it could be a tree, it could be a location,
and if Google can search
and can figure out what that image is,
Google will bring back the same kind of information
as it would have presented to you had you searched for that.
So this works great if you're looking at a flower and say,
what type of flower is that?
You take a picture, it'll come back
with probably the type of flower it is.
But here, I was on a flight
and my buddies wrote a book, YouTube Secrets.
I'm sorry I don't have any picture of a flower,
but watch this.
The Google Lens icon, if you have it available in your area,
it's that little kind of magnifying glass type icon
second from the right.
When I tap on that, watch what happens.
You see the little dots appear
and Google analyzes the image
and it comes back with what it finds in the image.
In this particular case, it is!
It's a book by Benji Travis and Sean Cannell,
YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing.
It recognized and parsed out the information
of what was in that photo!
Google Lens will again blow your mind
based on Google Search bringing you back information.
Now, that caveat I mentioned off the top of the video,
if you have Google Lens,
Google Lens is one of those tools
that is not available in every geography
so if you don't have it, my apologies.
I hope you get it soon.
It is truly an incredible, incredible technology,
and that's us just scratching the surface of Google Photos.
We have other videos on Google Photos
but I think the best thing for you to do with Google Photos
is to dive in and to start using it
and to make it your go-to photo app.
It's replaced all other photo apps for me
as far as my online storage and in photo management.
It's just that good
and it has that much potential for growth in the future.
I have no idea where Google's gonna take it
but where they brought it so far,
I think you'll agree, it's pretty darn impressive.
That's it, that's our fifth of our series on Google Apps.
If you haven't checked out
any of the other videos in this series,
they'll all be linked in a playlist
at the end of this video.
Would love your comments and your questions, your concerns.
I read each and every comment that you post here on YouTube
so I'm looking forward to hearing back from you on that.
Now, this is, as I say, the fifth in our series of videos.
If you don't wanna miss the rest of these videos,
make sure that you have subscribed to our channel
and hit that notification bell
so that you hear when we upload our new videos.
I look forward to the opportunity to share those with you
in the not-too-distant future.
Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming a castle!