- I know.
We all have so many photos
that getting on top of them
and getting them organized
seems to be an almost insurmountable task.
Can Google Photos help us
especially organizing our old photos?
Yes, I think it can
and I will show you how today on "Dottotech."
(upbeat music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing on this fine day?
We are gonna spend some time today using Google Photos,
Google's fantastic free photo management tool
and I'm gonna show you some ideas that I have
of ways to use Google Photos
especially to organize those older photos.
I think it's pretty easy to use Google Photos
moving ahead when we're taking pictures on our smart phone
and having the app running on our phone
and having it automatically syncing
and logging everything into Google Photos for us.
It's pretty easy and we feel pretty confident
about our new photos.
At least, more confident than we do about our old photos.
Well let's spend some time today
and talk about how we get those photos in
and how we use Google Photos to better organize
those old photos and we'll even touch
a little bit on how we can also improve
and edit those photos, at least a little bit,
within Google Photos.
Now, let's begin with the basics in case it's new to you.
Now we've got several good videos and tutorials
on using Google Photos
which we will link here
and we will link in the description below
or in the blog post for you to check out
if you wanna learn more about using Google Photos
and the basic operation in Google Photos.
But effectively what happens is
Google Photos is a cloud based service
that provides the ability for you
to upload all of your photos,
especially ones that you take on your smart phone,
to the Google Photos cloud service.
Now, in some ways you probably look at this
as a terrific backup service, which it is,
but really it's designed more as a file sharing service.
Google Photos grew out of Google's efforts
to create a social network
and the Google Photos,
the basis of Google Photos is really designing a system
that's in the cloud that makes it easy
for us to access and share our photos
more than anything else.
Now, here's the number one thing
we all need to understand with Google Photos
when it comes to organizing our existing or our old photos,
is forget about folders.
Back in the day,
actually, like, maybe last week,
those of us who were organizing our photos
on our computer, typically used folders
to create an infrastructure,
so that we understood what photos were where
and we could find out photos in the future.
Photos, folders for photos are no longer
the way that you are gonna organize your photos.
So, as a matter of fact, when you go into Google Photos,
be it on the smart phone or on your computer,
you can't even create folders.
You can create albums but not folders.
Recognize that Google Photos is gonna organize your images
based on the information in that photo.
The date it was taken,
the location it was taken,
if it can identify who was in that picture
and which photo album you put it in.
Those are the organizational criteria
that Google Photos is going to create.
So when we are creating new ongoing content,
it's pretty evident, I mean, based on the date,
based on the location,
it's pretty easy for you to organize your photos that way.
But when you're scanning in or importing old photos,
it becomes a little bit more problematic.
So that's where I wanna start today's demo,
is going in and showing you,
first of all, how we bring new photos into Google Photos
and then how we organize them once we're there.
Sound like a plan?
I thought you might like it
This is my Google Photos account,
which has now thousands of photos in it
and I'm gonna be showing you today's demo
primarily on the computer today.
This is running a Mac but it runs identically in Windows.
But, most of the stuff we could also do,
you could also do in the smart phone application as well.
It's just easier for me to demo it on the computer.
Now, Google Photos organizes our photos
kind of out of the gate, not by folders as I mentioned,
but instead it organizes your photos by the data
that it finds within those photos.
First and most importantly is the date a photo was taken
which is incredibly easy when you're using your smart phone
to take the picture
because all of that metadata is recorded,
the location, the date.
It's all recorded
and then when it syncs to Google Photos
all of that information is conveyed.
So here's my photos that I took yesterday
and if we scroll down here on the right hand side,
we can go back in time
and be able to look at photos from any time in the past
or up to today by the date
which is a great organizational tool.
The other thing Google Photos allows us to do
is organize our photos into albums.
So the more albums that you create
of clusters of photographs that are related,
the easier it is for you to find them in the future
and the third thing that Google Photos does
is it actually looks inside the image of the photo itself
and it tries to identify either activities or individuals.
It'll do facial recognition.
Now this isn't available in every region
because of local laws
but for most of the people who view these videos
you're going to have facial recognition built in as well
so that if I wanna just find pictures of my dog, Farley,
there's Farley right there,
I can just click on Farley
and here are all my pictures of Farley.
How do you feel about being part of the demo, Farley?
Exciting day?
Yeah, he's just, he's just beside himself.
But so there we can quickly search
and I love this facial recognition.
And it goes beyond facial recognition.
You can also put in activities.
If I type in fishing,
it will bring up all sorts of pictures
of fishing as well,
which I find to be just incredibly valuable.
Put anything in and if it's in one of your photos,
the chances are, it will identify it.
But today's topic was importing our older photos
and organize using Google Photos
to organize our older photos.
So there's some challenges that are attached.
Now, first of all, we've got different reasons
that we're gonna want to import our photos.
Sometimes we just wanna back them up.
Other times, we wanna organize them
so we can find them in the future.
We might wanna share them with others.
We might wanna be creating an environment
where we can share them.
We've got all these different motivations
for bringing our photos in
and we've also got a bewildering array
of different sources that are gonna
deliver the photos to us.
Some photos might be sent to us by email.
A friend might share them.
Or we might scan them in with a scanner.
We might take pictures with our camera
to bring some photos in
or they might be found on an old disk,
an old CD that we're importing
that was scanned years ago
and now we're finally finding this treasure trove
of old photos and we're importing them.
There's a lot of different ways
that we bring photos in
but if we can make sure that they have
as much meta information as possible as we bring them in,
then Google Photos is gonna be better able to organize them
and we're gonna have a lot more control,
and we're gonna have,
it's gonna just be a more successful venture
when we need to find that photo in the future.
So here's another creative way.
I'm, I was looking back through my Facebook feed
and I found this picture of me from,
when was it?
2010.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a musical
and I was singing and I like this picture
and I don't have this picture in my collection,
so I want this picture.
You find pictures of yourself on Facebook
that other people shared.
Let's import this as one of our older photos
and use it as a demo.
So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna right click on this picture
and I'm going to save the image just to my desktop
and I'm gonna actually save it into my,
I've got a photo here of old photos.
They're right there.
I'm gonna save it
and it's just given it this stupid name.
Facebook gives it this name.
I'm gonna import it as is
without anything different.
It's just importing a jpeg image
and let's import it into Google Photos now.
So here's Google Photos.
Bringing all photos in is the same process.
You go upload.
Navigate to that photo
and then import the photo and it will bring it in.
And there it is.
It's imported that photo
and it's asking, do I wanna add it to an album
or add it in,
or share an album.
I'll just bring it in and bring it in
and create a new album,
which is gonna be called today's demo.
Demo.
I can get right of this album later
but it's always good to organize your photos
into an album when you bring them in
because it's easy to find.
Now typically speaking,
you're gonna be bringing in more than one photo
but there it is.
Here's my new photo
that I just brought in.
So let's have a look see
at what the story is
with this brand new photo that we have.
So when I click on the photo,
I get the meta information in the right hand side.
And let's take a look.
It's details are that it's date is today.
This is very common.
This photo we know was taken in, what was it?
Let's take a look at the day it was posted.
It was posted in, it's from November of 2010
because the production date's right there.
Okay.
So we know it was in November of 2010
but it says right here that it's today.
So the first thing I'm gonna do to organize this photo
is I'm gonna change its date to 2010.
I'm gonna make it November
and let's make it November.
What, what are the dates of it again?
Let's just take a look at the dates of the performance.
Dates of performance (mumbles).
Let's say it was the second day.
It's close enough.
There we go.
November 27, 2010.
There it is.
Now I'm saving that
and now this photograph will slot in to that time.
Let's take a look at what else
we can do with the photo at this point here
because sometimes you're gonna wanna do
some color correction or some editing of the photo.
Now Google Photos isn't the world's best photo editor
but it does a little bit of basic photo correction.
If we trust it and ask it to,
if we click here on the editing feature,
we can ask it to automatically correct the lighting
and the brightness and the color.
We can also add different sort of filters
that will create different looks if we want,
especially if we're gonna be preparing it for Instagram
or sharing it.
I just kinda like to,
I just kinda typically speaking will trust Google Photos
to correct the color for me
and then if I want to,
you can also just tweak a couple of the things.
I think the color,
just because of the lighting there.
There we go.
That might be a little bit better.
Let's...
There we go.
I'm happier with that like that.
There we go.
And once that photo is done,
I will, oh!
If you wanna check and compare,
you just click on hold on it.
That was the original.
Release.
That's the original.
Does it look better to you?
I don't know.
I'm not that great a photo editor
but it's good enough for me.
I'm gonna say, "Okay, done."
So now this is being saved.
So this is the way that we import photos
to our, to, to Google Photos
and if you take your time and go through the photos,
straighten them out,
do a little bit of color correction
and check the metadata on the photos,
you will then have a photo that will be,
it'll be easier for you to find
the photo in the future when you need to,
especially if you put it into an album.
Now, there's one other thing that it's done here.
Look, it's asking me, it says,
I recognize Steve Dotto in this photo
even though I look quite a bit different in this photo
than I do now, but it recognized me and so it's correct.
I will leave it as that saying that is Steve.
And I can add a description.
And what was the, what was the name of this show?
It was,
"Good News"
an old school musical.
So there it is.
"Good News."
There it is.
Done.
Now, let's go back
and we should see that if I go to my photos
that photo should not be available at the top,
but if I scroll down to 2010,
if I scroll down to 2010,
and there it is, the date in 2010.
I don't have a lot of photos in my,
in my Google Photos from that vintage,
but there you have it available at that date.
Now, I would be remiss
if I took on this topic
and did not talk to you a bit
about backing up your photos.
Now, a lot of people are under the misconception
that by storing your photos in Google Photos,
you are backing them up.
In fact, you are not.
Google Photos is a great photo management tool
and it can be a good backup tool
but it's only a good backup tool
if it is indeed being used as a backup.
In other words, if you store your photos
somewhere else originally
and then you back them up to Google Photos,
if you have another backup somewhere.
So, for example, I bring all of my photos
into iPhoto on my Mac
before I upload them to Google Photos
or really, it happens pretty much at the same time
every time I plug my camera or my phone in
but all of my photos live in both locations.
So I always have a backup,
plus I have another hardware backup
of my Google, of my i, iPhotos account as well.
So I've got my photos in three places
in case catastrophe strikes.
Google Photos is a sort of a backup,
but if it's the only place that all these photos live,
it's not a backup.
It's the original.
If something happens to your Google account,
you could lose all of your photos.
Now one other good idea that's really convenient,
rather than using hardware since a lot of us
aren't using the computer as much anymore,
but instead are living our life more in a mobile environment
and our phone isn't a great place
to archive and backup our photos,
is to consider using another cloud service.
For example, you could use Dropbox or a similar service
to sync all of your photos.
If I go into my Dropbox settings,
into the preferences,
and this is a good idea now,
especially since Dropbox,
if you have a commercial Dropbox account,
Dropbox has given us a ton more storage
and they're charging us more,
so perhaps we should use it for more.
But if we take a look here in our import settings,
you see that I can upload all of my photos
and back them up automatically
and my videos for that matter
and back them up automatically into Dropbox
and I do that as well.
So I actually have four backups
if you stop and think about it.
So I believe that my photos are pretty secure
regardless of what might happen in the future.
It will take time to organize all of your photos
and, and matter of fact,
for a lot of us, our photos might never be,
what we call completely organized.
It's not like when you had a fixed number of photos
in a photo album and you,
you know, as you took a new roll of pictures,
you could easily organize those photos as they came in.
We take so many photographs today
that we need technology to help us find the photos
that we wanna find and organize the photos.
The combination of how Google Photos organizes our photos,
by date, by location,
by content, by album,
creates a structure so that we should over time
be able to create far more organizational structure
to our new photos and to our old photos
if we take a little bit of time
as we import them,
to massage the information in each photo
as it is brought in.
And for our older photos,
that should be a pleasure.
For new photos, that might be a bit of a hassle
but most of it's done automatically.
For our old photos, looking through those old photos,
spending some time with your memories,
I think is just a healthy thing to be doing.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
I look forward to your suggestions, comments.
Tell us, tell me how you back up,
how you organize your photos.
If I've missed a trick
about how to organize Google Photos here,
please, share it with me in comments.
'Til next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.