How to Use Google Photos - Beginner's Guide

everyone in today's video i want to show you how to use google photos it's one of my favorite apps out there at least in the last five years or so so i wanted to kind of give you a complete guide on how to use google photos and why you should use google photos all the benefits that come with it now google photos is available for the iphone and tablets like the ipad for apple devices and it's also available in android devices actually on android here is the default app for photos called google photos you could

always access it too on the computer at google.com photos now there are four really big benefits of using google photos so let me say what those are first and then we'll walk through using the application here the very first one is is a great way to free up space on your phone especially if you have an iphone and you don't have the upgraded icloud to put your photos on there you could use google photos completely for free it has unlimited storage up to a certain quality that we'll talk about for backing up all your photos

and all your videos too really incredible the second benefit of it is it's one of the easiest way i've ever found for syncing up your phone and your computer with the same photo library so you have photos on your computer you want on your phone this will do it for you you have stuff on your phone you want on your computer this will do it for you because the google photo platform is on the cloud so when you sync it all up it all is under the same umbrella under your google account now the third

benefit is it makes photo sharing so so easy doesn't matter if you do it on the computer or your phone photo sharing individual photos or entire albums the sharing of photos becomes so so easy and number four and my favorite way i use google photo is because it organizes things automatically in a way that it will take you forever to do what i mean by this is it organizes pictures by when they were taken where they were taken who's in the photo the type of photo it is it will just do all of that for

you automatically it makes it really nice and easy to search things in the future something that's really hard to do with different photo apps so those four reasons are why i use google photo and i think you should too so let's jump in here and start using it so the first thing you want to do is you want to get the google photo app you can do this on the computer but i find it a lot easier with the mobile app and go ahead and download it if you already have an android device you already

have this app just look for google photos on your android on the iphone here i'm going to go ahead and open it and the first time you do log into this app it's going to ask you to sign in with your google account again this is all under the same google email if you have a gmail for example use that to sign into your google account if you don't have one you will need to create a google account once you do you should land here which is the home page of google photos so make sure

you do that first now here the first thing you want to do is we want to turn on backup and sync backup and sync basically means it's going to scan your device it doesn't matter if you're on the android again or the iphone they look the same they work the same it will scan your device and copy everything from your phone or tablet or computer onto google photos using backup and sync let me show you how to turn it on click your profile icon right here and right here mine says backup complete because i already

turned this on but yours is going to have an option for backup and sync click it and click settings on top there if it takes you here but you want to look for backup and sync and make sure the slider is turned on here and it will automatically in the background started scanning your photos and videos and backing them up now let's talk about the quality of how things are getting backed up right here it says upload size let me click this to explain something it's going to upload things based on a certain resolution photos

is 16 megapixels which is pretty high it's high quality but it might not be the original quality especially if you took things in a higher resolution or even raw format with the newer iphones so you do have to sacrifice that if you want to use this with the free unlimited option if you do use the original you see this number here says 15 gigabytes i have 15 gigabytes of storage for free if i go over that the original is going to ask me to upgrade and pay and it's couple bucks a month here for getting

100 gigabytes if you want to do that but i don't care about that the high quality is perfect but when it comes to videos you got to be careful there because it won't back up the 4k videos only 1080p now this is again depending on what you're doing but usually i don't take videos in 4k and this may change in the future but that's the case right now so pay attention to that change this to original if you want and if you get to 15 gigabytes here you will have to update okay so back to

the home page let me show you what you're looking at here the things you see on top these are kind of like instagram story or facebook story where you're gonna see a highlight of things from your recent past so a year two years and so on are gonna show up over here you could click any of them to watch those that's just a preview of what you've done with this app in the past and using backup and sync but your recent photos for example for today i was taking some photos in the office here and

you could see those over here just from that section and everything is going to get organized if i keep going it's going to show yesterday the day before and so on but i think you get the idea here of what this home page is going to show you under the photo tab i do want to click on one because i do want to show you some of the options you have over here which let's go ahead and do with this photo here you could go ahead and edit photos if you click this option right here

there's a bunch of pre-existing filters that you could apply to any photo so beyond all the things that i showed you as a benefit of this app you also have that here you have things that make it lighter or darker you could change the color making things black and white and so on so let's say i want to make this black and white and you have this rotation here where you could go ahead and crop things differently or rotate them if you like just to make things look perfect and i'm going to press done and

let's go ahead and press save on top and i'm going to make this a copy so it saves the original colored one here as well so that's the option on the bottom you could always use google lens here where it basically recognizes what's in your photo and you could see you scanned it and found some things for me that's the google lens that's very very power powerful here in this section as well one of the other reasons i like this because it could actually recognize what's in my photo you could always delete things here but

be careful because if you do back them up from your device and you remove them from your device which on the iphone specially is going to tell you do you want to remove it from your device to save your space this is the only place your photo is going to be if you removed it from your device now i'm super paranoid so what i did is i actually used google photo as a primary way to backup my photos but i also paid for icloud and i back up my photos on icloud too in the apple

ecosystem so i have it in two different places that's the way i back things up you don't have to do that if you just trust this and want to remove things from here but it was worth a couple bucks for me to upgrade on icloud and i'm using the free version of google photos now let's see what else we have on top we could press this play option some photos that were taken with some of the cameras that have this live option it will show you this quick view i'm going to pause that you could

cast something so this lets you cast it to different devices maybe that you have around the house using wi-fi and you could favorite this on top if you want to add it to your favorite right there using the star and the three dots here give you some options for example it shows you the original resolution and how this was taken it shows you what device it was taken on and it shows you how it was banked up in this case the high quality because i didn't change that in the setting now you could add it

to albums here but i'll show you some of the way this organizes things automatically you could archive it and you could order a photo which is really interesting or save it as pdf or save it as a video some really cool options under every single photo here that you have now in this case i don't want to do any of that but i just want to show you what was available here and including the order photo option using canvas or photo prints or books so so useful okay so that's the home page the photos page

let's go to search this is where this becomes even more powerful so you see on top here now i have to blur this just for people's identity i'll keep the dogs in here but you see people and pets i did not create these folders so let me click a pet here now this is what happened here when google photo brought these into the app here you could see that it recognized that these are photos of my dog and he made an album for me that's incredible and it kind of freaked me out the first time

i saw it but now everything is organized i could click on any dog any cat or any person and see all the photos on my phone that are backed up on google photos here on this section really really cool so again i'll go ahead and blur this here but these are just all the different people all my friends all my family members here that i've taken a picture of and google photo has organized all of them into different folders so if i click on any of these he opens a folder with all those people in

it you could go ahead and search things based on location based on photo type even based on people's name if you took the time and gave people name when you're organizing your photos very very powerful search bar up here and it also organizes things by map based on the metadata of the photo meaning where was the picture taken and google does a good job explaining how they know that and then by things too so menus towers i took pictures of towers let's see what that looks like actually that's funny so here just the towers in

disney world when i was making a commercial there it looks like it's pulling those over here so that's really cool and you could see other categories here screenshots selfies videos 360 photos everything is put in categories i did not do this this was done by google photos everything was organized for me under the search tab let's go to library now and library i showed you how to make something a favorite but once you do they show up over here if you archive things they also show up over here so these two folders i use all

the time and if you move something to the trash they will move over here and you could empty the trash at any time and then you could create more albums over here looks like the disney album and cars and dogs all these albums i created and put things there this is just copy of my mobile upload so this was automatically created for me but i really like this page especially the favor icon and creating albums here on the other pages and then viewing them over here so you could see some of the jobs that i've

done in hawaii they show up over here and some other things even my facebook profile pictures were backed up over here from ios from some of the commercial shoots everything shows up very nice and organized over here now what if you want to share a photo let me show you how that works just press the share icon right here on any photo and it's going to show you people you could text this to it's going to let you use airdrop if you're on a mac send it as a message copy it use instagram email all

that is available for you but i'll show you how to do this with a whole album right now it's really useful so here's a whole album and to share a whole album i could add photos to it as well here if i want to add more but i could just press share right here and i get the same exact option and people that are part of google photo will show up over here i could search them and this will use their gmail here or their google account here to share so if i select someone here

and press send it will send that google photo album to them and that's one of my other favorite features about this app because i could share not just one photo but an entire album and i could order prints of one photo or an entire album using this method and i'll show you one last thing here which is you could add more description to a picture to make it easier to search later on so on a picture press the three dots on top of it and you could see that i gave this one a description here

but you could type out whatever you want and then use whatever you typed out here for search so it's just giving more information to google photo about what this picture is and you could see more about the details of it here so it knows the date and time it was taken it knows my description he knows my location and he knows probably who's in the picture again which i showed you with that recognition of creating those different folders and at any time i could change any of that including editing the date and time over here

and that's your introduction to google photos and i specifically wanted to focus on the mobile app but now everything that you learned here applies on the google photos website as well at google.com photos and as long as you use the same google account to sign in and backup and sync is activated you'll get to access all your photos on your computer now that you've added to your phone's app here thanks so much for watching i post these type of videos every single day on this channel with over a thousand videos and i hope to catch

you next time