Google Photos

If you got out riding the last two weekends you probably forgot it was the middle of winter. With temperatures in the 60s and 70s if felt more like spring time. Last weekend I went to Cranbury to do the Saturday ride with Tru. This Saturday I did a one way solo ride down the shore and met my wife there to do some work on the condo. Today's ride was sunny and warm enough that I didn't even need a jacket. When I got to the shore the clouds started to roll in. Then when I entered Seagirt the temperature dropped by 10 degrees and I was surrounded by a dense fog so I didn't get the scenic ride up the beach I was expecting. I'm glad I had my taillight and there wasn't a lot of traffic because it was hard to see more than a 200 feet ahead.

Whenever I ride I take a few pictures that I like to share. I usually just post them to the blog but sometimes I like to create an album especially for the trips I take. It makes it easier to share with friends and family. I have used Shutterfly and Photobucket to upload photos and create albums in the past but these services either don't have the features I want, have too many popup adds, or charge once you got over a certain limit of photos or views.

When I went to Alaska I knew I would be taking a lot of pictures that I would want to share so I looked for new photo sharing service. After looking over the choices I went with Google Photos. Google Photos my not be a very feature rich service but it does the simple things like storing photos and creating albums really well and being Google is also free with no advertising.

Google Photos are linked to your gmail account so if you have a gmail account you have access to Google Photos. There are apps for your phone or your computer that make uploading photos to Google Photos easy. Once you install these apps any photo you take on your phone is automatically uploaded. (If you are worried about using up all your mobile data you can set the app to only upload when on WiFi). On the computer once you set up the app it will automatically upload any photo put into the folders you choose. This make storing and accessing all you photos really easy.

What I do when I get home from a ride is to dump all my photos on to my Mac that I uses as a media server. The Mac is hooked up to my TV and I use it to stream content to my TV as well as store all my photos and music. A few minutes after I dump the photos they are available on Google Photos. I can now access these photos on my phone or any other computer with an internet connection.

When I write my blog no matter which computer I am using I can get to any photo I took and add it to the blog. From Google Photos I can search for photos,download a photo, edit it, or get a link to it to share with others. The search feature is kind of cool you put in an object you want to look for and it will actually look through you photos and find it. For example I entered the work "plane" and it returned any photo I had with a plane in it. The search is not 100% accurate but it pretty good.

Google Photos also allows you to create photo albums. You simple create a new album and just add photos to it. You can then get a link to share the album. For what I need Google Photos is perfect. There are two upload options High Quality or Original. Google offers unlimited space for High Quality which will compress photos over a certain size (16 M) and limit videos to 1080p. Original will not compress any photo or video but it limits your space to the space you have for you Google account. Unless you use a really good  DSLR you can go with the High Quality and probably won't see any difference since the photos from most point and shoot cameras are less then 16 M.

Because of the unlimited storage I have uploaded every digital picture I have taken since 1999. This means I have a safe backup for all my photos and I can now access them from any internet connected device. If you are looking for a good way to backup and save photos I highly recommend Google Photos,