Articles about Google Photos

Google Photos is set to enhance your photo editing experience with an exciting update. The search giant is bringing a suite of AI-powered editing tools, including the much-loved Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light, to all users for free, starting May 15.

Previously exclusive to subscribers, these features will now be accessible to anyone using Google Photos, with no subscription required!

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If you used Google Takeout to download an archive of your Google Photos content, there's a chance that someone else may have ended up with your videos.

The company has admitted that for a few days in November last year, "some videos in Google Photos were exported to unrelated users' archives". This means that not only could your videos have ended up on a stranger's computer, but also that you may have received random videos belonging to someone else.

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Embracing the notion of data portability, Facebook has launched a new tool that lets users transfer their photos and videos from Facebook to other online services.

The social network is kicking things off by making it possible to transfer data from Facebook to Google Photos. It comes as part of Facebook's participation in the open-source Data Transfer Project and the ability to transfer to other services will be added soon.

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With the launch of the Pixel 4, many people were surprised to find that Google was not offering full-quality photos backups as it had done in the past. For iPhone users, however, the use of the super-efficient HEIC format means it is a different story.

iPhone users have been happy to discover that their original photos are being backed up for free because the compression used by HEIC is more efficient than Google's JPEG compression. Google refers to this as a "bug" and says it is working to address it.

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If you have come to rely on Google Drive to automatically backup the images you have in Google Photos, you may have to find another option very soon. Google has announced that as of July, the way Google Drive and Google Photos integrate with each other is changing.

In short, Google Photos will no longer be automatically synchronize with Google Drive. The change is coming because Google says it has, "feedback that the connection between these services is confusing".

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Google+ is nearing the end of the line, and ahead of this Google has announced that its Notifications Widget is also to be killed off.

The widget -- which appears in the upper right-hand corner of various Google products including Gmail -- lets users know when there are notifications for various services such as Google Photos, Hangouts Chat and Google+. But when March rolls around, you'll have to rely on alerts for individual services instead.

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As a tool to backup your photos and videos to the cloud, Google Photos should give you a fair degree of control over how and when you want the backups to be performed. However, a new update to the popular app on Android manages to do quite the opposite, removing a very useful feature -- which is sure to frustrate some users.

Google Photos has dropped the backup while charging option from the settings menu, forcing users to either perform backups manually or accept that backups can happen anytime their smartphone or tablet is connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network.

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It's not really the time of year for spring cleaning, but Google is turbo-charging the Archive option in Google Photos with the added power of artificial intelligence. Archiving is only a recent addition to Google Photos, making it possible to clear out the clutter from your timeline, and now it has been boosted by AI.

The idea acknowledges the fact that while we might take a photo of something -- such as snapping a poster to save writing down dates and times of an upcoming event -- this isn’t something we necessarily need to see after it has served its purpose.

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We are finally in the month of May, meaning the holiday of Mother's Day is almost here. If your mom is still living, you should take the opportunity to spend time with her on that day. If traveling to her is not possible, picking up the phone is a good option too. Whatever you can do to make her feel loved and appreciated is a positive thing.

If your mom -- or any mother in your life -- is tech-savvy and uses a computer, Google Photos has a new feature that could really make her day. Called "Mother's Day Movies," it prompts you to select multiple photos of the mom and her children from your Google Photos library. The service then creates a "movie" using the images, which you can share with her.

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Google and photography seem to go hand in hand. The company's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones take very high-quality pictures, while its Photos app for Android and iOS is a brilliant way to both store and categorize images in the cloud.

Today, Google takes its passion for photography to another level with an all-new app for macOS. Dubbed 'Featured Photos Screensaver' it creates a screensaver using images that are sourced from user photos which were uploaded to Google+. Don't worry about privacy, folks -- these are images that users have agreed to share. Google+ photographers can choose to opt-out if they prefer.

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Despite the name, smartphones are generally used for anything but traditional phone related activities -- and one of the most popular usages of the devices is snapping photographs. But while an entire generation of photographers has grown up with digital photography, there are plenty of physical photos out there waiting to be digitized.

Google thinks it has the answer in the form of PhotoScan. The app is available for iOS and Android, and it transforms your smartphone into a scanner so you can preserve old photos. Unsurprisingly, it is packed with smarts to simplify the whole process, and it all ties in neatly with Google Photos.

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Google Photos has received a fairly significant update that sees the arrival of four key new features. Three of them are focused on sharing and viewing your photos, but the fourth is an AI-powered auto-rotate function that ensures you'll no longer have to look at photos on their sides.

As Pixel and Pixel XL owners (as well as other Android users who don't mind a drop in quality) have unlimited Google Photo storage at their disposal, Google is introducing a Facebook-style restrospective feature. Google says it will "make it easier to look back at your fondest memories", but there is more to discover.

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Flickr has made a big comeback after giving users a whopping 1 TB of free storage, but now it is ruining everything by making a very important feature of the service available only to paying customers.

Flickr has announced that Auto-Uploadr, the software that enables users to upload photos from a desktop device, will only be offered to Pro and Pro+ subscribers, leaving users on the free tier out in the cold.

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It has been a long time coming, but when 15 March rolls around Google will no longer support the desktop Picasa app -- and this is just the start of the shutdown. Picasa is being gradually shuttered in favor of Google Photos as the search giant focuses its energy on a single photo service.

So what does this mean for Picasa fans? Well, the good news is that there's nothing to do in terms of migrating content from one service to another. Picasa Web Album content can be viewed, edited and shared through Google Photos, but if you don't want to migrate then it will be archived from 1 May.

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Ho. Ho. Ho. Google gives early Christmas presents this holiday, by focusing on ways that families (or roomies) can better share that which is contextually precious: music, photos, online, payments, and videos. But Big G also trails Apple, which already offers its customers many of the same benefits.

Fresh today: Google Photos Shared Albums, which applies collaborative concepts that Apps users should find familiar. "People receiving the shared album can join to add their own photos and videos, and also get notifications when new pics are added", according to the official announcement. "You can even save photos and videos from a shared album to your Google Photos library, so that you can hold onto them even if you weren’t the one holding the camera".

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