Category: Google Photos

Google is in the process of dropping a new app into the Play Store, Google PhotoScan.  As the name suggest, PhotoScan is aimed at making capturing old photos and them storing them electronically (like in Google Photos) painless but in great quality.  The app detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare.  Then you can save it to your Google Photos account with a single tap.  And remember – if you are using Google Photos and storing photos in High Quality (photos under 16MP really benefit from this) then they don’t count against your Google Drive storage quota.

Using Google PhotoScan is easy.  With the app on your Android phone, point your camera at the photo you want to scan.  In the PhotoScan app, after you line up the photo and tap the shutter button, there will be four dots on the screen.  Line up the camera with those four dots and PhotoScan stitches things together to create a high quality digital image of your photograph.

As a Google Photos Top Contributor, there are a few feature requests that I hear pretty regularly.  One of those is now off the list:  Albums in search results.  The latest update to the Photos app now shows you albums in your search results when you are looking for a photo (or in this case a set of photos) within the app.  It is a small feature mind you and frankly, should have been there a while ago.  But it is there now and it is a good proof point that Google does take user feedback seriously.  With any Google app, if there is a feature you want to see, use the Feedback feature to get that to Google.  It really does work.

Google has rolled out a small but important update to Google Photos that makes it much easier to share your photos with others.  The update gives you the ability to share a photo or set of photos with an individual contact, not just another app.  The ability to share with another app has been there for a while but to share photos with a contact, you had to dive into another app (Messages, Hangouts, etc.) to make that happen.  Now you will see your contacts in the Share menu and can share directly from within Photos, saving taps and steps.

Google Photos has been updated for Android and with it comes a long requested feature of the app.  Version 2.0 is out now in the Play Store and if you have the app already installed, you will get an OTA update for it over the course of the next few days.  The new feature?  The ability to permanently organize photos in albums.

Prior to this release, photos in an album could be moved around but they could not be sorted automatically (say oldest to newest).  This update to Google Photos brings that feature.

Google Photos, the photo and video storage app-meets-service for Android and iOS, has hit an important milestone in the Google Play Store.  The app has now been downloaded an eye watering 500 million times, putting it in very rarefied air in the Play Store.  To put this into perspective, Snapchat is only in the 100 million download range along with Pokemon Go.  Yep, the app that has been the craze for the last month hasn’t come close to where Photos is when it comes to downloads.  Even Netflix is only at 100 million.  You get the idea:  500 million is a big deal.

For those of you who haven’t tried Google Photos, is stores all of your photos online (which you can get to via https://photos.google.com) so your photos are stored not only on your phone but in the cloud.  When you use the Free Up Space feature (which was highlighted in adverts during the Olympics), the photos are deleted from your phone but kept safe online.  Even better, if you store photos in High Quality, it doesn’t count against your Google Drive storage.

A new update to Google Photos is rolling out that brings a new editing feature for videos.  The update is build 1.25.0.12950344 for those keeping score and playing Version Bingo.  In the update you will find that you now have the ability to edit a video that you have stored locally.  Those editing features include the ability to rotate the video and to clip it at the beginning or the end to adjust the overall time of the video. Once you save that video that you have edited, it is stored online to your Google Photos account like other videos.  The key thing to remember is that the feature is limited to those videos you have stored locally.  In other words, it does not work on videos that you have uploaded to your Photos account and then used the Free Up Space feature and removed them from your device.