Five tricks to take full advantage of Google Photos

Google Photos is one of the best smartphone apps. The new functions come with each month, which is why we have gathered the most important ones in one place.

Trick 0 - enable unlimited space for photos and videos.

This advice for the majority of people is obvious, because it is from her that interest in the Google Photos service begins. However, the cloud for photos can work in two modes: paid and free. In the first one we store the original files without any compression, but we have to pay for the space according to the Google price list.

However, the power of Google Photos is free, which we can enable in the application. We get unlimited space for photos and videos, but the photos are automatically reduced to 16 megapixels and movies to Full HD. In addition, the materials are compressed qualitatively. This is unnoticeable when viewing photos, but it can be a problem when machining. Less data means less editing possibilities.

Trick 1 - use the search engine.

Google Photos search engine is really powerful. For example, when I buy something bigger, I always take a photo of my invoice or invoice with my smartphone. How to find such a photo after a few months? All you have to do is enter the "bills" into the search engine, and I will get a list of photos of receipts with a division into dates.

Enter in the search engine such as "dinner", "dog", "bike", "Warsaw" or "mountains". You will see that it really works, quickly!

Trick 2 - free space on your smartphone and get more space on your Google account.

If you are running out of memory space on your smartphone, you do not need to add a larger microSD card. You can delete photos and videos that are already stored in Google Photos. You will still have access to them wherever you have internet.

In the Google Photos app, touch the menu (three dashes at the top) and Settings. Then select "free space". The application will check which photos can be safely deleted. The selected files will be removed from the smartphone's memory, but they will still be visible in the application on all your devices.

You can also increase the space on your Google account. Go to your site with settings and check how much space the photos take (under "graph" click "View details"). If Google Photos occupy several gigabytes, that means you've been backing up your original content for a while.

You can free this space by opening Google Photos in the browser on your computer by opening the sidebar and selecting Settings. Then select "Compress." This way you will gain a place on your Google account, and you must remember that this is a shared space between Photos, Drive and Gmail, so it's worth the weight of gold!

Trick 3 - Share photos from the application, but first delete the location data.

Sharing photos in Google Photos is very easy. You can share a single photo or entire album by clicking the share icon in the app or on the website. Then you can create a link that you send to your friends. Friends can view photos or download them all with just one click. This is the easiest way to send someone a photo packet. The times of pendrives and e-mailing are fortunately the past.

All available materials can be viewed in the section "Shared" in the application and on the site. In every chili you can stop sharing your photo data.

Important note: In Google Photos settings, you can turn off location saving in shared content. It's important because if you share photos taken at home with someone (for example, if you sell something on the internet and took photos of the item), the recipient can check the location, and hence, can get to know your exact address. That is why it is worth setting this option accordingly.

Trick 4 - use the archiving of photos and from the basket.

Not everybody knows that deleted photos can be restored. If you delete photos using Google Photos, they will be stored in the basket for 60 days. During this time, you can undo your decision and restore deleted photos. This is one of the features that makes Google Photos my default photo gallery on your smartphone.

In addition, most of us have a lot of temporary things in the pictures - screenshots from the application, or, for example, photos of documents. All these elements appear between photos, but they do not have to be visible. After selecting photos, you can click three dots in the upper screen and select the "Archive" option. Photos will disappear from the main view of the app, but they will be visible in albums, search results and in the Archive section.

Trick 5 - back up your photos from Windows and Mac. Plus, keeping the folders!
One of the biggest shortages in Google Photos is folders. We have albums, but they are very simplistic, because, for example, we can not create an album in an album.

However, there is a way to unlimited backup of photos with folders. You must use a desktop application called Backup and Sync, which is available on Windows and macOS. This small software allows you to transfer selected photos from your computer to Google Photos, and at the same time (optionally) synchronize Google Drive.

We can enable synchronization of selected folders, after which the application will send to Google Photos any photo that we place in this folder (or subfolders). The very possibility of a convenient backup of photos from a computer is great, but even better is the fact that photos are also automatically sent to Google Drive. Now the best: Google Drive also has unlimited space (on terms like in Google Photos), but we have preserved the entire folder structure from the computer!

This is a very simple solution that not many people know about. I've used it for a long time and it works great. In addition, I set the app so that it does not delete my photos from Photos and Google Drive when I remove them from my computer. Thanks to this, I have backup created in the background. If you do not need to have original files, Google backup can be a very good alternative to paid clouds or, for example, network drives.