The snap happy app
Taking photographs used to be an expensive business: a roll of film had only 24 exposures – 36 if you were feeling flush – and hardly any of us got through more than a couple of rolls on a week’s holiday. In today’s digital world, the overabundance of pictures creates a different problem: what the heck do you do with them all?
It is a universal truth that no matter how big the hard disk or SD card on the device you are currently using, it will, before you can say cheese, fill up.
Your phone, the likely source of most of your pictures, will stash away each one you take, until there’s no room for anything else – at which point it will start sending you unhelpful error messages.
But you don’t have to be a slave to the system: half an hour spent mastering Google’s Photos app will save you days of frustration later. Your best pictures will be available on all your devices, shared with whoever you choose, and the rest will be consigned to digital oblivion.
The best apps are usually the ones that don’t need familiarisation – they’re intuitive at first sight. But Google Photos is an exception, partly because it has become the de facto way of organising and editing pictures not only on Android devices but on iPhones and PCs, too, and also because it’s extremely useful.
The principle is simple: every picture you take on your phone is uploaded automatically to Google Photos, which is a cloud service you can access from any computer, phone or tablet, just by logging into your Google account.
Your pictures are filed by date and location, and the software will attempt to recognise faces and group the same people together. You don’t need to even launch the app to make any of this happen.
Once the process is finished – typically a few minutes after you connect to wi-fi – your pictures will exist in two locations: on your phone and in the cloud. And here is where it gets confusing, because it’s not always easy to tell which is which. You can – and should – delete the originals on your phone to free up space, but if you erase the copies they will disappear from your other devices, too.
The same is true of pictures that you
Google Photos could make you a picture of contentment, writes David Behrens.