Google Tip of the Day: Google Photos

Are photos and videos taking up precious storage on your phone or iPad?

One of my most favorite Google tools in my new Google Apps for Education Account is Google Photos. You can get to it on the web at photos.google.com.  Perhaps more importantly, it's an app on your phone that can automatically take the pictures from your camera roll and back them up to your Google account. You can see the app below.

Once you log in to either the app or the web version of Google Photos, you will be given the option to have your photos backed up from your camera roll to Google Photos. Once you give this permission, photos don't have to be stored on your phone because they will automagically uploaded to your Google account.  Now the magic happens.

The "albums" icon is my favorite.  If you tap on this, you get a screen that looks something like this:

Google photos can now sort your photos with a single click by a variety of factors.  It even has facial recognition software, so that if you click on "People", your photos will be sorted by who is in them.  As an example, I clicked on the picture of my little guy, Hobbes, and it bring up every picture I've taken that has his face in it:

(Can you imagine using this to take the pictures of your students you've taken throughout the year and quickly creating an album of pictures of that student to share with parents?)

From here, you can easily create movies (even on the app), albums, and collages -- all of which can be shared with anyone you want in typical Google fashion.

I would highly, highly recommend getting logged in and starting to play around with this super cool tool.

Have fun!