I’ve posted articles on using Google Photos a few times. Of course with the passage of time, features, and interfaces, change, so it is always useful to just review “what’s occurring”, and see whether there’s anything that needs correcting, or adding to. I will try and go back and edit the posts listed below to reflect changes that I’m aware of.
First and foremost it’s important to note that I don’t tend to use Google Photos for anything other than sharing photos with family and friends, so my use of the editing features is a bit limited. I am however a strong advocate of using Snapseed (available from both the Google Play, and Apple App Store) as a photo editor, but as it works best with the Google Photos app, it’s necessary to install Google Photos as well. [Snapseed is not available as a native desktop app on Windows or MacOS; it’s only available on mobile devices (Android and iOS/iPadOS).] So the first link that’s important to be aware of is this one …
Google Photos and Apple revisited – if you’re an Android user you can skip this article and move to the next paragraph – all your photos taken with your camera will be safely housed in the Google Photos app!!! If you’re an Apple user it’s important to understand how synchronisation works with Google Photos and the Photos app on iOS. If you’re not careful you can either end up with duplicate photos on both platforms, or worse still deleting photos from a device thinking that there’s a copy “in the cloud”.
The next bit of housekeeping is to understand what happens if you want to delete a photo from Google Photos – it’s not entirely straightforward (but it is easier than in the Apple world!!!). This article I wrote – “How do you delete photos from Google Photos?” – attempts to help you delete what you want to delete from your device, or from Google Photos on the web. This is particularly a problem if you’re an Apple user with a Camera Roll, rather than an Android user with Google Photos – so you’d be advised to read it.
So we finally get to editing our photos and using Snapseed. This article – “Snapseed and Google Photos” – is a good overview and will take you quite a way down the road of installing Snapseed, it covers the basics of how to get photos from a camera (rather than a smart phone) into Google Photos, and some basic editing of a photo. There are also links in the article to earlier posts on using Google Photos as well as a video on “getting started” and some additional references that I found useful.
The new stuff!
How To Use Google Photos: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide [2023] – if you want to just stick with what’s possible for you to do in Google Photos this is just about as good a guide as you’ll get. It goes through all the features of the app, but doesn’t cover editing photos in any detail. If you want a video that covers the same ground, you might like to watch this [I’d like to remind you of the point I made about his reference to Backup and Sync if you’re an Apple user – my earlier comments apply!!! He has decided to use both iCloud and Google Photos on the web for two backups.]. Google’s help guide to editing photos is provided here.
So we turn to Snapseed – here’s a beginner’s video on how to use Snapseed for editing, you should also refer to the article quoted in the earlier post – Complete Guide To Using Snapseed To Edit Your iPhone Photos – from which I also recorded the video from my computer screen, but it’s obviously better using the link from the article. Also please note that although iPhone is mentioned in the title, it’s 100% applicable to Android phones as well. Finally you might probably want to look at this – SNAPSEED: ULTIMATE USER GUIDE + TIPS (2024 UPDATE) – if I’ve convinced you that Snapseed is the “goto” app for photo editing on your smart device.
Google is always updating its apps, and this is particularly true now that we have AI. So a recent update introduces the possibility of background blur – which can make a portrait of a person stand out more, by weakening the effect of the background. Google writes about its new AI features here, and here,
Finally … this article has been all about using Google Photos, which might have let you think that Apple’s Photos app is not so good. In a forthcoming post, I will be examining how Apple Intelligence (available in the autumn) will quite possibly revolutionise Apple’s photo applications, and will for some, if not all, Apple users mean they might be less likely to use Google Photos going forwards. They’ve already moved to allow the sharing of albums stored in iCloud to anyone via a link. That’s progress!!!
