Just thoughts …

Category: Photography

  • More Google Photos – some simple image manipulation

    More Google Photos – some simple image manipulation

    Following up from my earlier post which covered uploading images from your mobile device, or camera, to Google Photos; this post picks up from the point where the images have been uploaded and gives you an idea of what simple editing you can do to your photos. This Google article  with separate tabs to follow for Computer (browser-based), Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad) sets out the scope of the things that you can do. For this post I’m only looking at what you can do on a Computer, from your browser.

    What I’m going to do is to take the “featured” image from the earlier post and show a few screenshots of things that I have done to it, perhaps to improve it – although that might be rather difficult as it’s a rather boring subject. So here’s the original photo (unedited), taken with my Sony NEX-6 camera and stored onto its SD-card and then uploaded into Google Photos, using the SD-card reader on my computer.

    Let’s crop it a bit to get rid of the spade handle. First I double-clicked on the image in my Google Photos pictures at https://photos.google.com and this menu appeared …

    The first icon  Share allows you to Share the Image, the second icon  Edit to Edit the Image, the third to Enlarge (or Zoom) the Image, the fourth to get Info on the Image, the fifth to Delete the Image and the sixth  More gives you More Options. I clicked on Edit to Edit the Image.

    Another window opens to show you this …

    … you’re being offered a range of filters  Photo filters which you can apply to change the appearance of your image. I’m not going to use this option preferring to do it manually, but I’d encourage you to have a quick peak at what automatic enhancements can be made to an image from this selection of effects. For the moment I want to do a crop (change the viewing window of the image), so I’m going to click on the  Crop & rotate icon to Crop and Rotate.

    On this screen, the first icon allows you to  select the Aspect ratio of the image you want (as shown above). Selecting one of these will apply an automatic crop. The second icon allows you to Rotate the Image. You can then drag the corners or edges of the image now to crop to exactly the form of the image that you want to keep. The third icon allows you to Reset your edits to start again, and Done is clicked when you’ve finished editing. So in this case, I want to keep the Original aspect ratio and just get rid of the spade handle manually ..

    … so I drag up from the bottom right-hand corner, and down from the top left-hand corner to get the cropped window on the image above. I can move the crop window around the image by clicking and dragging on it until I have it just the way I want it. I could also finely rotate the image if I thought I’d not got it completely straight by clicking and dragging on the slider on the right-hand side of the image. So, having done this, I have an image I want to work with so I click on Done and I get returned to the Edit window …

    … you can see I have the choice of changing the Light, Colour and Pop (sharpness) of the image. By adjusting these sliders I could arrive at something like this …

    … but even finer changes can be made by clicking on the arrow against each of these elements and adjusting individual components, so I could end up with changing the Light a little and adding a Vignette to the corners with some Warmth from the Colour slider to give me this …

    Now I know I’m biased, but I think that this almost becomes a reasonable picture. All you need to do is to select Save Copy from the More Options  Moremenu, return to the Photos by pressing on the Return arrow in the top left-hand corner of the screen and you can see the new processed image next to the original.

    What do you think?

  • Getting to grips with Google Photos

    Getting to grips with Google Photos

    It really is rather surprising that given the widespread adoption and use of Google Photos, that I can not find a sensible, easy to read, introductory guide on how to use it. Perhaps it’s because it’s so easy to use? Well, it is – up to a point. That point being how it works alongside Google’s other cloud-based software, ie Google Drive and Backup and Sync, and the now defunct and disconnected Picasaweb – where your photos are still accessible in your Google Archive.

    So this note is an attempt to set out what you can do with Google Photos using images obtained on your phone or tablet, or uploaded from your camera’s SD card. It will principally work from the principle that you’ve taken the photos, you want to upload them to your laptop or desktop (PC or Mac) and then want to work on them there using a web browser. That is not an essential workflow, you can do everything on your mobile device – if that’s where the photos are, even down to editing the photos using Google’s Snapseed application for iOS, or Android devices, it’s just the approach I’ve taken here. So if you want to do everything on your iPhone/iPad or Android device you can learn how to use Snapseed on iOS here, I believe the application is nearly the same on Android.

    To avoid duplication of effort however, here is an article that you should read first. It covers nearly all the features of the device apps, and the web browser version, and in particular handles some of the editing functions available, but it doesn’t cover the intricacies and peculiarities of the Backup and Sync tool which replaced the Google Photos Desktop Uploader and Google Drive Client tools last year; it doesn’t cleanly explain the relationship between Google Photos and Google Drive, especially if you’ve chosen to create a Google Photos folder inside My Drive on Google Drive; and most significantly, it doesn’t cover the recent decision by Google to remove the Google Photos tab/icon from the Google Drive browser-window interface.

    So … how do you get photos into Google Photos? This Google article tries to explain how you can use Backup and Sync to do that. How does Google Photos work with Google Drive? This Google article attempts to explain how. Confused, I thought you would be! This is what I’ve done, why I’ve done it and perhaps most importantly how I do it!

    Sometimes, it’s best to work backwards from Google’s most recent announcement because in doing that you can be reasonably sure you’ll be moving in the right direction … forwards! So, their announcement that the Tab for Google Photos in Google Drive is about to disappear takes on a certain importance. Google is attempting to separate Photos from Drive and encourage users to deal with them separately. It’s a continuation of the separation which started when Photos was spun out of Google+. To continue to see your Google Photos in Google Drive, you need to create a Google Photos folder in My Drive.

    This you do from the Gear wheel > Settings in your browser. After doing this you will get a notification that your photos will appear in due course in a Google Photos folder in Google Drive. You can tell they’re not the same when you look at the document I’ve already mentioned (above) – How Google Photos works with Google Drive.

    So to me, it’s a no brainer. I won’t use the Google Drive interface as a means of working with my Google Photos. It’s just one level of complexity, and a level of potential duplication, removed. On my system therefore, the box (above) remains unchecked and I don’t have a Google Photos folder in My Drive, on Google Drive.

    So how do I get my photos into Google Photos? From the iPhone/iPad (or any other smartphone that has the Google Photos app) it’s quite straightforward.
    From the menu iconchoose Settings, enable Backup & sync and then make decisions as to the quality of the images, and when they’ll be backed up (uploaded). I have opted to use the free storage option, and for them only to be uploaded when connected to a WiFi network. The reasons for this are that my main photo software is K=Lightroom and I have a different method of working with that. What I want to use Google Photos for is essentially sharing albums with family and friends.

    From my desktop/laptop it’s almost as straightforward. I connect the camera by USB cable to the computer, or insert the SD card from the camera into the SD card reader in the computer and I will be prompted with this message …

    They should then get uploaded to Google Photos and (as I’ve chosen NOT to have a Google Photos folder in my Google Drive), the images can be found in my Google Drive as an entry under USB Devices & SD cards, which remains even after I’ve disconnected the SD card from the computer.

    So there you have it. I’ve disentangled Google Photos from Google Drive; I’ve used Backup and sync to upload photos to Google Photos and I’m now ready to edit photos, create albums and share images through Google Photos.
    [By the way in deleting (after copying to another location, just to be on the safe side) my Google Photos folders from my Google Drive, I not only reclaimed a heck of a lot of space, but I also removed a lot of duplicated photos.]

    Finally … if you were a user of Picasa and Picasaweb, your photos are still accessible. What you can, and cannot do with them is recorded in this Google Help document. You can still download and use the PC or Mac Picasa desktop client for editing your pictures and if you want a simple photo-editing tool to get started with as long as you’re using a 32-bit operating system (ie not Apple’s Catalina or later), it’s a good place to start, but, it is no longer linked to Google Photos (or Picasaweb).  However, there is a workaround! When you save an image that you’ve edited in Picasa, you can save it to a folder that will then be automatically scanned by Backup and Sync and thus uploaded to Google Photos.