Just thoughts …

Tag: Google Photos

  • 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?

  • Integrating Shared Google Photo Albums with Facebook

    Integrating Shared Google Photo Albums with Facebook

    My concerns about the way Google has been developing its social and photography offering has been documented on a number of previous posts on this site and this has led me to look at whether it might not be the time to use Facebook more.

    The main grumble I had of recent was the way that Google had made it so difficult to comment on individual photos in an album. At least they have moved towards making that easier, but again, inexplicably to me, it’s outside their social/collaboration environment – Google+.

    The way forward – if you’re going to continue to use Google for storing and sharing photographs – is to create Shared Photo Albums in Google Photos – and then share them to Google+, Facebook or Twitter. You do that from the ‘share’ icon in the Album you want to share. Clicking on an individual photo will then allow you (and anyone else you’ve shared it with) to comment on the photo. These comments then don’t appear in any of the platforms you’ve shared the Album with, only in Google Photos, but at least it’s a start. You also have to be careful how you share the Album as the people you share it with can also add photographs to that Album – not what you might have meant.

    Still it’s a positive step forward, but Google has a long way to climb back to build my confidence in this part of their social offering. The photography side is now becoming very strong, and presumably will continue to grow and improve. Could it be that they want to turn Google Photos itself into a Social Platform – stranger things have happened!

    Detailed instructions on how to create a Shared Google Album and share it in the browser …

    1. Open Google Photos
    2. Click the third icon down on the left-hand side of the page called Albums
    3. If you haven’t uploaded the photos you want to share already, click on the ‘cloud’ icon
    4. Click the ‘+’ icon to create an album, and select a ‘Shared album’
    5. Add the photos you have already uploaded, or that are already in Google Photos, into the new shared album
    6. Give it a title and share it to Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

    You will find that by clicking on an individual photo in an album that you can add a comment. That’s it!