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!!!
A short post to highlight an issue that I wasn’t aware of, and now have to be very wary of. Indeed Ian’s comment about whether you need the Google Photos app installed on your iPhone is prescient – you most probably don’t if you’re backing-up photos to your iCloud account. And if you’re backing-up photos to a google account (as described in the earlier post), there are different ways of doing it which means you quite possibly don’t need the Google Photos app on your phone.
Remember, you can always look at the photos stored in the Google cloud from photos.google.com on your Apple phone or tablet – you don’t need the app installed.
So here goes … another learning point. I’ll type it in capitals so that you don’t miss it!
IF YOU DELETE PHOTOS FROM THE GOOGLE PHOTOS APP ON YOUR IPHONE OR IPAD AND IGNORE THE WARNING – THEY WILL BE DELETED FROM ICLOUD AS WELL.
There, I’ve said it. I didn’t realise it, and always shied away from deleting photos in Google Photos because I didn’t really understand what the warning meant. But now I do and obviously that’s not something I want to do, so how do I go about removing photos from the app, and/or from the Google cloud. Read on!
Scary, eh?! Take care when deleting photos from your iPhone
What I’ve researched is well summarised in the following article …
If you want to delete photos from Google Photos – do it on the Google Photos website, not in the app on your iPhone or iPad. If you have synchronisation active, they will then be deleted from the app on your device as well.
If you want to quickly delete all photos from your Google Photos app, just delete the app having first ensured that you’ve switched off Backup and Sync, because if you don’t, when you re-install the app, they will be synchronised back to your iPhone/iPad.
If you don’t need the Google Photos app, uninstall the app, no photos will be deleted from your phone, they will still be in your Camera Roll and will have been stored on iCloud, nothing will be deleted from the Google Photos website either, so you will have to do that deletion from photos.google.com – see Case 1 above.
An unlikely scenario, but one to be aware of – If you turn off iCloud before deleting photos from Google Photos on iPhone, then the photo will be removed from your device and Google Photos. It will stay on iCloud. However, if you enable iCloud again on the same phone, the photo will be removed from it too.
And even more unlikely, but probably unexpected and a potential surprise – Disabling Backup and sync will not have any effect on your iCloud photos as it is just a setting to enable or disable backup service on Google Photos. If you disable it and then delete photos from the Google Photos app on your device, they will be removed from the device as you are technically deleting the device copy on your iPhone/iPad. And once it is deleted, the iCloud copy gets deleted automatically.
Remember. Google Photos in the cloud, and iCloud Photos do NOT work the same way. Apple aims to synchronise all images across all devices with “the master” being held in the cloud. The Google Photos app is just a portal looking into the images on the device, and synchronising (if chosen) those images with ones stored on photos.google.com.
I hope that makes it all perfectly clear 🙂 🙂 🙂
In summary, do not delete photos in Google Photos directly from your iPhone if you have both apps on the device. Use the Google Photos website to remove photos. It is suggested that you should delete a few photos initially. Then, check them in iCloud after some time. If the photos are still there, you can go ahead and delete them in bulk.
This post is a sequel to the article (see link below) that I wrote in November, and reflects a little more of what I’ve learnt about the crazy world of how Apple Photos and Google Photos interact (or work) with each other. I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last.
This one starts from an observation I made this morning that some recent photos I’d taken with my iPhone and which were in my Photos Library also seemed to have been added to Google Photos on my iPhone (but not my iPad) as well. From the outset let me assure you that this is the normal behaviour. You have to set Google Photos to see all the photos in your local Photos Library {Settings > Google Photos > Allow Google Photos to Access – All Photos} otherwise it can’t work. What you are seeing in Google Photos is the app getting a view of what’s in your Camera Roll on the iPhone/iPad – you haven’t added anything at this stage to the Google Photos app, and more importantly, nothing has been uploaded to Google Photos at photos.google.com.
What I did see however additionally in Google Photos were some edits of recent photos that I’d done in Lightroom which I’d exported to my desktop, and then uploaded to photos.google.com. They could be identified by the little cloud icon on the picture.
It got me to thinking; what is the best way of sending photos from the iPhone/iPad to Google Photos – if I don’t want to sync everything using Google Backup (which as I explained in the previous post, I most certainly don’t want to do as they’ve already been backed up to iCloud). Am I doing it the best way?
Method 1
As above. Share (export) the photo from the iPhone/iPad to a chosen folder in the Files app or Google Drive, and then upload from that folder to Google Photos from photos.google.com (see also Method 3).
Upload from iPhone/iPad Camera Roll to a variety of services
Method 2
This is by far the easiest, and simplest way (and believe it or not I didn’t know you could do this). Open the Google Photos app on the iPhone, select a photo and then select the Upload (cloud) icon …
… the photo will be backed up to Google Photos (and photos.google.com); you will also note (see above) that once you’ve done that the Upload (cloud) icon is removed from the screen. In the Google Photos app, the photo will now have a cloud icon. Simple, eh!
Method 3
You can do the process in reverse. Go to photos.google.com and select Upload. You will be offered a variety of options …
An upload to photos.google.com from the Safari browser on my iPad
Choose (in this case) Tablet – as I was using my iPad to get the screenshots and you will get this dialogue …
Choose Google Drive and you will get this dialogue …
Choosing an image you’ve uploaded to Google Drive
Choose Copy from other services and you will get these options …
From which you can see (something else that I’ve learnt), that you can copy from iCloud – where all my iPhone photos are backed-up – to Google Photos. Duh!!!
What a wonderful (and complicated) world Google Photos is, and think – this was just prompted by me seeing photos in the Google Photos app I knew I hadn’t “uploaded” to Google Photos. Rest assured, they’re just views into the Apple Photos Library, not copies!!!
If you want to edit, even if only in a minor way, the photos on your smart device (phone or tablet, Android or Apple), two offerings from Google should be tried first. If you’re an Android (Google) device user, it’s a no-brainer.
The Google Photos app will be installed on your device when you get it, and all you need to do is install Snapseed from the Google Play store. If you’re an iOS or iPadOS (Apple) device user then there’s a couple of extra steps you need to do before you can get started.
This guide concentrates on Snapseed. I’ve written about Google Photos previously and I’m providing links to them below. I’ll check to see that things haven’t changed materially since I published these posts …
Although Snapseed is intended for use on smart mobile devices, you can install it on either a Windows PC or a Mac, but I have no experience of doing this, so it would be a project you would be taking on ahead of me. So for that reason I’m only looking at the app that you can download either from the Google Play, or Apple App stores.
So for camera users (rather than smart phone users), you will first of all need to get the photos onto your device. This could be by a direct cable connection from your camera to your phone, or by transfer using Bluetooth or WiFi, but more likely might be by using a SD-card cable like this one I have for the Apple gear. [It will either have to have a Lightning or a USB-C connector – check first before buying one.]
Apple USB-C to USB-A connector with USB-A SD-Card slot
The image(s) thus transferred will be added to your photo library be it Google Photos, or Apple Photos. Another way of adding photos on your computer to your Google Photos would be an Upload to photos.google.com – you will need a Google account to do this. This is how you would do it …
Select Import to Upload images to Google PhotosSelect images from the Computer (or from Google Drive)
You could decide to use Google Backup to synchronise all your photos from your iPhone (or iPad) to Google Photos as an “easy” way of getting the photos on your Apple device into Google Photos, but this is not necessary to use Snapseed as it can access your Apple Photos directly; so I don’t because I’m already backing-up my photos to iCloud. [I only discovered in November I was also sync’ing to Google Photos, so I stopped doing that then and saved some Google Drive storage, and a whole lot of complications about knowing what was where.] But if you want to synchronise from your Apple Camera to Google, this is how you do it from the Google Photos app on your device …
Instructions on how to synchronise Photos on Apple devices to Google Photos
You should now install the Snapseed app on your device(s) from the Google Play, or Apple App stores, if you haven’t already. If you’re an Apple user you might choose to install the Google Photos app at the same time – although you don’t need it to use Snapseed, but you might just like to compare how it works.
Next up, if you’re an Apple user you need to allow access to your Photo Library to Snapseed (and optionally Google Photos). This will allow both apps (on iOS) to access the Photos in your Camera Roll on your iPhone or iPad.
Setting up Google Photos and Snapseed to be able to look at Apple Photos on device(s)
So now your ready to start editing. Open the Snapseed app on your device – you are prompted to Open from device (ie look at the images in your Photo Library), or you can access the camera to take a shot, or Open latest image that you’ve taken. The steps from then on are relatively straightforward and you will have selected the image that you want to Use.
Open Snapseed and look at the photos on your local deviceSelect an image to edit, and click-on Use… and so start editing.
That’s about it. This video (recorded from my screen, hence background noise and rather low audio volume) gives a reasonable introduction on how the Snapseed app works …
A brief (14mins) introduction to editing photos using Snapseed
Here are some links that you might find of interest:
Using your Android camera to take photos; but I believe all Android phones have slightly different camera interfaces, so you’re better off researching that for yourself. [NB If you have come across a really good guide, let me know and I’ll add it to the list here.]
This article is prompted by a combination of a casual enquiry about sending photos from your iPhone to Google Photos (hosted on a Google Drive), and my own discovery that I was backing-up iPhone photos to BOTH iCloud and Google Photos.
Observation one. Google Photos and iCloud Photos don’t work in quite the same way. Whereas you can access the Photos you may have stored on Apple’s iCloud storage from icloud.com through the iCloud Photos app, you cannot access Google Photos from drive.google.com directly – you have to go to photos.google.com to access them. Google Photos uses up some of your Google Drive storage – you get 15Gb “for free” with a Google account – but it’s a standalone application, in the same way as Google Mail is. It’s an important distinction. Google provides you with applications which make use of their cloud storage, Apple provides cloud storage alongside access to applications which use that storage and which synchronises back to devices.
The iCloud window {Access to all Apple applications and cloud storage}
The Google Drive window {NB No access to Photos, or Mail}
The Google Photos window {separate from Google Drive}
Observation Two. This article concentrates principally on Google and Apple, because they are the two principal players in the Camera and Cloud Storage space. There are other cloud storage solutions on which you can store photos, eg Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Dropbox. I will only refer to these briefly at the end of this article. There are undoubtedly other cloud storage solutions, but I won’t be writing about them.
Observation Three. Anything I write about the link between Camera and Photos on an Android/Google system is second-hand knowledge, and I cannot verify it!
Observation Four – the final one. This article does not seek to cover the general topic of transferring photos from a phone to your computer. This is more than adequately covered in this article. I suggest you read it too.
Not wishing to be dismissive, but just because it’s so straightforward – I’m going to discuss Google Photos first. If you have an Android phone and thereby have a Google account, you automatically have 15Gb of cloud storage and the two are linked, and by default any photos you take on your phone are backed-up to your Google account. This is described well in the Google Support article. A couple of things are worth highlighting however: a) you can switch-off automatic back-up and synchronisation of your photos, in which case all backups would need to be done manually; b) you should carefully choose the “quality” of the photos you back-up – they may not be the same as that of the photo on your device; and c) it would appear that you could backup photos to a different account from your main one, thus adding to the free 15Gb you get with each account. [Alternatively, for £15.99 a year you could get an additional 100Gb of storage from Google. If you aren’t an Apple user this is definitely worth considering.]
It’s not that much more difficult if you want to save photos from your iOS (iPhone or iPad) device to the Google cloud storage. Again the Google Support article describes the process and the options quite well.
Similarly if you’ve transferred photos to your computer (eg from a camera SD-card), then Google’s got you covered to back-up and sync to their Cloud storage in this article. You should nominate a folder on your computer that Google Drive will monitor for newly added files which will then be backed-up and synced to either Google Drive, or to Google Photos, or both, depending upon the option(s) you’ve chosen.
Note (4) – you might get two copies if you don’t uncheck “Sync with Google Drive”
For this to work however, you do need to be sure you’ve a) installed the Google Drive on your computer, and b) you’ve set the preferences the way you want them. In my case, since I’ve increased the amount of Google storage I have, I’ve chosen to Mirror a folder (in itself called Google Drive) – then both the folder on the computer, and the one in the cloud should be exactly the same. A mirror in fact. Anything I add to (or edit on) my local Google Drive will be copied to my Google Drive in the cloud.
So we turn next to the Apple ecosystem. [I should feel more confident here, but as you may have noted that I disclosed at the start of this article that I was doing something extremely stupid and not noticing my idiocy.] Here the support page on Apple Photos and iCloud I think really does a good job of explaining your choices and how to set up backup to their cloud storage. I don’t think I can improve on it. But what if you’ve got Google Photos installed as well on your iOS device? This is where I made my foolish mistake. I enabled Backup and Sync on my iPhone and so I got TWO copies of every photo – one in my Google storage in Google Photos and the other in my iCloud storage. Duh!!!
Disabling the Backup and Sync left me with an image which was shared locally between the Google Photos and Apple Photos apps. How could I get that image (or group of images) onto Google Photos to perhaps share with friends or family?
It turns out that there are two reasonably easy ways of doing this. By enabling iCloud Photos on the phone (or tablet) …
Set iCloud Photos to On
… I can then download from iCloud to a folder on my computer which I can then upload to Google Photos from. Really rather simple and not a use case for Google Photos Backup and Sync to be employed.
Alternatively, I could go into the Google Photos app, select the image I want to send to Google Photos in the cloud and Share it by getting a link and then sending myself a message. The act of sharing it copies the image to the cloud, from which I can then add it albums, etc.
Using either of these approaches allows you then to obtain a link for the album which you can then Share to a list of users, or obtain a link for public sharing.
Once you get the photos onto Google Photos the fun starts. It’s not intuitive what happens when you decide you want to delete them either from the cloud, or from your device. In fact it’s downright confusing. I’ve written about this in another place (the public Thought grazing) and life is too short to repeat anything on here that I’ve already written over there, and believe still to be correct. Best of luck!!!
The situation with deleting photos from Apple Photos and iCloud Photos is slightly more straightforward and I’ve written this up already, so won’t repeat it.
It goes without saying that keeping it all in the Apple ecosystem (for me) makes a lot of sense, and with the ability to share albums on the way – it’s not yet as sophisticated as the Google Photo Albums service – I may transition away from Google Photos altogether in time.
For Dropbox users, you can setup an automatic upload of photos to the service. They even give you a bit more free storage if you enable this, or at least they used to!
Originally posted by David Harrison on the Thought Grazing Forums
The seed for this topic was sown by Ian at our meeting on October 13th 2022. I had to admit that although I had a reasonable idea of what happened with Google Photos, I was unsure what happened with Apple’s cloud offering.
I was reasonable quick in advising (and it’s reported in the notes of the meeting), that as expected …
“I can confirm that deleting a file on iCloud Drive from the Files app on an iPhone will delete it from icloud.com and your iCloud drive on MacOS as well – which is what you would expect should happen.”
However, the situation of Photos stored in the Apple Photos app (on iPhone or iPad) and iCloud Photos should also be noted – for completeness.
I’m not going to write anything; just provide three links to follow to clarify …
If you want to delete a Photo from both device and iCloud Photos. Just ensure Sync is left on and then you can delete the image from either the device or icloud.com
Having confirmed all this, and having more storage space on iCloud, and understanding that sharing Photo Albums is about to come to Apple Photos, and having checked that Sync’ing does seem to be working for iCloud Photos (from my Apple devices), I checked my Google Photos settings settings and switched-off Back up and Sync. I was doing far too many cloud backups!!! Always worth checking. If I want a Photo to be on Google Photos (for sharing for instance), I will now Upload, not rely on syncing.
When I first started taking digital photos, seventeen years ago, I kept a written record of the subject of each shot, the date and time it was taken, and the exposure details. When the photography group started, seven years ago, I began to take many more photos, and it became too much of a chore to keep records. I also realised that the technical info was stored with each image anyway, in the ‘Details’ section of the ‘Properties’, otherwise known as the EXIF data, (Exchangeable Image File). However that meant that I no longer had any information about the subjects. (I’m talking about Windows, but Apple computers must have something very similar. I can’t see an equivalent with Android though.)
As I have mentioned in the meetings, it occurred to me recently that I could actually add that info to the EXIF data. There are five headings I can add text to. From the top they are Tags, Title, Authors, Comments, and Subject. The upshot is that I have been able to throw away (so far) about 120 pages of my original records, covering about 4,000 images.
One other thing. My camera records information about some of the settings I have used which doesn’t appear in the EXIF data, possibly because it is specific to Panasonic Lumix cameras. Things like the mode (P, A, S, or M), HDR, and highlight and shadow settings. I now use the Comments heading to record that info.
Incidentally I store the images in folders just numbered consecutively. I don’t need to have folders labelled by subject, for instance, as I can create virtual folders on the fly using ‘search’.
I’m not as good as David at explaining things face to face, but I hope you can now see why I am so keen on the idea, and wanted to share it.
Most people now use digital photographs on our phones/tablets/laptops. But If you still like to have some printed (at a reasonable price) there are apps available which you can download onto your smart phone. – “FreePrints” (also a similar deal with the PhotoBox app and the Snapfish app)
They work by downloading the app and set up a free account with them – the app is free from the Google Play Store on an Android phone or the App Store on an iPhone.
You can choose up to 45 (or 50, depending on the app) standard-sized photos to print each month. The prints themselves are free you just pay for the postage. The FreePrints app postage is roughly between £1.49 and £3.99 depending on the number of prints ordered in a month. Exact postage costs will vary a bit from app to app.
There’s no subscription, so there is no need to order every month. The small downside is, that if your free photo allowance for one month is not used, you can’t carry it over to the next month. These apps are useful if you like to order a small number of prints regularly, rather than a load in one go.
If you’ve saved up a big batch of photos to get printed all at once, maybe stored on your computer or a service like Google Photos, it may be worth looking at deals on websites like Snapfish, Photobox or Boots Photos (there are others too). They’ll often have free photo deals for new customers, or give you free postage if you spend over a certain amount with them. They usually charge around 10p per print.
Both the apps and these websites are also handy for other photo products to put on your wall – poster-sized prints, canvases, mugs, T-shirts, calendars. Prices vary quite a bit between the different websites.
