Another full screen with 16+ of us spurring the lovely sunshine for a chat! I started the meeting off by talking about the changes to Google Photos that will occur on June 1st and the 15Gb of free storage you get with Google Drive. I’ve written about these separately, so won’t include that content with these notes.
I also touched upon the deletion of photos from Google Photos, on computers, the cloud and mobile devices, but again, I’ve written a separate post on that so won’t repeat anything here.
I rushed through the new content on the Flipboard magazine, highlighting the post on Reddit, which was a response to the question Steve asked at the last meeting (he also asked about RSS feeds but I responded to that one in the last notes); the iOS 14.4.2 (or 12.5.2 for older devices) that Owen had alerted us to; and articles on the latest update to Audacity and a review of the “best” photo-editing apps – I can recommend Snapseed for anyone using Google Photos in particular.
We then went round the screen (although not in the order of Jim’s screenshot above – many thanks again). I’ll only mention things that people raised …
Owen opened a discussion about the possibility of mixed media (in person, face-to-face PLUS Zoom) that the Committee was going to discuss in the near future. The following suggestions were put forward, and Owen would welcome any further ones as well. Don suggested Alternate Meetings rather than joint ones. Jim suggested that there might be challenges with getting the sound quality right.I said that I thought the management of the meeting might prove challenging, and in particular Screen Sharing might be difficult. Steve commented on the number coming into such meetings. Paul highlighted the issue of remote attendees being able to see in person attendees. Phil suggested the setup would have to be – two laptops, two screens, two cameras and a high quality WiFi!!! We all agreed this would be unlikely at the URC 🙁
Barbara would be grateful for any information on Google Photos and I promised to make available some links to articles I’d written in the past. [This prompted me to think that a lot of what we’d got on the old Google+ platform would still be relevant, and caused me to look after the meeting at this presumably underused resource.] After the meeting I resolved to do more actively with the Forums and Topics area of the website – so watch out, you’ve been warned – another place for you to look!!
Paul retold his recurring story of negotiations with TalkTalk suggesting he was thinking of moving to Sky Central. He managed to reduce his fee to £22 for Broadband, TV – no premium channels, free calls and overseas calls) from £27pm. Seems like a bargain!!!
David H had been alerted that his Google Photos account was at 85% storage capacity and he’d been asked to consider upgrading to Google One (Jim and I both have such accounts) which would give a total of 115Gb of storage. He’d started looking round for a method of transferring photos from the Google Photos Cloud to his desktop and had settled upon using the Mozilla Foundation’s free email client – Thunderbird to do that job. [Personally, I’m not sure why David couldn’t have just downloaded the photos, but perhaps I’ve forgotten to note something he said.]
Jim mentioned that he’d been experimenting with the Intel Graphics Command Centre (see below) …
… as a means to calibrate the displays on his devices so that the colours were comparable. I commented that I’d spent some time recently trying to do the same with a Samsung TV and after some time had completed the calibration, only to end up with a Profile that I couldn’t detect a difference from the supplied one!!!!
Jonathan mentioned he’d recently been working on Photos Books using a process he’d been introduced to by Jessops (now sadly going into administration for the third time). The system he’d used was from a company called Cewe – I will include the details he supplied to me in a Forum called Photo Albums, and add a few other possibilities there as well – please feel free to add any you have chosen with a brief review of what you like, or dislike about it.
Steven was interested at Paul’s TalkTalk pricing – he might be taking that further as it’s approaching his contract renewal time. I mentioned that anyone thinking of changing ISP should very seriously consider opening a Gmail, Yahoo mail or Outlook/Hotmail (Microsoft) account and use that as it would ease the pain of moving away from one ISP to another. You can setup forwarding from your ISP’s mailer to the chosen one before you move (or even if you don’t intend to move at this time), and inform everyone (I did so by putting a note in the Signature of my email) of your new email address.
Don was doing just this email accounts thing at this very moment, and I quickly showed how to add a Google account to an existing account from the Icon displayed on a Google Chrome (or Gmail, Drive, or Photos) page.
John also commented on Photo Albums, but I didn’t note down the one he was using. Perhaps you could add a Comment/Reply in the Photos Albums Topic? I have recorded he said it cost c.£30 for 28 photos, and you could get both hardback and softback editions.
Phil noted that in his research recently for a new computer he’d realised that cloud storage was cheaper than hard disk storage. [My comment: you need to get the right balance. Cloud storage is slow – it’s OK for archiving stuff. I’ll set out my thinking/strategy in a Topic at a later date.]