There has been a lot of reflection on the best of 2015. Whether it be Tech, News, Photos, Music or just about anything else, you can find someone who has feelings about what was great last year. In thinking it through, I came up with one great thing that came around last year… Google Photos!
Now I know what you are thinking, “Yeah, Nate, I search Google Images all the time,” or “Yeah, I’ve used Picasa for years.” Well I am talking about a new service that Google rolled out that is a combination of all of their stuff.
Here are the basics:
- It is a FREE app for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android
- All you need is a free Google account which you should already have anyway
- It is automatic – you just install and it starts backing up
- It will back up ALL your photos and videos for FREE*
- I have over 60,000 photos and videos uploaded between my computers and phone, almost 300GB
- They offer the unlimited free backup if they can analyze your photos, which allows the search and creations
- It autotags and organizes all your photos
- Search for “Paris” and it will find all your pictures of Paris
- It does automatic face tagging
- It does “Creations” – automatic GIFS, movies, stories and stylized photos
- You can set it to back up only on wifi and everything is private by default
I cannot explain how well this works and it is really fun to look through the creations. On Thanksgiving I took about 30 videos of my family bowling. What was I ever going to do with them? Who knows, but I felt pretty fancy with my Selfie Stick. Well all the videos automatically uploaded to Google Photos, and it spit out this gem, music and all…
I did zero editing, and how did I find it? Searched for “Bowling.”
Backing your stuff up is very important,you have no excuse not to do this. I hate getting calls that data is missing. Please take 5 minutes to get this done, and remember this should just be one part of your backup plan. Your data should be in multiple places, if you have Amazon Prime check out their photo backup as well (though feature limited). I also use iCloud Backup and suggest something like CrashPlan for all your computers. For about 6 bucks a month (1 buck for iCloud and 5 for CrashPlan) you can get a great back up solution!
Want something else that I enjoyed in 2015? Pick some of these up –
Disclaimer: This was originally posted on layPhone.com and was migrated to this site when Nate and David started Notnerd.com.
