Ever since I got my first cameraphone, I have always been busy snapping pictures on the go. I did not have the luxury of owning a digital camera prior to getting my Sony Ericsson K700i back in 2004, so the experience of capturing pictures without having to worry about wasting films got me snapping away.
Over the years, one of my main criteria in selecting my mobile phones is how good the camera on the device is. Fast forward to 11 years since my first camera phone, I have captured thousands and thousands of pictures. I may not be that great of a photographer, but those pictures I capture contain precious memories.
One of the problems about being such a shutterbug is that the pictures take up a lot of space. Gone are the days when the best resolution I could take was VGA (640 x 480) and sized at about 100KB per picture. My current daily driver, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, takes pictures at up to 16-megapixels, with each picture taking up between 4MB to 5MB of space.
I learned the hard way that it is important to regularly backup your pictures. Back then, I was only doing yearly backups by burning CDs at the end of each calendar year, so all it took was one computer crash back in November 2007 for me to lose all my photos taken in that year.
Another problem I have with taking so many pictures is the difficulty in organising them. It is manageable if you are disciplined enough to organise them in folders as soon as you take them, but I'm not, and have more than 10,000 photos in my 'general' folder and am too overwhelmed to do anything about it.
PRECIOUS MEMORIES: This writer organises his pictures on his Samsung Galaxy Note 4 using the Google Photos app. Google's solution
Having said all that, the Google I/O last May got me very excited when I heard about the announcement of the revamped Google Photos app.
Previously buried in the seldom-used Google+ app, Photos has been a useful backup tool for me. As mentioned earlier, I capture thousands of pictures a year, and face a tough time keeping them organised and backed up. Ever since finding out about the feature a few years ago, I have used the auto backup function in Google+ on all my Android devices to keep an extra copy of my photographs.
Google had already split out the photography features into a Photos app, but the latest announcement at the I/O was a revamp of what we already had. Google has done a really nice job this time, as the app does seem to be shaping out well.
I upgraded the version of Photos on my Android smartphone by opening the one that was already pre-installed in my device. Alternatively, you can also search for the Photos app on the Play Store and download it.
You can choose to backup your photos at their full resolution, but those photos will count towards your Google account storage space, which is shared among your Gmail and other Google-related accounts. Alternatively, you can choose to have unlimited photos at a compressed size of 16-megapixels per picture.
For me, the trade-off in quality for the unlimited photo uploads is hardly noticeable at all. I rarely send any of my photos for printing nor do I do any advanced photo editing with my pictures, so the compressed quality is not an issue. I do keep a backup of my photos in a hard disk, so I am treating the pictures in Photos as an additional backup for a worst case scenario.
The best part for me is that it also backs up my videos, with unlimited uploads of anything 1080p and below. Videos exceeding that resolution can still enjoy unlimited uploads by being downscaled, or be uploaded at full resolution but will count towards your Google account storage space just like full resolution pictures.
Feature-rich
Another thing I like about Photos is that it is cross-platform. You can download the app for your Android or iOS devices, and you can access them from the web . For those who want to upload media straight from their PC or Mac, there is also a dedicated desktop software for that.
The Photos app also offers decent photo editing tools. It allows for basic adjustments, such as lighting, colour, pop, contrast and vignette. Users will also be able to apply colour filters, as well as crop and rotate the pictures. As someone who is not well-versed with Photoshop, I find the editing software to be manageable and easy to understand.
If you aren't the type that will edit your pictures, Photos has got you covered. Previously known as Auto Awesome during the Google+ days, you will find that the some of your photos and videos will be auto edited and presented to you for your liking. I've been pleasantly surprised by the collages, filters, GIFs, and short clips that I find under the Assistant tab.
Under the Collections tab, users may also find "moments" compiled together into a photobook of sorts, which is based on the date and location that the pictures were taken. It may not always be a perfect mix, but it did succeed in making me smile while recollecting through some precious moments.
An interesting feature of Photos is that it has a built-in visual search engine to sort your pictures based on location and category. It does not just rely on geotagging for the sorting, as I have quite a fair bit of pictures received via WhatsApp from my brother's tour around Europe, and Photos had accurately sorted out his pictures by location based on the landmarks in the pictures.
Just by searching for the term 'food', I could find most of the pictures I had captured of my meals. Some terms and categories are still hits and misses, but it does seem to be a very promising feature once it gets developed on further. Imagine the convenience of never having to sort your pictures into folders manually ever again. I for one would really appreciate that.
It is also handy that you can choose for the app to delete all pictures that it had backed up to the cloud account, so it will save you the trouble of having to clear space manually from your device.
All in all, I would say that this is an app that is working exactly the way I would have wanted it to in terms of managing my pictures. It may take some time before it gets the organising of pictures right, but it is a great first few steps in the right direction.
Donovan is a full-time auditor and big-time gadget lover who discovered the wonders of the Android world back in October 2010. He still misses those pictures he lost in 2007.
Having said all that, the Google I/O last May got me very excited when I heard about the announcement of the revamped Google Photos app.
Previously buried in the seldom-used Google+ app, Photos has been a useful backup tool for me. As mentioned earlier, I capture thousands of pictures a year, and face a tough time keeping them organised and backed up. Ever since finding out about the feature a few years ago, I have used the auto backup function in Google+ on all my Android devices to keep an extra copy of my photographs.
Google had already split out the photography features into a Photos app, but the latest announcement at the I/O was a revamp of what we already had. Google has done a really nice job this time, as the app does seem to be shaping out well.
I upgraded the version of Photos on my Android smartphone by opening the one that was already pre-installed in my device. Alternatively, you can also search for the Photos app on the Play Store and download it.
You can choose to backup your photos at their full resolution, but those photos will count towards your Google account storage space, which is shared among your Gmail and other Google-related accounts. Alternatively, you can choose to have unlimited photos at a compressed size of 16-megapixels per picture.
For me, the trade-off in quality for the unlimited photo uploads is hardly noticeable at all. I rarely send any of my photos for printing nor do I do any advanced photo editing with my pictures, so the compressed quality is not an issue. I do keep a backup of my photos in a hard disk, so I am treating the pictures in Photos as an additional backup for a worst case scenario.
The best part for me is that it also backs up my videos, with unlimited uploads of anything 1080p and below. Videos exceeding that resolution can still enjoy unlimited uploads by being downscaled, or be uploaded at full resolution but will count towards your Google account storage space just like full resolution pictures.
Feature-rich
Another thing I like about Photos is that it is cross-platform. You can download the app for your Android or iOS devices, and you can access them from the web . For those who want to upload media straight from their PC or Mac, there is also a dedicated desktop software for that.
The Photos app also offers decent photo editing tools. It allows for basic adjustments, such as lighting, colour, pop, contrast and vignette. Users will also be able to apply colour filters, as well as crop and rotate the pictures. As someone who is not well-versed with Photoshop, I find the editing software to be manageable and easy to understand.
If you aren't the type that will edit your pictures, Photos has got you covered. Previously known as Auto Awesome during the Google+ days, you will find that the some of your photos and videos will be auto edited and presented to you for your liking. I've been pleasantly surprised by the collages, filters, GIFs, and short clips that I find under the Assistant tab.
Under the Collections tab, users may also find "moments" compiled together into a photobook of sorts, which is based on the date and location that the pictures were taken. It may not always be a perfect mix, but it did succeed in making me smile while recollecting through some precious moments.
An interesting feature of Photos is that it has a built-in visual search engine to sort your pictures based on location and category. It does not just rely on geotagging for the sorting, as I have quite a fair bit of pictures received via WhatsApp from my brother's tour around Europe, and Photos had accurately sorted out his pictures by location based on the landmarks in the pictures.
Just by searching for the term 'food', I could find most of the pictures I had captured of my meals. Some terms and categories are still hits and misses, but it does seem to be a very promising feature once it gets developed on further. Imagine the convenience of never having to sort your pictures into folders manually ever again. I for one would really appreciate that.
It is also handy that you can choose for the app to delete all pictures that it had backed up to the cloud account, so it will save you the trouble of having to clear space manually from your device.
All in all, I would say that this is an app that is working exactly the way I would have wanted it to in terms of managing my pictures. It may take some time before it gets the organising of pictures right, but it is a great first few steps in the right direction.
Donovan is a full-time auditor and big-time gadget lover who discovered the wonders of the Android world back in October 2010. He still misses those pictures he lost in 2007.
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