**** A truncated transcript follows. A full transcript can be found at https://www.marblejar.net/blog/2017/7/26/a2z86fjz3yx33uy98b3mpiqxup92rn. ****
Hello everyone! This is Lara Hammock from Marble Jar Channel and this is the 4th video in a series about the processes and tools I use to organize my photos. In previous videos, we covered centralized storage, simple physical organization, and using Picasa to manage and group photos. In this video I'll explain how to use Google Photos to access my photos anywhere and share them with friends and family.
Access anywhere
I realized early on that I wasn't going to be able to store all of my photos on my iPhone. After all, I don't have unlimited storage, who does? – and I don't like having to delete a bunch of photos so I can leave more. Having central storage on my PC solved this problem (see parts 1 and 2 of this video series to learn more). Every time I do my quarterly photo tasks, I transfer all my photos to my PC and clean my phone so it's empty. Great! The problem was that I still wanted to be able to access my photos from anywhere. I do this using Google Photos.
As you may remember from part three of this series, I use Picasa as my photo manager and grouping tool. In Picasa, I enable "Sync with Web" for each folder or album I create. This essentially creates a duplicate copy of my photos in the cloud. Why don't I just send my photos directly to Google Photos rather than using this complicated channel? The answer is that Google Photos is not yet reliable or robust enough to cover all my needs. I'm sure Google developers work around the clock, so I'm always open to this possibility in the future. Right now I'm having issues with photo duplication, unreliable syncing, and lack of features like sorting, grouping, creating collages, and printing.
Google Photos Basics
Google Photos stores all your photos indiscriminately in one big vat. Then it uses albums to organize them. It doesn't differentiate between folders and albums like Picasa does. Instead, when syncing your photos from Picasa, folders and albums all become albums in Google Photos. You can therefore look at the large vat containing each image indiscriminately by clicking on Photos (which also happens to be the default view), or you can view it by folders or albums by choosing the Album view. Google Photos doesn't give you any sorting options. It sorts only by date, most recent at the top, and uses the date embedded in the photo file's metadata. Luckily, you CAN change photo dates in Google Photos, but it's a rather tedious process. I finally managed to sort my albums into the order I wanted, but it took a while. If you go to an individual photo, you can press the edit button to make light edits (apply limited filters, cropping, basic lighting adjustments, and rotation), but this is 'a limited function. Additionally, you can press the Info button to access the photo file's metadata. Here you can add a caption (captions come from Picasa where they are easier to add) or change the file date. You can also choose the More button to add this individual photo to an album or download it to your device.
Access and sharing
The great thing about Google Photos is that all my synced photos are in the cloud, so they're available everywhere. Here are some ways I take advantage of it:
• Access individual photos from the iOS app: Instead of storing my photos on my phone, I can access all of my photos from Google Photos. I downloaded the iPhone and iPad app and placed it right next to the Photos app. I can find photos the old fashioned way, by quarter. For example, if I'm looking for photos from my daughter's 6th grade celebration last year, I know to look in the Q2 2016 folder. BUT – and this is incredibly cool – Google Photos has built-in now some object recognition by artificial intelligence. So, not only can you search by person using facial recognition and location (using geolocation information from photos), but you can also search by object, activity, or event. There are predefined categories, or you can really try anything that comes to mind. For example, if I search for /"dog/
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