As of May 27, 2016, Google Photos has been around for an entire year. In that time, it’s managed to garner 200 million some odd users, who have uploaded an incredible 13.7 petabytes of data in the form of 1.6 million image and video files, 24 billion of which have been selfies, of course. As a sort of birthday present to its users, the Google Photos team took to their official page to post up a few tips that can help any user get the most out of Google Photos, on mobile and desktop.
For mobile users only, the post makes mention of an Easter Egg that’s “out of this world”, as well as the ability to see all of your videos from the Albums page by scrolling the top carousel to the right and tapping on the videos tile. Another mobile exclusive feature is tapping on the “Device Folders” tab and seeing which folders on your phone are being backed up. Among the desktop exclusive features, users can free up some of their storage space in Google’s cloud by going into the settings on the desktop version of Google Photos, where they will find an option to convert all of their original quality photos and videos to high quality to save space. Desktop users can also change the time and time zone on individual photos or groups of photos to make them appear in order in their library. Desktop users will also find a “Show more” option when searching, and can view their most recent photos from there under “Recently Added”. Rounding out the desktop-only tips and tricks, users can press SHIFT and the /? key to be presented with a list of possible keyboard shortcuts.
On both ecosystems, users can search for multiple people, or a person and a place or thing. For example, searching “Jerry and cat” will turn up pictures of Jerry with cats, while searching “Jerry Clearwater Florida” will turn up pictures of Jerry in Clearwater, Florida. Users can also search by emoji. While not quite as accurate as a text search, searching by emoji can be interesting. Shared albums can also be created, giving access to the album to everybody it’s shared with and notifying everybody involved whenever something is uploaded to that album.
