Taking a look at Google Photos

- Here at The Practicing Photographer we spend a lot of time working in Photoshop and Lightroom and other applications that run directly on my computer but, there are a bunch of web services now that offer all sorts of photo stuff. There's Google Photos, Apple's iCloud Photo service Dropbox, Flickr, all of these different services and people often come up to me and ask me what they should use these for, if they should use these so I want to talk about those today I'm going to mostly focus on Google Photos. Before I do though, I want to say something.

For years, I wrote reviews and articles for computer magazines, and I learned something very valuable from an editor in a magazine who said, "You know, no single review "is the answer for any reader." No one reads one review and makes a buying decision on that. A review is a data point, it's just one piece of information amongst many that go into a buying decision. I think the same thing can be said about these authoritative things that I'm saying about process or how you should do your photography or what not this is just my opinion, it's the way I do things.

It's easy for people to get cowed by some authority figure telling them something, listen to what I'm saying then go listen to a bunch of other people do some experimenting on your own and find the process that works for you, that's how we come into a workflow and a set of tools that work for us. So, with that said, here's what I think these photo sharing sites, or photo service sites are good for. Google Photos is really cool because it attaches to your normal Google account it gives you an unlimited amount of storage as long as you give Google permission to do one thing and I'll get to that in a minute, it runs on your phone, your iOS or Android device your tablet, or in a web browser on your computer.

As far as your phone goes, any pictures that you take with it once you've started up Google Photos get automatically backed up to the Google Photo service so this is a nice backup for your phone, the Google Photo app gives you a browser so once things have been backed up to Google Photos you can take them off your phone which frees up a bunch of storage, all that's very nice, so it's a great way of maximizing the storage on your phone and being sure that you have a backup. The service itself does some cool things, once photos go in, they all automatically filter and organize themselves in a bunch of different ways.

You can see here that these are sorted by date, and that just happened automatically. I pulled those in, it pulled the date tag out and organized them. It will also go in and automatically group people with similar faces, there is not currently a way of adding a name to a face but at least it gets everybody that looks alike squeezed together. You can, of course, create your own virtual albums but one of the coolest things about Google Photos is it's got this assistant feature when I click over here on the Assistant, I find all these things that my trusty photo assistant has done for me automatically.

Google Photos analyzes all of the images that you've taken and figures out ways of grouping them together, so here it's made a collage, it's found some photos of the same person shot at roughly the same time and it's collaged them together. Here, it's created an animation it's found a sequence of images that were shot close together and so decided that those would make a good animated .jif file. It will go through and automatically stitch panoramas if it sees good candidates for those, and it just does all that on it's own. It's not doing that on your device, it's doing that in the cloud and then just showing you the results.

I don't have to save these, each one has a save to library button so I can choose to save it or not. It's just this nice way of having some cool extra data created from my images. I've been finding that a lot of fun. Other services offer similar features Dropbox will automatically back up stuff that's on your phone, iCloud and Flickr also have their own facial recognition and other organization features that are all very nice, so this is just a really nice way of managing the mobile photos that I take. However, there are some big caveats to be aware of and I don't see these as useful tools for serious photo work, mostly for bandwidth reasons.

So far, bandwidth and formatting reasons. So far, none of these photo sites support raw files, so if you're out shooting with a real camera, shooting in raw, that's not going to do you any good, they're going to convert them all to .jpeg's on uploading you're going to lose all that extra raw goodness that you were shooting with. Google Photos goes one step further and down samples anything that's below a certain size. I think it's 16 mega pixels I can't remember, it's a large size but if you're shooting with a high res camera you're going to lose all of that stuff. It's also converting everything to .jpeg so you're going down to 8-bit and a smaller color space so I really don't see it even as a good back-up solution for serious photo work.

The other problem for serious photo work is you're probably using a ton of data, if you're like me, you have slow upload speed at home so pushing everything up to the cloud is maybe just not even practical. For your mobile stuff, for your snap shot stuff for kind of just your personal journaling and documentation stuff, these are really cool because in addition to getting back up and freeing up space on your phone you getting these cool new ways of presenting things and there's a lot of sharing features built in. Finally, I have one other big prejudice against these online services, and that is that I can only see the images on screen and for those of you who have been following me for a while you know that I don't really think an image is an image until it's on paper.

Paper is really the only way to get a quality view of an image, because only on paper are you viewing light in the same way that you view it in the real world. This is about sharing and social media and that kind of thing, and they're very good tools. The coolest thing about this is most of these services are absolutely free, so there's no risk, there's no reason that you shouldn't go try any of these sites and try to figure out how they might work into your overall photo workflow.