I’ve been using Google Photos since it was first released in 2015 and I love it. My entire lifetime of photos (and videos) are in my Google Photos account and I can find any moment from my life in seconds. As soon as I learned enough about it, I took it on as my mission to help others do the same. Google recognized me as a product expert in January of 2016 and I have now risen to the status of “Diamond.” I say this to make it clear that I am not a whiner about Google Photos. I do think it is the best system out there for managing the tsunami of photos we take these days. But, it’s not perfect, and I want to go on record with my list of important features that are missing.
Google Photos’ mission is to provide one private home for all your photos and videos, organized and brought to life, so that you can share and save what matters.
Google
This “IPO” scale is just something I made up to explain why some people love Google Photos and others don’t. If you are a 1, it means you don’t pay much attention to your photos. You’re thrilled to know that Google photos automatically backs them up to the cloud, in date order, and you can search through them any time you want. It will even remind you of fun memories. You don’t have to do a thing, Google Photos is made to order for you. If you are an ambitious photo organizer (#5), you’ve been organizing your pictures for years. You really like the folder/subfolder structure you have for your photos on your computer and you want to keep it. You probably also rename your photos according to a system you’ve developed and you manually tag every photo. You can’t do these things with Google Photos so you won’t be happy.
I have been using and depending on Google photos since at least 2018. I do casual travel, take photos, edit them and sometimes do a photo book for my use. It has been simple and wonderful. But on my recent trip all of a sudden on May 26 they weren’t downloaded to my ipad. I don’t think I did anything to change it. Where are my photos for that 8 day period? On that 8th day I lost my phone. Although I replaced my phone I don’t have my old gallery…….
Usually that is caused by an account issue. Your old phone was using a different google account than your new one.
One of the most attractive features of Picasa was the availability of multiple framing functions.
https://picasageeks.wordpress.com/tag/framing-pictures-with-picasa/
I don’t find any equivalent offerings on Google Photos. Am I just missing something or is that ability denied to GP users?
There is no framing feature in Google Photos, except for Vignette that darkens the edges. You may want to look into Snapseed, a free editor by Google that works well with Google Photos. Check out this short Snapseed overview video: https://geeksontour.com/2024/04/photos16-snapseed/