Diana Podaski, Linear Retail Properties

Taking photos is one of our favorite things to do, whether it’s for documenting a special event, capturing something on your walk or showing off a new acquisition or busy shopping center. With literally thousands of photos on our phones and other devices it’s hard to keep track of everything, especially in an organized fashion and even harder to find a specific photo you’re looking for. Google Photos will ease your photo organizational pain by bringing an automated search tool to your photos. The New York Times quotes the app as, “Upload the pictures, and let Google Photos do the rest.” Oh, and that annoying, “Not Enough Storage” message that always pops up on your mobile, consider it vaporized as Google Photos will safely back up all your photos to your Google account for easy access on all your devices.

With the Google Photos app, all your photos are automatically organized by date, people, places and things, no tagging necessary, it’s magically internally organized by Google’s algorithm. Search by what you remember about a photo, whether that’s a building, a color or an object in the photo. It also supports face grouping technology which will automatically group together photos with the same face but won’t identify the person by name. (You can add nicknames if you want but the system is not tied to anything, it is still private and you can turn it off at any time in settings.)

The second best thing about the app is that you can stop worrying about running out of space on your phone! You can navigate to “settings” and tap “free up space.” Photos that are safely backed-up will be removed from your device’s storage, but will still be available in Google Photos. It offers 5 GB of storage for free for full-resolution photos on iCloud.

“Another great feature of the Google Photos app is its collections feature. Photo collections from a specific activity are auto created into slideshow movies, so the dozen photos you may take walking a site are stylized into a really clean animation which is awesome for sharing, with zero work required from the user,” mentioned my techy friend Sean Wilcox, marketing optimization analyst at Autodesk in San Francisco.   

The app is free within the app store but you must have a Google login. If you don’t have one, create one, I promise you it’s worth it.  It works with Mac, Windows, a camera and storage cards. It does require iOS 8.1 or later so make sure your system is updated; it also works with Android.

Social Media Fun Fact: “The Big Three” - Selfies, photos of food and animals all decreased this year. Instead, street photography, nature and architecture were the most photographed things in 2015, according to EyeEm and “more than half of the images uploaded to the community are coming from mobile devices.”

Diana Podaski is VP - marketing and social media at Linear Retail Properties, Burlington, Mass.