Moving from Picasa to Google Photos

As Geeks on Tour – we do a weekly webcast called “What Does This Button Do?” Episode 132 recorded on 12/17/17, was about Google Photos for Picasa users. You can watch this hour-long episode on YouTube.
If you’re still using Picasa as your only tool for managing your photos, it’s time to get serious about moving to Google Photos in the cloud. Picasa still works, on both Windows and Mac computers, it works today, it will work tomorrow, but you never know when there may be an update that will render it useless. If you buy a new computer, you’re going to have trouble finding the Picasa installation file because it is no longer officially available. We do have a copy of it that is available for our Geeks on Tour members, and you can probably find it elsewhere by searching for “Picasa Installation File.”

The future is in the cloud

The world of technology is all moving to the cloud. Picasa is a computer-based program, Google Photos is cloud-based. Picasa is old, Google Photos is new.  If you take your pictures with a smartphone, the Google Photos app is fully automatic for uploading your photos to your Google account online and making them available to all your devices, including your computers.
But, what about all those old pictures that are still on your computer? Or the ones that you stored on external hard drives or even CDs/DVDs? If you upload them all up to your Google account in the cloud, you will then have your entire lifetime of photos available any time you look at your Google photos. I can tell you, it is thrilling when I can show someone photos of my childhood in Alaska by opening the Google Photos app on my phone and searching for Alaska. Or my wedding photos from 20 years ago, by easily scrolling back to that date. Be careful though, you may lose some friends if you do this every time you see them! But even your most photo-averse friends will appreciate it when you can instantly pull up that picture of them receiving an award 10 years ago.

Moving photos from Picasa to Google Photos

You don’t need Picasa to move your photos to the cloud – all the photos you see in Picasa are actually on your hard drive and Episode 132, mentioned above showed 2 ways of moving them from your hard drive to your Google Photos account.

• The “Pull” method of uploading your photos: with this method you need to select actual pictures, not folders full of pictures
• The “Push” method of uploading your photos: with this method you can select a folder and all the photos in that folder as well as any sub-folders will be uploaded. It will not maintain the folder structure, no albums will be created for the folders. It just gathers all the photos from within the folders and uploads them to your Google Photos library.

If you do have Picasa, and you like the way you have your pictures in folders, you can use Picasa’s Upload command to both upload AND create corresponding albums in Google Photos.

2018 Update: this is no longer available, see Bad News about Picasa … but we were warned

1. View your folders using Picasa, make sure you have logged in to the appropriate Google account. You will see it in the upper right corner.
2. Select a folder (or an album) and click the Upload button. Notice that my folder name is “January” – this is not good. I might end up with lots of “January” albums and there is no such thing as nesting in Google Photos. I highly recommend renaming such folders to 2005 January, or 2005-01 or something that uniquely identifies it, before uploading to Google Photos.
   
3. Upload Options: notice when you upload with Picasa, it is set to automatically create a new Google Photos album with the same name as the folder being uploaded. In this example I learned not to name it just August, but 200608. When this is complete, all the photos in that folder in Picasa will be in your Google Photos library, AND you will have an album named 200608 with all the photos showing there.
   
4. Repeat for every folder (or album) you want uploaded to Google Photos.
   OR
   Use the Tools->Batch Upload command to simply check off all the folders or albums you want uploaded.

Using Picasa’s Batch Upload feature, you can upload many folders and albums at once

Using Backup and Sync

Backup and Sync is software for your computer that will do all the uploading for you. The problems with it are:

1. It uploads photos from your computer to Google Photos, but does not create albums in Google photos. The photos are just added to your library.
2. The default setting is to upload ALL the photos on your computer’s Desktop, Documents and Pictures. My bet is that there are lots of photos in your Documents folder, on your Desktop, and that do not belong in your Google Photos library.
3. After it uploads the photos, it actively synchronizes any edits or deletions. You can turn off the option to synchronize deletions, but no such option exists for edits. For example, there have been reports that once your photos are resized to “High Quality” in the online version, that resizing is synchronizing back to the computer, converting the computer originals to the compressed size. The originals are gone. This is a bug that doesn’t affect everyone  and will be fixed, but why take the risk?

If you want to use Backup and Sync, my recommendation is to carefully select the folders you want it to upload. You can select a parent folder and it will upload all photos in any subfolders. So, for example, you could tell Backup and Sync to upload the My Pictures folder, and it will get all the photos within the My Pictures folder structure. Don’t accept the defaults that are to upload all the photos on your entire computer. Then, when the upload is complete, I recommend discontinuing the use of Backup and Sync. From now on, use the “Push” or “Pull” manual techniques above to add miscellaneous sets of photos from your computer to Google Photos. This way, you’re confident that whatever is on your computer is independent, safe, not being synced.
If you are a Google Drive user, that’s a whole different aspect of Backup and Sync. You can set it to synchronize your entire Google Photos library back down to your computer. That will be another lesson!

Taking a trip? Don’t leave home without Google Photos on your phone.

“I’m going on a 3 week cruise starting tomorrow and I’m afraid my phone will run out of space for taking photos.”

Don’t let that happen to you! And, don’t delete photos off your phone without making sure they’re backed up first!

We got together with our friends, Chris and Charles, the evening before they were to board a cruise ship for 3 weeks. I looked at Chris’ phone and saw that she only had a few hundred megabytes of free space on her phone. At that rate, she wouldn’t last one day of taking pictures before getting the dreaded, “Device Full” error message would appear. I looked in Settings and found that over 8 Gigabytes were in use storing nearly 4,000 pictures and videos. She needed to get serious about deleting them!

“I have them backed up on my computer, so it’s OK to delete them from the phone,” she said, “but, I don’t want to delete them all because I like looking at them on the phone. It’s just too much work to decide which to delete and which to keep, so I don’t do it.”

I told her if she used Google Photos, she can delete the photos from the phone, but still see them all using the Google Photos app after the pictures were uploaded to her Google account online. With the Google Photos “Free Up Space” command, all the photos can then be removed with one click. “Let’s do it!” she said.

How to prepare your phone for a trip:

1. Install Google Photos app on your phone, get it from the App store on iOS or the Play store on Android. It’s free.
   - turn on “Backup and Sync” setting
   - make sure the Google account listed is correct for where you want your photos stored
   - make sure the upload size is High quality (free unlimited storage)
2. Watch the photos being backed up! Just because you see photos in the Google Photos app does not mean they’re in your Google Photos account, it takes time. The app initially views the photos on your phone. Only when you see “Backup Complete” are you safe to delete them from the device. You may need to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot because it can use a lot of data to do the backup.
   
   
3. Verify that you can see your photos in your account online. Go to Photos.Google.com and log in with the same Google account used for the app on your phone. You should see all your pictures there.
4. Now you can delete the photos. Don’t use the trashcan, that deletes from everywhere. Use the Google Photos app on your phone, tap the 3-line menu, Free Up Space. You will see a message about how many photos will be deleted and how much space will be freed up. If you are using an iPhone, and you have iCloud Photo Library turned on, realize these photos will be removed from all iCloud devices as well.

It took all night for Chris’ 4,000 pictures to be backed up. When we looked in the morning, the Google Photos app reported 110 photos remaining. It just took another half hour or so for those to complete. Using a computer, I had Chris sign in to her Google Photos account to prove that we could see her photos online that had just been backed up from her phone. Yes! All photos were there, so I had her open the Google Photos app, and tap the Free Up Space option. Seconds later, she had over 8 GB of free space, plenty for a few thousand pictures.

Bon Voyage Chris and Charles! I can already see from your Facebook photos that you’re having a good time!

Geeks on Tour premium members may also want to view these videos:

• 385.Android Google Photos AutoBackup
• 388.Apple iPhone/iPad Google Photos AutoBackup
• 396. Gathering all your Photos with Google Photos
• 427. Google Photos – Deleting Pictures from Android
• 428. Google Photos – Deleting Pictures from iOS (iPhone/iPad)
• 429. Google Photos – Deleting Pictures using Web
• 430.Google Photos: Free Up Space on iPhone and iPad
• 431.Google Photos: Free Up Space on your Android
• 466. Apple Photos vs Google Photos
• 467. Android Gallery vs Google Photos

Black and White Photos with Google Photos

“Tag, you’re IT!” That’s what it’s like in today’s world on Facebook. Its called a “Challenge” and the latest one is about Black and White photography.

Seven days, seven black and white photos of your life. No people, no pets, no explanations.

I usually ignore challenges, I’m a party pooper, I don’t want to play. But, I liked this, I wanted to play. Here are my 7 pictures:

#1 Dolphin carving, black and white with vignette

#2 WWII Museum in New Orleans - just black and white with a little Pop

#2 Lighthouse: Vogue filter with a little Pop!

#3 Jackalope

#4 Roadtrek

#5 Union Station Kansas City

#7 Bridge over Missouri river in Kansas City. Also added some "Drama" using Snapseed

I Cheated

I did not use Black and White film! I didn’t set my digital camera to take black and white photos. I didn’t even use my phone’s capability to take photos in black and white  mode. I took color pictures. A few of these, like the lighthouse,  are even old color pictures I chose, then I used very simple editing tools to create the B&W images.
Here’s the lighthouse photo that I took back in September 2016, it’s in my Google Photos library.

To turn this into a Black and White photo, all I had to do was click to open it, then click the Edit tool: Now I see a number of “filters”, including 3 different black and white filters: Eiffel, Vogue, and Vista. Just try clicking on each one and see what it does. I like the Vogue the best, but then I also add a little Pop to sharpen the lines a bit.

The filter does the trick, but there’s another way I think I like even better. You can click on the Adjustments button: Yes, I know, it looks just like the Edit button above. Don’t ask me why, I liked the old pencil for the edit button personally! Anyway, once you’re in the adjustments, you’ll see a slider for color. If you drag that all the way to the left, you’ll remove all the color … that makes it black and white! Then, you can also add a little “Pop!” If you add more pop, you’ll get some of the color back, but in a special, muted way. Watch this quick video and I'll show you exactly how to do it.

Partial Black and White

If you watch the video, you'll see how Jim made this image of  our musician friends, Victor and Penny, performing at Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield, Iowa. Notice how the photo is not completely black and white, but it's not really color either.

Want to give it a try?

Don’t wait for a challenge, just do it. You can post them on Facebook, or you can even leave a link here in the comments where we can see your black and white masterpieces. To get a link:

1. Select the pictures you want to share
2. Click the share button:
3. Get Link, Copy
4. Start a comment here, then paste the link

Leave a comment about which photo above that you like the best.

How to show your phone's photos on the big screen TV

We had company over for dinner last night and, invariably, there came a time where they started showing us pictures from their last trip. They opened the photos on their phone, then we would pass the phone around. 

Wait a minute! 

We can do better than that. 

Let's have a real slideshow using the big screen TV. We have a TV with several HDMI ports. In HDMI 2 we have plugged in a Chromecast device. The phone in question is an iPhone. The Chromecast device works just fine with either iPhone or Android. You can purchase them for about $35 at Amazon, or any electronics store like Best Buy. 

Here's what you do:

1. Set the TV source to HDMI2 (whatever port has the Chromecast device plugged in)
2. Connect the phone to the same WiFi hotspot that the TV/Chromecast is connected to. Our household hotspot is "Geeks Hotspot" When we first installed the Chromecast, we followed the instructions to connect it to that hotspot.
   I told our friends to go to the WiFi settings on their iPhone and connect to Geeks Hostpot. I gave them the password.
3. Open Google Photos and open the first photos you want to show, then tap the chromecast button in the upper right. 
4. You should now be seeing that photo on the TV. On an iPhone, you will need to swipe left to see the next photo. On Android, you can tap the 3-dot menu and choose Play Slideshow to have the photos progress automatically.

To learn lots more about displaying your pictures and other things on your TV, see episode 108 of What Does this Button Do.

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Google Photos and the New iOS 11 HEIC Photo Format

If you upgraded your iPhone or iPad to iOS 11, you now have a new photo file format called HEIC and a new video file format called HEVC. The HE stands for High Efficiency and it is a new official format developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG.) These are the same folks who developed the standard .jpg format so many years ago. This is not, therefore, an Apple thing, but Apple is the first major player to adopt it. The main purpose of the new format is to store the same photo using less file space, but it can also store multiple photos in one file, and multiple layers. I took the 2 pictures below with the same iPhone, the only difference is I changed the setting from the new format, back to the old in between taking the 2 shots. The new format takes up 3.1MB and the old takes 5.1. They both have the same number of pixels - 12.2 MegaPixels.

 

I can see both file types using Google Photos. The problem is, if I download the .HEIC file to my Windows computer, it can't open it. It just shows up as an outline of a white empty box. And, if I view it in my Android's version of Google Photos, I can see it, but I can't edit it.

Mrs Geek's Advice

If you are using all Apple devices, you're fine. But, if there are any Windows devices in your mix - or if you're sharing some of your Google Photos with others who have non-Apple devices - then you would need to be sure those photos are converted back to the old format.

My advice is to turn back the clock and change your iPhone's setting so that it uses the old format - at least until the other systems catch up.

• Settings
• Camera
• Format
• Most Compatible

What Else is New in Google Photos?

Episode #125 of What Does This Button Do explores the new features of Google Photos from the past 6 months. If you get there today (9/23/17) at 2pm Central / 3pm Eastern you can watch while we record the live presentation. Subscribe to the GeeksOnTour YouTube channel and click the little bell icon to get notifications any time we're live.

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Save a Picture from Google Photos to your Device

I have a beautiful photo of a waterfall in Pennsylvania. It's in my Google Photos library. I took it with my Canon camera. How can I use it as the wallpaper for my iPhone (or Android) phone?

I can see it on either of my phones, but it doesn't show up when I try to select a photo for wallpaper, because the wallpaper setting is only seeing the pictures that reside on the device. So, I need to get it down from the cloud (my Google Photos account) to the camera roll (or gallery) on the device. There are lots of apps that only work with photos on your device, so even if you don't care about wallpaper, this is a good thing to learn.

Here's how to do it:

1. Open Google Photos and view the desired photo
2. tap the 3-dot menu 
3. Android: Save to Device
   
   iPhone: Download
   

Assuming you have a decent Internet connection, that photo is now on your device and it will show up as an option for Wallpaper.

This is the quick tip in Episode 124 of What Does This Button Do? Check it out to see exactly how it's done. We demonstrate on both iPhone and Android phone.

Android Bonus: Google Photos direct to wallpaper 

The purpose of this article is to show how to download a photo from Google Photos online copy to your device. I used the example of setting a wallpaper, but there are lots of other reasons: there are other apps you may use for printing photos, editing photos, making collages and those apps may only work with photos that are on your device. 

If wallpaper is your purpose - Android has an easier way! On an Android phone, you can open a photo in Google Photos, tap the 3-dot menu, and then Use As. You will see wallpaper as an option right there. So easy!

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Can’t take a good picture from a moving vehicle? Sure you can.

It is difficult to take a good picture while in a moving vehicle. You can’t take the time to properly frame the shot, and when you’re bouncing around you’re bound to get things a little crooked,  but – take it anyway! It’s a piece of cake to make that picture better after the fact with just a few clicks using Google Photos editing tools. My husband and I travel all over the country in our RV (see our travel maps here.) He does the driving, so I can snap pictures. I love the memories I have from the pictures snapped thru the window.
Sometimes I’m using my iPhone, sometimes an Android device, and sometimes a “real” camera, my Canon T3i. It doesn’t matter what camera I’m using, all my photos go to the cloud in my Google Photos account. Once they’re there, I can using the edit tools to make them look better.
These edit tools are available on my iPhone, on my Android mobile devices, or on my computer at Photos.Google.com. You open any photo, then click the edit button. Note: the edit button has recently changed on the computer and the Android version, instead of the trusty old pencil icon - - it is now the same as the adjustments ‘slider’ icon - . Either way, it takes you to the editing tools: Filters, Adjustments, and Crop/rotate. Crop and rotate (straighten) is probably the most important tool in the following examples. All of these editing features are detailed in previous articles in this website:

1. Straighten
2. Crop
3. Filters: Auto, Metro (no article yet, but it’s in the Editing chapter of the book.)
4. Pop
5. Vignette

If you want to try these yourself, here are the original photos: https://goo.gl/photos/qMsRbq6DF2hcTXjM7

As Taken	After a few clicks with Google Photos Editing tools
State sign at border	Crop, Straighten, Auto color correct, and a little Pop
New York farm	Crop, Auto-color, a little pop, and a little Vignette
Mt. Hood	Straighten, Crop, Auto-color, a lot of Pop
Toronto Skyline	Straighten, Crop, Metro Filter, Pop

Google Photos Quick Tip: Vignette to Frame your Photos

What's a vignette, you ask? It's where you just darken the outside edge of a picture so that it stands out. It's a very soft frame. Here is a recent flower photo I took:

And, here's the same photo with a vignette applied.

It's super simple, and all with features built in to Google Photos. This works on all 3 platforms, Apple iOS, Android, and Web.

• Open the photo and click the pencil to get into editing mode
• Tap the middle editing tool: adjustments 
  
• From there, tap the down arrow to the right of the "Light" slider
• You will now see all sorts of adjustments that can be made to the lighting in this photo. Feel free to play with the exposure, highlights, shadows etc.
  
• Vignette is the last one. Drag the slider all the way to the right for a thick border, or not so far if you want it thinner. Then close the Light adjustments by tapping the up arrow at top right.
• Save

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Make Albums and Print a Photo Book from an Album

We just returned from a month-long trip to Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and Berlin. How many pictures do you think we took? I used my iPhone 7+ and Jim used his Pixel XL phone as well as a Samsung Camera 2.  We took over 3,500 pictures and videos between the two of us.

We picked our best ones (445 photos) to share in an album, complete with text and maps to help tell the story. You can see the album here. Watch the video webinar below to learn all about how to make albums.

If you're not making Albums, you're not using Google Photos!

Here is our 45 minute What Does This Button Do Episode 119 on Photo Albums with Google Photos. The video starts with a demonstration of making a photo book. If you are a Geeks on Tour member, here are your #119 Show Notes.

The album is great, and I look at it all the time, but, I want an actual book to put on the coffee table so anyone can pick it up and browse our photos. Guess what, Google just added that feature to Google Photos!

In Google Photos, if you click on the Assistant, you will see a new button now for Photo Book. Click that, then you can select whatever photos you like - up to 100 of them - and click Done. That's it, that's all you have to do other than entering a credit card and an address for mailing your book. In a week or so, you will have a beautifully printed book with all the photos you selected.

Start with an Album and it's even easier to make a book

When I made my photo book, I started with the album. After all, I had already selected my best photos for the album - I didn't want to start from scratch selecting photos from my library.

• Open the album
• Click the 3-dot menu
• Select "Create Photo Book"
• Click Next
• If your album has 100 or fewer pictures, they will all be added to the book. Since my album had many more, Google selected 100 for me. I could review and change their choices if I wanted, but I didn't.
• Click Order, enter credit card and address.

A couple of clicks and a credit card - it only took 2 minutes! My book with 100 photos cost about $40. 

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

My iPhone is full of photos, can Google Photos help?

Peggy asks:  I’ve been taking photos with my iPhone for quite some time and have taken several hundred photos. The other day, I connected my iPhone to my Mac and now  I have over 4,000 photos on my phone. I’m getting a message that my phone’s storage is almost full. How did that happen? I don’t want to lose these photos, but I don’t need them on my phone. If I delete the photos, I understand that they will be deleted from my computer and iPad  also. Can Google Photos help?

What happened?

It sounds like your setting for Apple’s iCloud Photo Library got turned on. That means that Apple will keep all of your devices in Sync. Every photo will be on your computer, your iPhone, and your iPad. It is true, if you now delete any photos from your phone, they will be deleted from your other devices. Google Photos, on the other hand, will back up your photos and allow you to delete them from the phone.

Yes! Google Photos can help, but pay attention to your iCloud Photo Library settings

iCloud Photo Library is Apple’s solution for Backup and Sync for all your photos. It works differently than Google Photos Backup and Sync. Using them both will use up more iPhone storage space, and it will get complicated because of the way they handle deletions. With one exception,  I recommend using Google Photos and not iCloud Photo Library. The one exception is if it is important to you that the photos taken with your iPhone get automatically copied to your Mac’s hard drive, then you’ll want to stick with iCloud. With Google Photos, you can view your photos from your Mac (or any computer) by browsing to Photos.Google.com. They are not stored on your computer’s hard drive.

• On your iPhone:  go to Settings, iCloud, Photos
• Photo Stream, and iCloud Photo Sharing don’t matter, they can be either on or off
• Look at iCloud Photo Library. If it’s Off, great! leave it off. Go to next step: Install Google Photos
• If iCloud Photo Library is On, also notice if the box is checked for “Optimize iPhone Storage”
  • If “Optimize iPhone Storage” is not checked, you can turn off the iCloud Photo Library setting now. This will stop the iCloud Backup and Sync while leaving photos on your phone. If you delete a photo after turning it off, it will not be deleted from your other devices. Go to next step: Install Google Photos
  • If “Optimize iPhone Storage” IS checked, then turning off the iCloud Photo Library setting will stop the iCloud Backup and Sync, AND REMOVE ALL PHOTOS FROM YOUR PHONE. It won’t touch the photos on your Mac or iPad. Leave the iCloud Photo Library setting ON until the Google Photos backup is complete. Go to next step: Install Google Photos

Install Google Photos, turn on the Auto Backup & Sync feature, and wait until all photos are backed up. If you have thousands of photos on your phone, this will take days. Once they are all backed up to your Google Account, then you can turn off iCloud Photo Library and  use the Google Photos “Free Up Space” command to delete all photos remaining on your phone. Here’s the step by step:

1. Install Google Photos from the App Store
2. Sign in to your Google Account
3. Turn on Auto Backup & Sync, connect to Wi-Fi, and leave the Google Photos app open on your phone while the backup is taking place. If you look at the assistant, you should see how many photos are remaining. Keep an eye on it.
4. Wait until you see the message “Backup Complete” This may take hours or even days.
5. Verify that all are backed up by viewing Photos.Google.com on another device like a computer
6. Now you can turn off iCloud Photo Library. If your phone had the “optimize storage” setting checked, this will remove most photos from your phone. That’s OK. You’ll be using Google Photos from now on.
7. Delete all photos from phone by using the Google Photos, 3-line menu, Free Up Space command.

You’ll still be able to see all your photos using the Google Photos app because it is viewing your photo library from the online copy. If you lose your phone, or should decide to remove the Google Photos app, you haven’t lost your photos. They are all stored in your Google account online and are visible from the website, photos.google.com or from any mobile device using the the Google Photos App.

iCloud Photo Library competes with Google Photos

You cannot Free Up Space until you disable iCloud Photo Library. You see, both Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud Photo Library serve the same purpose – copying your phone’s photos to cloud-based storage – but their philosophy is quite different.

• Apple’s philosophy is hardware-based. Apple assumes you have an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac computer and that you want all the pictures on all the devices. So, iCloud’s job is to keep all devices in sync. Add a photo to one, you add to all. Delete a photo from one, you delete from all.
• Google’s philosophy is device-independent. Google thinks everything should be in the cloud, under the lock and key of your username and password, and all devices should access the content there. So, once the pictures are uploaded to your online Google account, you can delete them from the phone, or tablet, or computer.

Google Photos: Don't assume your photos are getting backed up

*Updated March 2020

• It is Google Photos' job to back up your device's photos to your Google Account online. 
• It's your job to verify that it gets done. 

There's nothing worse than thinking your photos are backed up, deleting them from your phone and then realizing they weren't backed up after all.
I'm currently traveling in Europe and taking hundreds of photos with my iPhone. I'm constantly checking that my photos are getting uploaded, and I'm not always happy with what I find. Whether it is a problem with the Google Photos app itself, or with the Internet connection, is hard to tell, but I often find that the backup process is stalled. Kind of like a clogged drainpipe, the upload process needs to be cleared and restarted. Using one or more of the following techniques, I have successfully ensured that all my photos got backed up / uploaded.

First Check your Backup Status

Tap on the account button in the upper right. You're looking for the message, "Backup Complete." You will other messages about the status of backing up. Something like "Backing up Photos: 321 items left" You will also see a progress bar that fills in blue from left to right. If you check this several times over the period of a day and see the same number left, then it's gotten stuck. It is not properly uploading your photos to your online account as it is supposed to do.
You may also see messages like "waiting for Connection" or "Backup and Sync is Off." These messages are very useful.

Check Photos.Google.com

Even if you see the message "Backup complete", I need to see for myself. Sometimes you see that all is complete, then a few minutes later it has more to backup?! The only way to know for sure that your photos have successfully made it to your Google account online is to use a computer (or any device other than the one that took the pictures) and see your photo library there. 

• Using a computer browser, preferably Chrome, go to www.Photos.Google.com 
• Make sure you are signed in to the same Google account used by your phone that took the photos. You can find that account address on your phone by going to Google Photos settings, Backup & Sync. The backup account will be listed there.
• Look at your Photos library, check that the topmost photo is the most recent photo you took with the phone in question. Spot check previous photos
• If your backup is not complete, read through the rest of this article for things to do to get the backup kick-started.

Your Internet Connection

First check your Google Photos settings under Backup and Sync. If "Use cellular data to back up ..." is off, then you must have a WiFi connection before any backup will happen. Even if your phone indicates that it has a good connection, you still need to test it by opening a browser window and visiting some website that would not be in your cache history. This is the only way to know for sure that your Internet connection is working well.

• Open Chrome or Safari
• Type in a website that you don't normally visit (I use msn.com or aol.com because they're short to type)
• If the website comes up quickly, you're all set. Go on to Google Photos
• If you see a log in screen, then you need to complete that process for the WiFi hotspot you're on, or find another WiFi hotspot
• If the website just doesn't come up, or comes up very slowly then you know you have a very poor Internet connection and you'll just have to wait for later to get your photos backed up
• Try resetting your Internet connection.
• Turn on Airplane mode to disconnect from all communications
• Turn Airplane mode back off - this forces your phone to re-connect and it usually gets a better connection. If not ...
• Power off and Restart your phone
• Find a better signal or WiFi connection. Just because you are connected, doesn't mean it's good enough to upload photos. Internet connections have 2 separate speeds: download and upload. Browsing the web uses the download capabilities, uploading photos needs the upload. I've found lots of Internet connections where the download is good, but the upload is not.

Google Photos App

If you know that your Internet connection is good, then there must be some problem with the operation of the Google Photos app. Things to try: 

• Open the app, and leave it open, with the phone screen on and awake. On iPhone especially, the upload cannot take place in the background. This is quite annoying, but true. Even on Android, I find it is important to have the Google Photos app open for the upload to complete.
• Force quit the app and re-open it. By "force-quit" I mean to open your recent apps screen on your phone (iPhone: double-tap the home button, Android: tap the multi-tasking button next to the home button) and tap the X on the Google Photos app, or swipe the app off the screen. Now, when you re-open the Google Photos app, it is forced to start fresh. See if it has started backing up now by checking your account button. You may have to wait a minute or two.
• Manually backup some photos/videos: try finding a photo that has not been backed up yet. If you see a report that some photos were skipped, open one of those skipped photos.
  
   On iOS a photo that is still waiting to be backed up has a circular arrow icon. Select it, tap the 3-dot menu then Back up. If that operation completes successfully, check your assistant to see if backup has resumed. If not ...
• Power off and restart your device.
• If your remaining photos are still not backing up, try uninstalling the Google Photos app and then re-installing it. This will have no effect on your photos, Google Photos does not store your photos in the app itself. They are stored online.

Google Photos Help

Here is the official Google Photos help page all about Backup and Sync.

Make a Second Backup before Deleting

Before I use the Free Up Space command to delete the photos from my phone, I want one more layer of protection. Since the Google Photos copy of my pictures is my working copy, I don't consider that a true backup (see previous article: Google Photos is not a "Backup" of your Photos. I use the OneDrive app for this purpose. Other possibilities are Amazon Photos, Dropbox, Facebook, or copying to a computer via a cable connection.

6/13/17 Additional Notes

After several frustrating days of taking hundreds of photos and not getting them backed up I have reached a couple of conclusions:

1. A stalled backup is almost always due to poor Internet connection. It's the upload speed that counts here, so even though a connection may be good enough to read your email, it may not be good enough to upload your photos. You need to find a better connection.
2. Google Photos has some problem with iPhone Live Photos. When it comes to Live Photos, it stalls the backup process until you force it. You gotta watch it constantly and be ready to force quit the app and restart. At least that's the way I did it - it may also work to turn off Auto Backup then turn back on.

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Google Photos Makes Mothers' Day Videos from Your PIctures

Google wants us to have more fun with our photos. That's why they give us a place to be the forever home for ALL your pictures. With Mother's Day coming up, they've given us a new toy! A Mother's Day movie made for you. All you have to do is:

1. Go to Photos.Google.com/mothersday on any connected device - phone, tablet, or computer. 
2. Click the button "Get Started"
3. Select a Mother. You should be seeing all of the People in your Google Photos library, if not, see prerequisites below. Find the face of your mother and click it. Then click Next.
4. Select Children. Click the face(s) of you and your siblings. Click Done.
5. That's it! You'll see a message "Creating Movie: This will take a few minutes. When it's ready, it will show up in your Photos Assistant." If you like it, click Save.

Google Photos finds pictures with both you and your mom in the same picture, then strings them together along with music. Here's what it did for me:

Prerequisites 

In order for this to work you must be using Google Photos, be logged into your Google account, and have lots of pictures there. You must also have Face Groupings turned on. To check that, go to Google Photos and click the 3-line menu, then Settings. You should see an option for "Group Similar Faces" - make sure that is on. Once you turn it on, it can take a while to group the faces, be patient. If you don't see the option for grouping faces, you may be in a country where it is not supported.

Want More?

You can make additional Mother's Day movies by repeating the steps above. It doesn't have to be your mother. You can pick another mother (or even a father, or a teacher) as long as you have pictures of her and her kids in your photo library. You can even skip the 'Select a mother" part altogether and just use this to make movies of small groups of people. Select a Mother: click Skip. Select Children: select a few people who you expect to all be in some pictures together.

Want to Make Changes?

Google does all the work to create this movie, but if you want to change something, you can edit it just like a movie you created yourself. You can remove photos, you can add other photos, you can add video clips, you can rearrange them, and change the music. You need to be using Google Photos on a supported mobile device, then you open the movie and tap the pencil to edit it. What you see next will depend on whether you are using Android or iOS, but both of them allow you to make the changes mentioned above.

How to Give it to your Mother

The movie that is created is now a part of your Google Photos library. I like to upload mine to Youtube so it can be embedded on a web page - as I did above. You can also share it via email, Facebook, or other social media, but if you want something more solid, how about a digital photo frame? Most photo frames can display photos and videos from a USB 'thumb' drive. To get your movie to the thumb drive, plug it into a computer, then open the movie in Google photos, click the 3-dot menu and choose Download. Navigate to the drive letter for the thumb drive and Save.

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Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. 
She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.