google+ photos

Google has made its Featured Photos screensaver – previously limited to Pixel, Chromecast and Google Fiber devices – available on the Mac. The screensaver pulls in the highest-rated shots Google+ users have chosen to make public, so you get a constantly-updating flow of often breathtakingly gorgeous photos.

The screensaver works especially well on multiple monitor setups, as each monitor displays a different photo …

Expand
Expanding
Close

The latest update to the Google Photos app is a big one: it uses AI technology to add four new features, from resurfacing old memories to fixing sideways photos. The new features are available in the iOS app, Android app (shown above) and on the web.

While the iPhone should recognize whether you’re holding the camera vertically or horizontally, there are times when this doesn’t work reliably. The app will now automatically detect photos which appear to be sideways and offer to fix them for you with one tap.

The three remaining new features all focus on ways to highlight memories and share moments with others …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Back in June, Google released a Motion Stills app that removes shakes from iOS Live Photos and turns them into easily shareable GIFs and movies. That functionality is now built into Google Photos 2.0 with more sharing options and a number of other tweaks.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google Photos already lets users backup and view an unlimited number of high-resolution photos and videos for free, and Google recently added a button that lets users manually purge downloaded content to make room for more free storage. There’s a new update awaiting Google Photos users today that adds support for the latest software and hardware features on iPhones and iPads.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Welcome to the latest edition of Jeremy’s 5, my latest quick roundup of 5 interesting little things that aren’t big enough for full articles, but are still worth sharing with you.

This week, I’m looking at the next wave of emoji, T-Mobile’s 4G LTE CellSpot, Google Photos, iCloud/iTunes Account Merging, and battery drain from the latest iOS beta…

Expand
Expanding
Close

I’ve been all in on iCloud Photo Library since Apple replaced iPhoto with the new Photos app on the Mac last year and I haven’t looked back since. I pay $2.99/month to sync my 13,206 photos and 1,087 videos (plus iOS device backups) with iCloud, and this allows me to take or save photos and videos from any device and have them appear across the others including the web, edits, albums, and all. I even have a system to help ensure to if something in the cloud gets hosed that everything will be fine at home (and if the house burns down hopefully the cloud is still there).

This also enables me to access my 155 GB photos library in the Photos apps on iPhones and iPads that otherwise couldn’t fit that much content. Thumbnail previews are available at all times, and full resolution versions download on the fly as needed. When you’re iPhone, iPad, or Mac needs more local storage, Photos can remove full-res images and downloaded videos to make more space using an optimize storage option. This works pretty well especially on higher capacity devices, but there’s one problem…

Expand
Expanding
Close

A few weeks ago Google unveiled a new space saver feature for its Photos app on Android, and this week the best feature 16GB iPhones and iPads could wish for is now available on iOS. Google Photos has also added Shared Albums across iOS, Android, and the web, which makes sending pictures and videos you capture to friends and family super easy.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is adding some new space-saving features to its Photos app on both the web and iOS. A new feature rolling out to the web client starting Wednesday will give the option to downgrade photos previous backed up in full resolution to the compressed mode in order to save space. And on iOS, there’s a new “Free up space” button being added to the settings menu that deletes already backed up photos…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is hosting its big fall event today with the company officially taking the wraps off a new lineup of Nexus smartphones from various manufacturing partners, its new second-gen Chromecast that we revealed previously, a revamped Google Photos experience, and much, much more.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google Photos

My relationship with Apple’s hardware is simple: I’m happily locked in, and not changing platforms any time soon. But my relationship with Apple’s software is complex: I want to love it, but every time Apple decides to “throw everything away” and “start over” with an app, it’s disruptive — and for many users, unnecessary. From my perspective, users weren’t complaining that Apple’s popular photo apps iPhoto or Aperture were hopelessly broken or even deficient in major ways, yet Apple discontinued both of them last month to release Photos, a bare-bones alternative no one seems to love. On the relationship scale, I didn’t abandon Aperture; Aperture abandoned me (and a lot of other people).

So yesterday’s announcement of the free cross-platform photo and video storage app Google Photos couldn’t have come at a better time. Apple has struggled to explain why it now offers two separate photo syncing services, neither with the virtually unlimited photo and video storage Google is now giving users — notably all users, including Mac and iOS users. Moreover, Apple has offered no sign that it’s going to drop the steep fees it’s charging for iCloud photo storage. With WWDC just around the corner, Apple has a big opportunity to match Google’s photo and video initiative, thrilling its customers in the process. If that doesn’t happen, I’m moving my collection into Google Photos, and not looking back…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Last month we reported that Google’s slick new “Google+ Photos” app that launched exclusively on the Chromebook Pixel could possibly be making its way to Mac. The proof came from a newly posted listing on the Chrome Web Store that made references to auto-uploading features specifically for OS X. Unfortunately, launching the app would give Mac users a “not supported on this platform” error message. While Google has yet to officially launch the Mac and PC versions of the Chrome app, there is a way to bypass the error message and enable the app now.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Back in June, Google released a new Google+ Photos app for the Chromebook Pixel and noted that the slick app would also be coming to other Chrome OS devices. However, today we received some proof that the Chrome app might be soon making its way to other platforms including Mac and Windows. The Google Operating System blog notes that the app has recently made its way to the Chrome Web Store with the app’s description describing auto-upload features for Mac, PC, and Linux:

Expand
Expanding
Close