Moving to Google Photos

Software
21

I just can’t get past not trusting Google at all. I merely enter info for various photos in the Apple app when I have the time. I’d much rather do that than rely on Google.

I did have Google Photos for a while and then I eliminated it as I did not feel comfortable with it.

1 Like
22

I’ve had good success with Google Photos. Some of the major reasons I switched were:

  1. Price points for storage tiers favored Google after I started approaching 200GB.
  2. Easier ability to share individual photos or albums.
  3. No issues w/ local database on laptop, like the Photos app.

So all iPhone photos are auto-uploaded direct. All my DSLR photos are culled, edited as needed, labeled/captioned as needed (birding especially) (using Lightroom) then exported to a folder. Lightroom Classic adds some minor files per catalog, but the photos are never sucked into a database. All changes are saved to and exported w/ JPEG files. No extra XMP files lying around. Hazel monitors this folder then does some renaming and dupe-checking, finally dropping them into a final folder. Google Drive desktop app then immediately copies them to the cloud. The caption field populates the ‘Other’ field after upload.

As others have mentioned, you can search for any description or ‘other’ field you have populated, or just rely on Google’s AI to recognize and/or find objects. It is surprisingly robust.

I still have some of my wife’s video taken w/ her iPhone that iCloud can’t seem to download. I’ve tried 2-3 times and each time just produces an error. Still need to fix that.

2 Likes
23

Just that I read the article and wasn’t sure what you found interesting, but you answered that just above!

24

Interesting. Things have obviously improved since I last tried the service. It was heralded in the tech press as “amazing” but my simple tests proved it to be laughable at the time. I searched for “aircraft” too and more than half of what it found was indeed aircraft, but it also found all sorts of other things including a close-up of bicycle handlebars. Worse, though, was the enormous number of obvious photos it missed. I tried the same with “vehicle” and “car” and got even worse results.

It may be time for another test, though I think I’m setting myself up for disappointment again.

25

I’m not sure how long it takes for GP to identify photos. If you’re not happy with the results I’d give it some time and try again after a few days. I think you’ll find it is worth the wait.

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