Google Photos

Mark 0:13
Now you sent me information saying, Google Photos. So this is all about the photos what you take from your mobile phone and everything is.

Seamus 0:41
Yes, I should these two things that Google has are Google Photos and Google Drive. And Google Drive, we’re just gonna get the difference of those at first, Google Drive is a storage and collaboration platform. And Google Photos is something different and that’s a photo, video syncing and back up some editing. But the biggest thing is, it uses machine learning to organise your photos and gives you the ability to search for all sorts of things. It’s, it’s quite an incredible piece of, or framework or platform, in that it, they are improving all the time to make things easier for you so you know how you know you’ve got thousands of photos and sometimes finding a particular photo is not easy,

Mark 1:31
Yeah, especially with mobile phones nowadays. Virtually every 10 seconds someone’s taking the snap somewhere.

Seamus 1:36
That’s right, yeah. So, what Google Photos can do with either an iPhone or an Android phone, is if you put the Google Photos app on your phone, it will automatically backup your all your photos to the cloud to Google Photos cloud server. And that’s quite a good thing in itself, you don’t have to do anything about it, it’ll just, if you’re out on a trip or something like that, as soon as you get back to Wi Fi not mobile data because, you know, obviously takes a bit of bit of data to send photos up, it will automatically save your photos onto Google Cloud, Google Photos sorry.

Mark 2:20
That’s okay. ‘Cos I noticed that with myself with my phone I mean I may not I’ve taken a fight over a couple of days but still on my phone if I when I get up in the morning I see that it’s backing up to Google Photos and then sort of like, where did I take a photo? but it’s still doing the backup.

Mark 2:35
It is, yes. And the beauty of it is that if you’re happy with, not the original images as in a slightly reduced file size it’s free forever. If you want to get, you know, the raw images, then you’ve got to pay but other than that, it’s just free which is pretty amazing and the large image size is quite fine for most things so it wouldn’t be fine if you want to make a huge big poster, but for most things that you want to use your photos for – going on this free platform is quite an incredible thing really

Mark 3:17
Do you have to download it – or is it already pre-loaded onto the machine?

Seamus 3:30
It may be on some Android phones but on most phones, you will have to download the app, which again is free but once you’ve downloaded that you set it up so that it backs up all your photos and videos to Google Photos.

Mark 3:47
As long as you know the password if you ever lose your phone or you replace your phone or something like that, you can still access the photos that are on the cloud.

Seamus 3:54
Yes. And you can access it from your laptop, of course too because once you go into your Gmail or your Google account, then Google Photos is one of the apps that you have access to so that’s available to you as long as you know your Google account login details.

Mark 4:13
Okay, now with this so it’s any size, if you, I mean, I know people would take videos or a party or something – there’s 15 minutes of video so it takes all that as well.

Seamus 4:23
Yep. That’s it down to 1080p err measurement things. It won’t do really high res, the highest resolution but 1080p is good enough for most things that you’ll need to use

Mark 4:49
I do know when people take photos nowadays they like playing with them there are all these different filters there are all the things with weird bunnies and everything on it so does it keep the original or keep also the one that you decide you want to play around with

Seamus 5:06
It keeps the original but, it’s original if it’s just reduced to a certain size which is fairly big. But, so your photos will still be on your phone, your raw photos but they if you when you back them up to Google Photos, then they’re just slightly reduced or most of them are. But, but one of the biggest things about it is the organisation. So, and Google spending a fortune on machine learning so you can – I had a dog that died a couple of years ago but I just looked at some of the photos of my dog, typed in his name and then, Google searched through all of my photos for all of my dog and it’s amazingly clever in that it didn’t pick up other dogs it just picked up my dog. And you can do the same with people you tag, a person’s face with their name. And sometimes it asks you to do it twice, my daughter I’ve got photos of her from, you know, birth to now nearly 16. So, I’ve had to tag, a few times her photos as she’s changed over the years. But now I can just type in Zoe my daughter’s name, and it’ll find every photo that I’ve ever taken of my daughter.

Mark 6:28
That’s rather amazing, so it’s using facial technology or facial recognition technology to tag a photo here with the name of it,

Seamus 6:34
Yes and machine learning. So, there are so many things it’s doing it’s quite incredible, you can do any sort of facial recognition like that, and it will sometimes ask you is this face the same as this face if there are ones that he’s not sure about. So you just either say yes or no so you can sort of teach it as you go along.

Mark 7:06
One of the things I wanted to ask is security, I did ask you before, but it’s sort of when you get into tech this size. Security is there; now they are your photos you have all rights to these photos because of things like Facebook and everything else. If you put a photo on Facebook, it’s Facebook’s to use anytime they want.

Seamus 7:25
Yes

Mark 7:26
So in anything that they want to do so this is not the same here with Google?

Seamus 7:30
I’m 97.63% certain that it’s not that I should actually double-check I’m fairly certain with Google stuff, you own it. They’re not a social media platform so they’re slightly different in that they are your private photos, whereas if you put something on social media you’re, you’re saying that anyone, basically you’re saying that anyone can use it because you’re sharing all over social media and you’re right Facebook does own those photos but this is sort of a more like Gmail or Google Drive in that it’s your private storage of your private photos or whatever. So, yes, as long as you’ve got your login details to your Google account, and you don’t share them with anyone else then the photos are all yours and very private and very secure because it’s Google

Mark 8:31
Now when you download the app I take it it’s got a menu so you can learn what it is. Just go read through it step by step to understand what it’s doing.

Seamus 8:40
Yep, and on your phone now they’ve got, it’s not on all phones but it’s just come in and they use machine learning to make suggestions on how you can edit your photos on your smartphone. I should also say that it does have basic editing abilities. It’s not as good as a full-blown photo or video editor, but you can do most things you need to do but this new thing that Google just brought out, makes suggestions on how you should, you know what you could do to your photo to make it better.

Seamus 9:16
Boy, technology I think a lot of people like me, being an old bloke, are behind, I mean you’re almost my age, but you’re being longer than mine. Yeah. At least 35 I think!

Mark 9:38
If anyone wants to find out more, they just go on and is Google Photos is that what the actual app called.

Seamus 9:44
The app’s called Google Photos, so you can download that on your phone and then once it’s downloaded it’s in your suite of Google Apps again called Google Photos.

Mark 9:56
Okay, so pretty easy to find

Seamus 9:58
Easy to find, actually very easy to use, even for old farts like you and me.

Mark 10:03
Thank you very much for including me, although I don’t include myself in insult like that, you’re not.

Mark 10:14
Thank you. And this time around Google Photos check it out.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai