As the historian for my family and third-generation amateur photographer, gathering, organizing, preserving, and sharing the family photos is extremely important to me. Both my dad and my grandfather were amateur photographers. And in addition, not only did they instill a love of photography in me, but I inherited both of their extensive photograph collections. In addition to that, I inherited almost 140 years of my family's papers and photographs. So I'm finding that Google Photos is one way to really work with all of my material in preserving it and sharing it.

Today, we're going to go over just getting set up with Google Photos, in case you aren't already, and then collecting your photos together. We'll talk about a couple of minor editing features. We'll do some organizing. I'll show you some of the powerful search features that you can use. And we'll talk a little bit about preserving. And then I'll go over some sharing projects. There's no way I can go over everything about Google Photos in 50 minutes. So my hope is that if you're not a Google Photos user, you'll come away with enough to get yourself started and be excited about using it. And if you are a Google Photos user, I hope that you find some tips and tricks that you can use.

Now you'll want to know how to access a copy of my handout for the session. It's in the app. And because you'll want to refer to it more after the session, probably, than during, but I just want to make sure everybody knows how to do this. You go into the app to my presentation. And then go scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen. And tap on the handout to obtain it.

OK, let's get oriented with Google Photos. When you first go into Google Photos, you're going to see all of your pictures. And I'm mostly using screenshots from my laptop. So if you're on a mobile device or your iPad, it'll be basically the same, but there will be some differences. And I'll try to point out some of those as we go through, in case you're following along on your mobile device today. There is a navigation panel somewhere on your screen.

And your pictures are presented in a timeline format, with the most recent pictures at the top of your screen. And then you would scroll down, scrolling backwards through time. Now on my laptop, this is going to be over on the right-hand side of my screen. And I find a lot of times on a laptop or a desktop computer, you've got to hover your mouse over something to get it to appear. And that's the case with the timeline. On your mobile device, usually what you can do is just start scrolling. And that little button will show up. And then you can just hold down on that. And the dates will appear. And you can scroll through your timeline and see the dates as you're moving through your timeline.

Now it's also really important to know where the help features and the setting features are. I think they've kind of hidden them. What you want to do is just click or tap on the hamburger icon, which is those three horizontal bars up at the top of the screen. And then you'll get a dropdown menu. And from that menu, if you don't see Help or Settings, scroll all the way down to the bottom. They put the Help in the Settings at the bottom. And I think those, when you're first starting out, those are two features that you'll use fairly often.

Now one of the big things that we do, we spend a lot of time doing with our pictures, and this goes back to the days even when we had the physical pictures, you're searching through boxes and boxes of pictures for that right picture that you need for whatever your project is. And it's the same way with your digital pictures. You spend a lot of time searching. So what we're going to work on today a little bit is working with--to help Google Photos help us find our pictures faster. So perhaps you remember about when you took a picture. Use that timeline feature. And watch the dates. And try to get as close as you can in the timeline to where you think you took your picture. And then you can find it quicker. Now we genealogists think a lot in terms of surnames, branches of our family. So there's always the search box on your screen somewhere. Just type in your surname. In this case, I typed in Lowe. And what I got were all of the pictures for my Lowe family. Now the way that Google organizes it is, along the top row of the screen are all of the albums that I've created that have Lowe pictures in them. And then the bottom of the screen are the individual pictures that you can then scroll through.

Perhaps you just remember where you took the picture. I took a trip to my dad and my grandfather's hometown last summer in Cheney, Washington. And I wanted to pull up those pictures that I took in Cheney. So I just typed in the word Cheney, and all the pictures I took on that trip showed up, and also the album that I had placed them in.

Maybe you're looking for a headstone picture. We all love to go to cemeteries, right? Just type in the word headstone or cemetery. And then all of your cemetery pictures will show up. And again, you'll have the albums along the top of the screen. And then the individual headstone pictures following.

Now to get to this state of being able to search, there are some things, some steps you'll need to go through. Google does try to help you. But you still need to take a few steps yourself. So let's go through them. First off, you have to have a Google account. And it's really easy to set up. You just you just need a name, a password, and a couple of other pieces of information. And this is one of the things I put a link in the handout for you to use to get your account set up, if you don't already have one. Once you create your account, you'll have access to a myriad of other Google Apps, like Gmail, Drive, and YouTube. And it's all free.

Now after setting up your account, you're going to need to get the apps for the devices that you're going to be using Google Photos on. So that might be your smartphone or your iPad. Each of those devices, if you want to use Google Photos on that device, you'll need to have the app. The help feature will step you through the process for a computer, Android, iPhone, and iPad.

So this is where you can go to the Google Photos help center that I talked about earlier, the help on the menu. Or just Google the term Google Photos help. And it will take you to the help for Google Photos. And I have to say, their help screens are phenomenal. It's just finding them. But like I say, if you can't find it, just Google it.

Now you can also download the Backup and Sync app if you have a desktop.

And you can set it to automatically upload your pictures from your desktop. You can also send it up to just upload from one folder or certain folders. It will all happen automatically.

Now I've got a couple of tips for you today.

Google Photos offers unlimited free storage of your images. But you need to make sure that your devices are set up for this. You can find the specific steps to set this up in the handout. So I'm not going to spend any more time on that, but I just want you to know it's there. And then once you've got the Google Photos app downloaded and set up on your devices, the pictures on that device will sync with Google Photos. Now you might want Google Photos to sync across all of your devices. And again, you just need to go into the Google help and find out what the settings are and just get that set up.

So you'll look in Google Photo Help for "find backup," or you'll look for "back up photos and videos." And then just follow the instructions.

Now, you can also choose to back up while you're only charging your phone. And that way you don't wear out the battery on your phone. So if you've gone to the cemetery for the day, and you've taken a ton of pictures, you might not want all of those pictures being uploaded to Google Photos until you get back to your hotel or your house, and you can plug it in. And you don't want your battery running out.

OK, now we need to collect your digital images. Now we've already talked about setting everything up so that your phone or your iPad can automatically sync the pictures that you take across all of your devices. And if that's the only thing that you do, you've already made your life a whole lot easier. But Google Photos is really powerful. So there's a lot more that you can do.

Now I'm going to step back in time a little bit. How many of you have used a flatbed scanner to scan old pictures? OK, good. Oh, good. So we're used to doing that. There's a faster way to do it now. You can still do that. You can upload your pictures manually. But there's a faster way to do it. And that's the PhotoScan app. It goes onto your phone. You can get it from the app store or the Google Play Store. And all I can say is, it's really fast and easy. I have done a lot of scanning on a flatbed scanner. And this is--I am so impressed with it. Once you scan those pictures with your phone, it will automatically upload to Google Photos. So the way it works, is you're going to take a picture--a series of four pictures of your item. And you just hover that circle over each of the four dots. And the camera automatically takes the pictures. Now what this does, is it helps to reduce the glare that you see. And it also helps to eliminate that skew, so that you end up with a nice rectangular picture.

So when you're done, this is what you'll get, a picture that looks something like this.

But you can make adjustments to the picture once you get the images into Google Photos and make them a little bit, and make it look a little bit better. I just quickly applied Google's autocorrect feature to this photo. And I'll show you where to do that in a few minutes. And it really improved my picture. So this is the original scan that I took with the photo scan app. And then, after I did the autocorrect in Google Photos, that's what it looked like afterwards. So you can see it got rid of that awful glare that was still running across the middle of the picture. And it also just really, I think it really increased the clarity of the picture.

Now judging from the hands that went up in the room a minute ago, we all have lots of pictures on our computer that we manually scanned and got from other places that we might want to upload to Google Photos. So let's talk about uploading those images. From within Google Photos, you just click on Upload.

And then you'll just navigate on your computer to the folder where the pictures are that you want to upload. So I'm going to upload some early 20th-century pictures from my Mitchell family that I scanned a number of years ago. So I've navigated to that folder and selected the pictures that I want to upload. And then just click Open. And you'll get a little status window in the bottom of the screen that will tell you how your upload is going. And then when it's done, it will let you know. And it'll ask you if you want to add it to an album or a shared album. And we'll just--I want to add these to a picture or to an album for my Mitchell family. So I'm going to create a new album and just name it "Mitchell family." And when I'm done, just click on the check mark or check box. So these are all of the Mitchell family photos that I uploaded. And I want to use these to talk about some of the editing features that you can use. Notice some of these pictures are sideways. And I did highlight one of them in red. So let's rotate it. All you need to do is click or tap on a picture that you want to rotate. And then click on what I call the broken hamburger icon. That's the Edit icon. And this screen that comes up, this is where you can apply those adjustments that I was talking about. So that autocorrect feature is one of these selections that you see on the screen. And you can do a lot of other fun things with these. You can apply different-colored hues. You can make it look like--a modern-day picture look like an old picture, or a color picture look like a black-and-white picture. There's all kinds of fun things you can do there. But we just want to rotate the picture. So we'll click on that rotate icon. And this is where you can also crop your picture by just clicking and dragging on those boxes in the corner of the picture to get it cropped the way you want it. You can also partially rotate the image, just a little bit. Or you can rotate it in 90-degree increments. And that's what we're going to do. So we'll just click on that. And our picture is rotated. We'll click on Done.

Now let's click on the Info button. This is where we can edit information about the picture. And I think this is really where a lot of the power of Google comes in, if you can work with your pictures a little bit.

The first thing that I did was just add a description. So when we're done with all the editing and changing that we're doing, that description will show up along the bottom of the photo. And I just put the names of everybody in the picture in the description. Now this is a picture that I scanned a number of years ago. So the way it is now, this picture is going to appear in my timeline under the year 2009, because that's when I scanned it. But the picture was taken in 1905. So I'm going to have a hard time finding this picture again, if I'm looking for it. So what I want to do is edit the date. Just click on the pencil next to the date to edit it. And the back of the picture says that it was taken October 4th, 1905. So I just put that in. And I'm not going to worry about the time on this. Click Save. And your date has changed. So now, when we go back to the timeline, my picture is going to be under 1905, much easier to find. Now one of the things that I like about uploading pictures from my desktop or my laptop computer is that the file names that I gave my files are retained when they're uploaded to Google. So I, and I use, I have a meaningful file naming system that I use. So I'm pretty stringent about wanting to hang on to that. If you've taken a picture with your phone, that phone is assigned a number. And that's what gets uploaded to Google. And you can't really change it once it's there. So just, that's just something to be aware of.

When you're done with your editing, just click the x box to get out. And notice now that the description that I put is down on the bottom of the picture.

Let's talk a little bit more about the timeline. I mentioned earlier that when you first go into Google Photos, all your pictures are arranged in a timeline. And then you can also click on that Photos icon to get to your timeline. If you're someplace else in Google Photos, that's the way to get back to your timeline, is the Photos icon. Now we can see that the Mitchell picture that we just worked on is now in its place in 1905 instead of 2009. So the timeline, I think of it as a diary. And not only is it a diary of my life as I'm going around with my phone, snapping pictures, but also my family history, because I'm going in and editing the dates as much as I can to get them into somewhat of a chronological order.

Now you can also organize your pictures and albums and do some other fun things from your timeline. You can select all the pictures for a particular date by either hovering or just clicking and tapping on the date. Or you can select individual photos.

Once you've got all your pictures added that you want, or selected, that you want to add to your album, just click on the plus sign. You'll get a dropdown menu. And we're going to add these pictures to an album. In this case, we'll make it a new album, rather than adding it to an existing album. And we'll just call it "Grand Teton National Park." And when we're done, we'll just click the check box. Now if you're on a mobile device, it's just slightly different. To select your pictures, you're going to need to hold your finger down on one of the pictures until blank circles appear. And then you can go through and tap and select the pictures that you want to put in your album. And then you just go through the same steps that we just went through. I had a hard time with that when I first started using Google Photos on my phone. So I like to make sure people understand that's a little bit different.

Now what I also want to point out, you can put a picture in more than one album. I think a lot of us are kind of used to, you have a physical picture, it goes into an album. If I want to put it in somebody else's album, I have to take it the developer and get another picture printed up. You don't have to do that with Google Photos. You can put one picture in as many albums as you want.

Let's go into Albums and work there. Let's just, we just click on the Albums icon in the navigation pane.

We've already talked about organizing your pictures into albums when you initially upload them into Google Photos. You can also work just from this screen with your albums. And Google automatically creates some albums for you to help you with your organizing and some searching. And those albums that Google creates are along the top row of your screen. And then the albums that you've created are in the bottom half of the screen. And you just scroll down to see the rest of your albums. Google automatically organizes photos by people, places, things, and some other categories. We're just going to talk about people, places, and things. So let's take a look at the people, because it's so important to identify all the people in our pictures, especially those older people that are going to be forgotten if we don't. So click or tap on the people pane. And you'll get a screen with faces from the pictures that you've taken. One of these is from that Mitchell group of photos that I uploaded. I put a red box around her. And I want to put her name on it. So we'll click or tap on her face. And what we do we get is a screen with that Mitchell album, because that's where her photo is, and a box that we can just type her name in. And then when we're done typing in Margaret H. Mitchell, we just click the Back button. So now we could do a search for Margaret H. Mitchell in Google, and it will bring up all of the pictures that Google thinks are Margaret Mitchell.

So this is what I got. All I had to do is identify her in that one photo.

Now sometimes, you are going to have to help Google out with this, because it does, the facial recognition is not perfect. For this group of pictures with Viola Hansen, it's identified her as being in some pictures that she's not in. So what I want to do is disassociate her from those individual pictures. Now I'm not saying we're going to take those pictures out of Google Photos. We're just going to disassociate Viola Hansen from those pictures, because she's not in them.

We'll go through and pick Select, just like we've been talking about. Select those pictures that we don't want her name associated with.

And then we'll click on the menu, which is those three vertical dots up in the corner. And you'll get a dropdown. And you just click on Remove the name label. And it'll take Viola's name off of those pictures that I selected. Now this is also where you can edit the name label, if you want. So if you change your mind about the way that the name that you set up is, you can just go in here and change it.

So now, when we go back and look at Viola's pictures, all those pictures that she wasn't in aren't there anymore. And it's just the pictures that she really is in.

So as you work with your photos and you identify people, they'll appear in the people pane with the names that you've put with them. And then if you are interested in looking at all the pictures of that person, you just click on the face. And you'll get to see all the pictures of that individual person. But again, just remember that that's what Google thinks. So you might have to make some corrections here and there, because it's not perfect. And I'm finding that I have more trouble with the older pictures than I do the really modern pictures. So I don't know why that is, but it might just be because I don't have as many of those older pictures in there yet.

OK, let's go back to the Albums page, where the albums that Google creates are along the top of the pane. And let's look at Places.

Now if the device that you took the pictures with has the location feature enabled, Google Photos will automatically organize your images by where they were taken. So this is another way that you can go searching for pictures. If you remember where you took the picture, this is a way to get in there and find those pictures you took.

Google also organizes your pictures by things. And I just love this. You have no control over what things it identifies.

So with my pictures, it's identified sky, wedding, graduation. And I really like that it identified selfies, because I'm the family photographer. And I don't get in very many pictures. And sometimes, I need a picture of myself. So this is a way that I can find pictures of me. We just click on selfies. And all the pictures that I'm in appear.

Now in the navigation pane, there's also another feature that I want to talk about briefly. And that's called the assistant. Now you'll need to go into Settings. Remember, I talked about settings at the beginning. Back in the menu, you'll need to find the settings. And then tell Google Photos what assistant card you want to see. So you might go in and just play around with it and see what you like and what you don't like. I have it set up so that it will create albums for me. So if I take a trip, and I take a bunch of pictures, Google automatically creates an album of that trip for me. And if I don't like the name of it. This one they named, two days an Island County. If I don't like the name, I can just go in and change it. But that makes it really fast to quickly organize your pictures.

Now it'll also make rotation suggestions. And all my pictures were already rotated, I guess, the way they needed to be. So, but--you can go in here and check, and if there are pictures that are sideways or upside down, it'll make suggestions that maybe that should be changed. And you can get that fixed in there, too. And it also makes stylized photos for me by applying those filters that I talked about earlier. So sometimes, it's kind of fun. I don't always stop and think about doing those kinds of things. So it just does it for me, and then I can quickly share a picture with somebody with the stylizing.

So people, names--people's names, places, and things will help you with Google's search feature. Google, here, is suggesting searching on hiking. So if I were to type that in, it would bring up all the pictures that it thinks have to do with hiking. Let's say I want to see all my beach pictures. Just start typing in "beach," and notice that it actually tries to help me out by saying, well, you were in Pensacola Beach. So it's suggesting that for me, if that happened to be what I was looking for. But if I just type in "beach," all my beach pictures show up.

Our family artifacts take many forms, from print, photos, slides, film, and letters, to documents. So we not only want to preserve those physical artifacts, which is a whole other talk. But we also want to get those items digitized, not only as a way to preserve or back them up, but also to be able to share them.

How many of you have heard the term "LOCKSS"? A few of you.

"Lots of copies keeps stuff safe."

So in addition to those paper copies, you want to keep copies of those really precious photos and documents in Google Photos. That's one way to help keep them safe. But you also want to back them up in other places, too. Make sure that you have a cloud backup. And I'm not endorsing any of these companies. I just randomly picked some for this slide. But go find a cloud storage service that you're comfortable with and that meets your needs, and sign up for it. Also, remember, you can back your pictures up to just a separate hard drive that you keep in your house or your safe deposit box. Somebody came up to me before the talk and said that they had been using Google Photos as their backup, which is great. But that was their only backup. And apparently, they had lost some of them. So again, lots of copies keep things safe. Use those external hard drives. Use a cloud backup. Use Google Photos. Get those pictures in lots of different places, so that if you have a disaster, you can still recover those really important and treasured items.

Now, sharing is another way to preserve your photos and other documents. And Google Photos makes it really easy to share. Once you've collected and organized your pictures and other things in Google Photos, there's lots of different sharing projects. I'm going to start today by just making a quick collage. And it's of memories from my mother-in-law's family farm. So the process of selecting is the same that we've been talking about. Just go in and select all the pictures that you want for your collage. And after you've got them all selected, click on the sharing icon. You'll get a dropdown menu. And we'll pick, collage. And then Google just automatically makes the collage for you.

Now click on the sharing icon again. And you have lots of ways that you can share your collage. You could email it to somebody. You could add it to a shared album, or share it on Twitter. Or what we'll do is share it on Facebook.

So you can add a comment to your collage, and then click Post to Facebook. I wrote, "To all of you Bindon descendants, who remembers the Bindon farm in Three Oaks, Michigan? Please share a memory or two." Within a few hours, I had, I can't tell you how many responses I had from people. And they were all sharing different stories. And these are people from young, way younger than me, to people in their 80s. So it was just really neat to have these people sharing all of these memories. And that was just from--just a real quick little project that I did, sharing to Facebook.

Now shared albums are also a really great way to share between friends and family. In this example, let's say that you went on a research trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC. And you took pictures of a lot of documents. Now you want to share these documents with your cousin that's helping you do the family history research. So you can just go in and find those pictures that you want to share with your cousin. Select them. Click on the sharing icon.

And then just decide how you want to share them. In this case, we're going to pick Shared Album.

And then just select the album that you want to share to or create a new one.

Now, what I really like about shared albums is the collaboration that you can do. So for example, if you're trying to identify who is in an old photo, you can make comments back and forth to each other about that photo and what's in it, or what you think is in it, and kind of come to a consensus.

And I mentioned at the beginning of the talk that I've inherited a lot of ancestral photos. And one of those collections is my grandfather's World War I experience. He took a camera with him and took a lot of photos. He kept a diary. And he wrote letters home almost every day until he shipped out. And then he still wrote home, but not quite as often. And all the family members saved them and gave them back to him. They're mine now.

So I've been gathering them, scanning them, and uploading them to Google Photos. And one of the first things I did is I went in and started editing the date, so that they show up in 1917 instead of 2017, so I can find them.

You can edit the dates on photos in groups by going in and selecting a group of photos. So this is his diary. And I just wanted to put--I just put one date on the diary for now. I'm going to have to kind of divvy it out. But he made multiple entries on one page, so it's kind of hard to split it up too much. So I've just selected groups, maybe from a month at a time, and just tap on the menu, those three vertical dots. And then you can just go in and edit the date and time for a group of photos. So I was able to, in 15 minutes, probably, do 300 pictures just by doing it in a big group. [INAUDIBLE] Hold your question. I also put Grandpa's diary in its own album. And so once I get a few more of these dates and a few things organized, what I'm going to do is share them with family members. I'm trying to work on a book about his experience and really research where his unit was as they traveled through Europe and what he wrote about. But that's going to take me a long time. And my family wants to read about what he did. So once I kind of get this a little bit more organized, I'm going to just have this shared album out there for my family members. And they can go in and read his diary as he experienced World War I. So whether you're collecting current-day family photos, visiting an old family home, the family cemetery, or digitizing family photos, Google Photos is a fun and easy way for preserving, organizing, and sharing your digital images.

And now it's time for the question-and-answer period. So if you have a question, just make your way to the microphone that's in the back of the room over here. And also, just a reminder, to use the app to rate the sessions while you're here at the conference.

Are there any questions? I see some people moving.

You know the Google Photos, your presentation is very powerful. But boy, there's so many other options out there. There's Dropbox. Nikon has options. Flickr has some. Can you comment on the others? And that's the first question. And the second question would be, how do you move pictures in those other electronic storage areas to Google Photos? Well, I am a Dropbox user. I have a premium account, because I have so much stuff in it. And I actually have all of my family history photos in Dropbox. So everything that you saw here today on Google Photos is also in Dropbox. Again, it's part of that LOCKSS theory, of lots of copies keep stuff safe. OK, and I can also access my pictures if they are in Dropbox, and I need to do something. I can access them that way. And I forgot the second question. [INAUDIBLE] OK, how do you move? How do you move from other storage areas to Dropbox? To Google?

From other storage areas to Google. So, well, so, Dropbox, for instance, I mean, what I showed you today, those pictures that I uploaded were in Dropbox. So it's just a matter of navigating to that on your laptop. Now if you're using something else, some other photo storage system in the cloud, usually you can download your pictures. So I would say, probably, you just download them, and then just reupload them into Google Photos. Go ahead. How easy is it to transfer photos from Google Photos into the family history databases like FamilySearch or Ancestry? OK, I have not done that. But what I'm thinking you would do, again, is just use the Download option from Google Photos. And then upload whatever you want into Ancestry or FamilySearch. That's the way I would do it. Yes? OK, can you explain to me. I'll take pictures with my camera or my phone. Sometimes it takes anywhere from 24 to three days before it hits Google. What am I missing to have that happen? I'm thinking it might be in your settings. I've had this happen before. And I have to go and check settings. Is that in the camera or in Google? Both. I would check both. And the other thing, too, is, like, I have my phone set so that it won't upload unless I'm on Wi-Fi. So if you've got that set up, that might be why. If you don't have your Wi-Fi turned on and you've got it set up to only upload when there's Wi-Fi, then that might explain it, too.

On the facial recognition, does that tell you which person in the group that person is, or is that just that that person's in that picture? Just that that person's in the picture. Yeah.

I was downloading my pictures from my phone to my computer and somehow lost them. Will they show up in Google? Were they in Google to begin with? No, they were just on my phone. And I went to transfer. I hooked it up to my computer to download it to my files. And somehow, they got lost. That is a completely separate issue. OK. Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry that happened to you. Yes? I've about 300 slides of my wife's mission that are scanned. She's no longer with us. A group of former missionaries are going to help me identify them. What would be the process that I could use so that I could get the individuals identified?

OK, so are you talking about physical slides? Well, they're scanned. And I'll put them into Google Photos. OK. And then I'll invite this missionary group to look at them. OK, so you would do, you could do that by creating a shared album. And then what would be the best way to identify each individual? Well, you can go into the description and actually write in the names of the people in the description. The other thing you can do is use that facial recognition to assign names to the people that are in that picture. OK, then will those assigned faces be transferred? If they want to download the picture to their own computer, will that identification go with it? I'm thinking probably not.

But I have not tried to do that before. Yeah. Face identification, I know everybody in my pictures. I don't need to identify them. But it's people that I give my pictures to, needs to be able to know who they are. So I'm partially asking, how we can identify pictures whether it goes to FamilySearch or goes to wherever and have those names go with them. Well, like I say, I would put that in the metadata of the picture or on a description of the picture.

The only thing I can say is, give it a--try it, and see if that travels with it. But I'm thinking it's not going to. Yeah. To the person, too, before me, the lady who lost the pictures, chances are they are not lost, unless you hit Erase. So it's probably gone to a different file that she's not used to. And she should search different files on her phone. I bet she'll find her pictures. Here's my question. OK. My question is, when you share pictures, can the person who gets them, who's the shared recipient, download them? Yes. Easy question. Yep. I love that feature. I've done a lot of that. OK, I noticed in your presentation that some of the things that you're using are documents, like your grandfather's diary. When you scan them, do you scan them as PDF files or JPEG, or how do you--how do you scan them? That's a really good question. And honestly, I kind of go back and forth.

Yeah, I do both. But if you scanned it as a PDF file, Google will still handle it the same way? Well, actually, Google, actually, if it's a PDF, you're not going to be able to upload it to Google. OK. So everything I've uploaded to Google is a JPEG or maybe a PNG file. OK. But I do tend to do both. I create a lot of PDFs, too. OK, thank you. So when you upload to Google, does it change the quality of the picture? Because if I'm taking pictures on my iPhone 8, it's a higher quality than what Google starts it at. Is that right, or is that a rumor? You'll have to go in and kind of look, because I have my phone set up to take pictures at the highest possible quality. Right. Does Google store them at that quality? I've heard that they like lower the--compress them, and that you won't retain that quality. They do. So should you store them somewhere else before you upload them to Google? Oh, yeah. I always keep like, my master, my full size, big full size. I always keep those. OK. Yeah. That was my question. Do they only accept JPEGs, or do they do TIFs? They do not do TIFs. And if you look in the handout, I gave you a list of the different file types. I know--the ones I usually use are JPEG and PNG. And what is their limit on size, on megapixels? Well, again, if you set up the free unlimited storage, there's really no--they're going to do with it what they need to do. But I've not really had a problem with the quality. If you want to keep it, like, that original huge file size, you're going to get bumped up against the amount of space that Google allocates to you. So you kind of have to go in and look at the help on that one. If you were wanting to share an album of archival photos with a cousin, for example, would they dilute the quality then, so that when the cousin downloads, they're going to be reduced? I haven't had any problems with it. But I would just suggest that you kind of go in and play with it and compare, if it's something you're concerned about. Yeah. Thank you. Sir?

I'm just curious. They've gone away from Google or from Picasa, which to me is one of the great programs. Now is there any sort of editing program like Picasa, that will do so much, in the Google Online storage that we're talking about? Yeah, Google does some basic editing. I'll be honest with you, I don't really know, because I use Photoshop to do--if I have to do anything that's involved, I just, I'm a Photoshop user. So yeah, I'm not really sure about that one. I've said for years that Picasa was all that was needed for the regular person, for the average Joe. A lot of people feel that way. It's great. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

I was wondering, when you take a picture and place it in an album, does it make a second copy of that picture? Is that what it does, or does it just connect to the-- I think it's just connecting that one picture to different places. OK, because I was wondering, if you changed one, does it change the other, wherever it is? Do you happen to know? I have not tried. I have not paid attention to that. So I think I'll go home and try that tonight. OK, thank you.

I've just recently downloaded all my pictures into photo, Google Photos. But there's lots of duplicate of pictures. And I don't know why. But how do I get rid of the duplicates? Delete them? Well. I mean, that's the only thing I can think of. I mean, I'm not sure why you would have duplicates. I mean, I tend to take a lot of pictures. So I mean, you probably noticed on the screen. I have, like, multiples of the same picture.

It might be because you have the same picture like, stored on more than one place on your computer. OK. That could be. And it got pulled in more than once. So if you don't want them there and they really are the same thing, just delete one of them. I know. But I've tried to do that. Is there a certain place I go to delete? There should be, if you go and look in one of the menus, there should be, like, a garbage can. OK. To delete. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome.

Are my photos from Picasa automatically uploaded to Google, or do I have to upload them? I was not a Picasa user, so I can't--I can't answer that question. OK. And also security-wise, does Google own my photos, or do I own my photos? That's a really good question. So if you read the terms of service, you retain the copyright to your pictures. So you own the copyright on your pictures. But you are granting Google the license to do certain things with your pictures. And I would just go in and read the terms of service if you're concerned about that. I mean, we all know Google likes to collect data. I don't know that they're really going to go out and, like, use your picture someplace. Although they might be able to. If you read the terms, you'll know. You are granting them certain rights. But you still own your pictures. Absolutely. Thank you. Sorry if you already went over this, but how do you tag a person in a picture?

Oh, this is another bane. You really have to wait for Google Photos to notice that person. And then you can go in and tag them. Yeah, because I have thousands of pictures, but I don't have any people. Like when I go to my people, there's nothing there. So I just have to wait for them to-- Yeah. Bring your phone up afterwards and show me that. That's kind of an--because usually, after you've had the account for a little while, you'll start seeing people show up that you can go in and work with. OK, thank you.

Hi, I have several albums in Google Photo. And some of the albums have the same person. If I delete one picture from one album, will it delete it, period, from my-- No. It'll still be there. You're just, all you're doing is just taking it out of that album. Great, thank you. That's it. Yeah. One thing I like to do is print pictures. Is there a way to print those pictures with the captions and things you put on them? Somebody asked me that the other day. And I meant to go in and try to do that. I'm not sure if that caption comes out or not when you print it. OK. Yeah, sorry. I know there was something I forgot to do. OK, thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]