How to use google lens on the iphone

Launched in 2015, Google Photos is a tool that can store photos, videos and screenshots taken by your phone.

It’s a solid media backup to have at your disposal. And, because it’s a cloud-based tool, it can free up space on your phone. Plus, it works on both Android and iOS devices.

Here are a few more things to know about how Google Photos works:

How does Google Photos work?

Google Photos users can upload new photos, view, edit, save and create new videos, animations, collages, albums and photos books. You can also download everything, meaning your cloud-based backup can itself be easily backed up onto your computer or external hard drive.

For those who don’t have a Google device (like the Pixel phone), you can opt to automatically backup and sync your photos and videos as you take them. If you have an Android device, you can limit backup data usage, so you don’t run out of data uploading things in the background.

You can also set your Google Drive to keep a copy of your photos and videos by going to your Drive’s settings , turning on “Create a Google Photos Folder,” and clicking save. As photos are added to your account, they will be sorted into categories.

You can easily share photos and albums using the share feature, whether they have photos in them or not. And, provided you have the “backup and sync” feature turned on, you can retrieve your files from the trash for up to 60 days after hitting delete. Or you can always archive photos to get them out of the way, but have them remain searchable within your account.

It has free, unlimited storage — with a few caveats

Google Photos comes with free, unlimited storage — but that’s only if you opt to save “high quality” images, as opposed to original quality images which may actually be higher resolution. That means those larger files will be compressed to save space, unless your account’s settings say otherwise. The resolution limit for photos is 16MP, while videos are compressed to 1080p.

You can allow auto-compression for future uploads by going to your settings and selecting “high quality”. And you can apply that change to past photos by clicking “recover storage,” which is also located within settings.

For those who prefer to go with original file sizes, it’s free up to 15GB, and that includes everything from Photos to Gmail to everything else in the Drive. After that, you could upgrade, via the Google One subscription plan, starting at $1.99 per month for 100GB.

It features an AI-powered assistant

Google Photos provides users with a lot of auto-generated extras. For example, it can create photo-book collections, grouping together pictures based on factors like the date, people, and the places featured. Users are also given the option to print and ship those books (for a fee of course.)

The Assistant will also take photos that were captured in rapid succession and turn them into GIFs (referred to as “animations”), while individual photos can be saved as motion photos — meaning they record video of a few seconds before and after you’ve taken the shot. These may also be known as Live Photos to iPhone users.

It has other smart features

The robust search option is a major draw for the platform. It lets you search for generic subjects, like “dogs” or “beach” to narrow your options, which is especially useful if you haven’t yet sorted your pictures into albums.

It also gives you the option to identify different people in your photos by manually putting a name to the face. After that, pictures with those people are automatically sorted so you can later search for pictures featuring specific people.

In a similar vein, you can also set it to create “live albums,” which automatically populate with photos of friends and family members.

For those looking to backup their physical photo prints, you can quickly ‘scan’ those to have them uploaded by taking a quick pic using your phone or other Photos-friendly device. And for those who photograph paper documents, Google Photos also lets you highlight desired sections of text, and even crop out backgrounds to make it easier to do things like upload and expense a receipt from a work trip.

Google Photos is a powerful and versatile tool that requires little effort to use to its fullest. And, given the fact that it provides free, unlimited storage without sacrificing too much on photo and video quality, it can be a solid option for backing up your media files.

Google rolled out new features to Google Photos at its annual I/O developers conference. Is it time for iPhone owners to switch photo apps?

At Google I/O 2017, the company unveiled a number of improvements for its photo app, putting more distance between Google Photos and the stock iOS Photos app. There are now five reasons why Google Photos is better.

1. Unlimited and free cloud storage

I have been using Google Photos on my iPhone ever since Google introduced unlimited cloud storage. Sure, my photos will be resized if they’re larger than 16 megapixels, but the shots I snap with my iPhone are safely below that limit. With Apple’s iCloud storage, I get 5GB of storage free but that’s nowhere close to what I or most other iPhone users need, which means I need to pay up to store my photos in Apple’s cloud but not Google’s.

2. Photo Assistant

Google’s big announced at its I/O conference was that Google Assistant is coming to the iPhone, but Google Photos already has an Assistant. The Assistant in Google Photos isn’t a Siri replacement, but it offers up collages, animations and movies from your photos. It’s always a fun stop and something the iOS Photos app lacks.

3. Suggested Sharing

Now, we get to the new features announced at Google I/O. They won’t be rolling out for another week or two but they look promising. First up, some help with sharing your photos. Google Photos will use machine learning to select photos and suggest which of your friends or family to send them to and ask to add their photos from the wedding, party, or whatever event you were all at. I look forward to being a better photo sharer with Suggested Sharing.

Google

4. Shared libraries

You’ve opened your heart, now open your photo library. OK, that might be overselling it a bit, but the upcoming shared libraries feature sounds like a great way to share photos with that special someone in your life. You’ll be able to give your spouse or significant other full access to your photos or only photos of certain people or a certain date forward (what are you hiding in your past?). Never miss another cute picture of the child or dog the two of your are raising.

5. Autopilot Photo Books

My brother and I each snapped a ton of photos from a family vacation we took not one but two summers ago. We thought putting together a photo book that prominently featured the grandkids would be a proper thank you for our parents, who financed the trip. Guess what? We look like terrible sons because it was so hard to put together a photo book from our separate libraries using the Photos app on iOS and MacOS that we still haven’t done it. Google is getting into the Photo Books game. I don’t know if Google Photos will make creating a photo book from two separate libraries easier, but I love the idea of it automatically picking the best shots from my vacation photos and throwing them into a book. The first step of any journey is the hardest, they say.

Are you an iPhone user looking to backup your photos to the cloud, but you have either ran out of iCloud storage space, don’t want to pay for iCloud fees, or you’re already intertwined within the Google ecosystem? You’re certainly not alone. Thanks to Google Photos, there’s an alternate way to backup iPhone photos to the cloud, and it’s free.

Apple provides 5 GB of free iCloud storage with every account, but for many people, that’s not enough to store their stuff, let alone all of the photos in their libraries. Of course one solution is to pay Apple for more iCloud storage space and then to use iCloud Photos, but that’s not the only option. Google provides a solution to alleviate this issue with Google Photos, by offering unlimited storage space to its users at no cost at all.

If you are interested in taking advantage of the free Google Photos cloud storage space to store your iPhone or iPad photos, then read on so you can learn how to backup pictures from iOS and iPadOS directly to Google Photos.

How to Backup iPhone Photos to Google Photos for Free

In order to take advantage of Google’s unlimited storage for photos, you’ll need to install the Google Photos app on your iPhone or iPad. Additionally, a Google account is required to use this service. Simply follow the steps below to get started.

Open “App Store” from the home screen of your iPhone or iPad.

Find “Google Photos” on the App Store and install the application onto your device. Once installed, tap “Open”.

Upon opening the app, you’ll be asked to sign in with your Google account.

Once you’ve signed in, you’ll have the option to “Back up as (Google account name)” as shown in the screenshot below. Simply tap on it.

Now, select the “High Quality” option and tap “Confirm” to start backing up your iPhone or iPad photos to Google’s cloud servers.

These are pretty much it, now you can keep a backup of your iPhone photo library online with the help of Google Photos.

Image & Video Quality When Backing up iPhone Photos to Google Photosy

Although Google Photos offers unlimited photo storage for free, there’s a caveat. The High Quality setting that you selected will compress all the photos and videos before being uploaded to the cloud servers using Google’s lossless compression algorithm. Thus, you may see some image quality degradation in that process.

For example, a 16 MB image file will be compressed to around 2 MB by Google Photos when you choose High Quality. Additionally, if the image resolution is higher than 16 megapixels, Google will downsize it to 16 megapixels.

Similarly, if the videos you upload to Google Photos are higher than 1080p resolution, they will be resized to Full HD.

Now, you might be wondering what the difference in image quality is, and for many users the difference is nearly impossible to notice until you start pixel peeping or zooming in further, or if you’re really serious about image editing. But for casual users and most pictures, it’s prob ably fine.

Regardless, if you still want to store your photos at the original file size and at full true native resolution, Google provides 15 GB of data on the free tier, which is still 10 GB more than what Apple’s iCloud offers for free. However, it’s worth noting that this storage space is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Like iCloud, you can always pay Google for more space too.

Did you backup your entire iPhone or iPad photo library to Google Photos? What do you think of Google’s clever compression algorithm that helps them provide unlimited storage space for free? Let us know your experiences, thoughts, and opinions in the comments!