Last year on the 27th of May, Google announced Google Photos with the goal of being the best place to put all of your videos, photos and important images to share with whomever you want, with potentially unlimited space.
A year later, Google released some statistics about Google Photos on their Official Blog, and the results might startle you.
According to Google, over 200 million people use Google Photos per month. They’ve collected over 1.6 billion animations from users, as well as nearly 14 petabytes of data (14,000,000 gigabytes). They crunched some more numbers; and suggested that it would take one person over 420 years to scroll through all of the pictures on their database. They’ve also added over 2 trillion different labels for files, and it probably wouldn’t surprise you that over 10 percent of those tags were just for selfies.
Because everyone takes so many pictures on their phones, Google decided that they would use this anniversary to help users better operate Google Photos so that they can collect more interesting photos (and release more fun statistics):
- You can search through your photos easier by using photos.google.com. Just press the shift key plus the question mark to bring up shortcuts.
- If you’ve got a lot of pictures of the same thing, you can narrow the search by adding another subject. For example, if you’re looking for that picture of the time that you put bread on your cat, you’d have better luck with the term: “cat bread” than just “bread” or “cat”.
- If you’re short on storage, you can compress the pictures in your Google Drive easily: just click “original quality” instead of “high quality” on photos.google.com.
- If you use a lot of emojis, you can insert them as search terms and pull up pictures that correspond to the picture. The example Google uses is an emoji of a tree to pull up tree pictures.
- If you’re looking for pictures from a specific time frame, click “show more,” then click the “recently added” tab.
- You can double-check that photos were transferred or backed up from your phone by clicking the “Android” tab.
- You can create albums that notify users every time you add a new photo (which is great to start a “family” folder that you share with your parents, siblings, and grandparents.
Just a Few Of the Options You Have on Google Photos
Google released three more hacks for Google Photos that you might not know how to do from your phone! Check out the blog post for all of the information.