Features & benefits of using Google Photos when you travel

Whether you’re creating content from your personal vacation or a fam trip, the last headache you want to deal with when you get back to your office is a phone full of photos with no labels, location, or accurate timestamps, Or the nightmare of all nightmares, you start swiping through to find your favorite shots but they’re missing because you’ve accidentally deleted them, or your phone ran out of space. All of this can be avoided using Google photos to organize your travel content, and here are a few reasons why.

Photos Are Automatically Backed Up

There are many things we travel with that would be frustrating and wildly inconvenient to lose, but ultimately replaceable. Unfortunately, photos are one of those precious momentos that are not recoverable, especially if you don’t have a solid backup system in place. If you’re using your smartphone to take pictures, you can set up your Google Photo account so your photos will automatically upload the moment you connect to wifi (always make sure it’s a secure wifi network).

Save on Device Storage

Photos take up a lot of space on your phone and can slow down the overall functionality of everything you run on your phone. We mentioned above that your photos can be backed up automatically, which means you don’t need to keep all of your photos on your device. Google Photos currently provides 15GB of free photo storage on their drive, so if you’re a photography enthusiast, and you think you’ll need more you can purchase more storage for a minimal monthly fee.

Convenient Chronology

No other photo app packs as big a punch when it comes to search capabilities as Google Photos. Google will automatically timestamp your photo, including a day, month, and year so if you ever can’t remember the precise chronology of a trip, it’s easily done within seconds. This becomes especially helpful after a fam trip, heavy on-site inspections, and activities and short on time to keep all of your media in order.

Intuitive Search Function

Another great feature is being able to search for photos by the subject in the photo. Recently returned from a Fam trip to Germany and want to pull together an article on the ‘Great Palaces of Bavaria’? Simply type “palace” or “castle” into the search and watch the magic happen.

If you’re trying to find a picture of a bridge, lake or fountain, you can simply pop that into the search function and voila!

Facial Recognition Capabilities

This feature might give you the heebee geebees but it can be extremely useful if you’re wanting to organize your photos into groups of people. If you’re a parent you’ve likely taken advantage of this feature by typing in ‘baby’ or ‘child’ to curate all of the photos of your little one. If there is a particular individual you are wanting to highlight or write about, you can search for them.

Also a Great Tool For Organizing Videos

Capturing a destination on video is equally as important as doing it with photos, so you’re going to need a tool to organize and help you categorize your videos as well. Google Photos has all of the same capabilities for video, you just need to keep in mind that when you’re uploading your videos from Google, you have two options: High quality and Original Quality. Also, your videos will be compressed to 1080p so if you’re wanting 4K quality video, you may want to use a different video app.

Seamless Mobile & Desktop Functionality

If you’re someone who prefers to organize your media when you get home, the Google Photos interface is consistent, simple and user-friendly. The capabilities of the app are the same on both the web and desktop version, and it doesn’t matter if you’re using an Android or iPhone. If you’ve brought along your work laptop or tablet, you can easily go back and forth between the mobile app and your computer.

Facial Recognition Capabilities

This feature might give you the heebee geebees but it can be extremely useful if you’re wanting to organize your photos into groups of people. If you’re a parent you’ve likely taken advantage of this feature by typing in ‘baby’ or ‘child’ to curate all of the photos of your little one. If there is a particular individual you are wanting to highlight or write about, you can search for them.

Also a Great Tool For Organizing Videos

Capturing a destination on video is equally as important as doing it with photos, so you’re going to need a tool to organize and help you categorize your videos as well. Google Photos has all of the same capabilities for video, you just need to keep in mind that when you’re uploading your videos from Google, you have two options: High quality and Original Quality. Also, your videos will be compressed to 1080p so if you’re wanting 4K quality video, you may want to use a different video app.

Seamless Mobile & Desktop Functionality

If you’re someone who prefers to organize your media when you get home, the Google Photos interface is consistent, simple and user-friendly. The capabilities of the app are the same on both the web and desktop version, and it doesn’t matter if you’re using an Android or iPhone. If you’ve brought along your work laptop or tablet, you can easily go back and forth between the mobile app and your computer.

Sharing Albums With Clients

If you’ve just traveled somewhere absolutely epic and you want to share some photos with your close clients, Google Photos makes it super simple to create customized photo albums that can be shared with private links. This feature is particularly handy if you’re hosting a fun Facebook Live or virtual event and you want to send the album out ahead of time. You can set specific permissions to things like “view-only” or make it so your clients can comment on individual photos. This is also a great feature for travel advisors who host private group trips - Clients can also go into settings and make it so anyone on your trip who has the private album link can share their own photos to the group album.

Google Photos is a powerful and effective tool you should be using to save, organize, label and share your photos with your clients. One quick thing to remember is that photo storage is not unlimited on the App so you’ll want to double-check and make sure there is sufficient room on your Google Drive.