Google Photos and Album Archive, the storage of photos

Today I will be discussing Google Photos and Album Archive. Many people are familiar with Google Photos and having it to store photos in but also to create a albums and share it with others. Some people will be familiar with the Google Photos app on mobile devices where when you take a photo on your camera, it automatic saves to Google Photos and there is a way to ensure photos don't take up space on your Google Account. Album Archive is a place that simply exists but you can't usually do a whole lot with the photos inside of there except delete, download, make the photos completely private (but you can't switch the visibility from private to public), and some people might not realize why this place is important and which photos it can and does store and this is a place I considered a storage place.

But first I am going to take some time to discuss some recent changes to Google Photos and the automatic sync that once was between Photos and Drive. June came the month that announced the impending change of how Google Photos would work with Google Drive and that it would affect storage as well since the automatic sync was discontinued. When the automatic sync was discontinued that meant that photos would stay inside of Google Photos without going into Google Drive unless you downloaded the image from Photos to your device then upload the image to Drive. To go from Drive to Photos is now simply clicking on a button called "Upload from Drive" while inside of photos.google.com. The discontinuation of the sync also meant that any images uploaded to Drive would take up storage and if the image is in Original Quality, that will also take up space no matter if you are in Photos or Drive. The discontinuation of the automatic sync does not impact the Backup&Sync for Windows and Macs (information on Backup&Sync: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313). The June 12 article about this change can be found at https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/.

Websearch, the finder tool

Websearch is one product I call by the name that is actually part of the help center and help community's URL but in reality it is simply known as the Google Search engine. Google Search is the first product that Google developed and was a way to find all the public information on the world wide web and still operates the same way meaning to find public information. If you are a webmaster, you might be more prone to use the Google Search engine to see how well your website is ranking in the search results and then knowing which keywords will pull up your website. Google Search is more than just a tool to find websites, it can also find images, Google Books, news, stocks (finance), and a few other things and sometimes if you are wanting to look in a specific section so for example images, you can go directly to images.google.com or in the www.google.com, there is the word "images" on the upper right or you can insert a keyword into the search engine and then once that pulls up, underneath the search bar you can see the words like "images," "books," etc.

The home page of Google Search

Once you insert a phrase into the search bar and click on 'Google Search'

Using Gmail

Since 2012, I have owned an Gmail account and when I first got it, I used it primarily to communicate with friends via email and then via Hangouts. But then as time went on, I used it to communicate with family members and then to receive email notifications from Google+ when that existed and from a platform that used to exist called Google Product Forums (GPF for short) and now my email notifications are from the Google help communities found on the www.support.google.com platform. Gmail has been my main source to receive emails though a long time ago I had a brief history with Yahoo and then knew the ins and outs of Juno. I do also have experience with Gmail provided by a G Suite by Education account (meaning I have G Suite Gmail, which I don't use anymore since not part of that college but still have access to that account so sometimes do check up on the account, which can work differently than free Gmail since the admin has the ability to turn off certain functions).

So as you might know Gmail is a type of email provider so you are probably thinking what's so special about that product that you use just to send emails back and forth between people or to receive subscriptions/newsletters from companies. But it the what you can do inside of the Gmail that can make the adventure and fun. Gmail does not have folders but labels. Gmail does have a trash bin so if you have accidentally put something into the trash bin, you have up to 30 days to take it out of there. Classic Hangouts conversations are saved in a Gmail label called "chats" so if you want a good way of trying to locate a specific Hangouts comment, you can use the search box inside of the "chats" label. Gmail in all labels and the inbox does have a search box where you can search just by putting in random words or by using your keywords with search operators. You can filter messages in Gmail to make them go straight to trash or to bypass inbox and go to a label. You can definitely create lots of filters in Gmail, which means can have more than 500 of them. You can even create a label that is nested underneath a label.

Google+, the past and now

This year saw the end of consumer Google+ where both Google+ profiles (by consumer Google Accounts typically ending with @gmail.com) and Google+ Pages (both by consumer and G Suite accounts) were shutdown on April 2, 2019. I had the privilege to use the Google+ when it was still the classic version and then the new version though I remember the new version much better. I had used Google+ for maybe about 3 years.

The parts of Google+ I played with and used at times was becoming a member of communities then contributing to them, whether it was about photography (though mostly in those communities, I just liked looking at their photos!) or the Official Google+ Help or another other interesting topics to me such as Chromebooks. I wrote my own collections though never quite got them fully off the ground and tried to write about 3 different topics, which were of nursing, other great communities on G+, and a sleep journey of sorts to talk about how to sleep better and my own sleep journal. I followed multiple collections about Google products, photos, and wildlife. Then sometimes I wrote private messages to only one user or did a completely public post not inside of a collection or community. I used the different features inside of a post such as adding a link, adding photos, then the only feature I never used was the location where you could add a location to a post (which worked on a mobile device).

Many users still ask about what has happened to consumer Google+ and why they can not log into it anymore. Recently one user asked if Google was done deleting all of consumer Google+ and for some people, you might notice you still see plus.google.com links inside of your Web&App Activity and still see some "photos from posts" inside of get.google.com/albumarchive. Some users wonder if they can migrate over to G Suite to continue to use Google+ though that experience will be different since that is not completely public and not searchable on the Google Search engine.