- How To Save Google Photos To Computer
- Google Photos Can't Download Video To Watch
- Google Photos Can't Download Video Youtube
- Google Photos Won T Download Video
Google Photos is the home for all your photos and videos, automatically organized and easy to share. How To Download All Pictures And Videos From Google Photos (2019) LearnHowTo. How To Download All Pictures And Videos From Google Photos (2019). How to Download a Video from Facebook. Even more from Google. Back up a lifetime of photos. Backup and Sync. Automatically back up photos from your Mac or PC, connected cameras and SD cards. Get the Google Photos app to back up and view photos on your Android and iOS devices. Downloading videos from Google Photos to the computer is easy. There are two ways to download videos to computer from Google Photos. To download video.
- March 19, 2019 4:50PM EST
- March 19, 2019
Internet users are not at a loss for services that automatically back up photos and provide access to them on any device. There's Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon Photos, and iCloud, just to start. But Google Photos has grown fast since its launch in 2015.
How To Save Google Photos To Computer
Google Photos offers truly unlimited backup of all the photos (and videos) you take. Every single one. For free. The caveat: images must be less than 16 megapixels to qualify for the unlimited storage. You can upload larger images, but Google converts them on the fly to 16 megapixels (and downgrades video shot above 1080p), with your permission. Since even the highest end iPhone today has a 12MP camera, you're not losing any quality at all most of the time.
If you upload images at their original size and quality, they will count against your allotted 15GB of free online storage with Google, which is shared with Gmail, Google Drive, and other Google services.
Google Photos came about by salvaging the best part of the Google+ social network that no one wanted to use—the photo storage and sharing. Google Photos also replaced our former Editors' Choice photo software Picasa, the desktop program Google acquired in 2004. You can still use the Picasa desktop software, but it'll never get an update. It's time to let it go.
Google Photos Can't Download Video To Watch
To be honest, you won't miss it if you are willing to leave desktop programs behind. Google Photos was built from the get-go for use on mobile devices via apps (iOS and Android) and on the web. For iOS users, it even supports Live Photos.
And did we mention the unlimited storage? As long as Google doesn't pull a Flickr and go back on that promise, Google Photos is the best place online to store, edit, tweak, and share a massive amount of photos. Plus it adds new features sometimes. Read on for all the little tricks that will allow you to get the most out of your pictures on Google Photos.
Google Photos Can't Download Video Youtube
Google Photos Won T Download Video
Show a Slideshow
Go into any album of images and display it as a slideshow, which is especially nice when you pair your device with a Chromecast on a big TV. On the web or Android app, tap the ellipsis menu () at the upper right. Select Slideshow and they'll display in order.Play With Search
Try some searches in Google Photos, using terms common and obscure. Google's auto-tagging of images is pretty amazing, beyond just the face recognition (which I found could ID people in photos even if they're in the background). For example, a search of the term 'dog' got just about every image I could conceive of with my pups in the pics—even some with just a pup statue or paw. I didn't tag any of those pics with 'dog' or 'statue,' by the way: Google just knows. Yes, useful and creepy! (It also pulled in pictures of stuffed animals, a woodchuck, and my brother in a Chewbacca costume, so usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.) Location searches are also easy with geo-tagging, making it easy to find, say, all your vacation pictures at once.Label the People
Whether you're using the mobile apps or web app, click on Albums, and at the top of the screen you'll see a few pre-set options. One is People&Pets. Click it and you'll see head shots from your photos. Click a person and enter their name. In the future, searching by name in Google Photos will make it easier to find (almost) every picture of that person, dog, or cat. Google's face matching takes care of the rest. (You may have to turn that feature on in the Android app.) These Live Albums have a hefty limit of 20,000 images each.
Is Google then using it to know everyone in the world and make it easy to find them? My tinfoil-hat-covered Magic 8-Ball says 'signs point to yes.'
Create a New Live Album From an Old Album
If you've created albums of people or pets, you can automatically add pictures to those albums based on facial recognition. Open the album, click the ellipsis/overflow menu () and select Options. The option to automatically add photos is right there—click the icon and add a person or pet that has already been assigned a name. New pix will start flowing into that album as you take them.Pinch to Change Your View
On mobile apps, pinching or expanding your two fingers on a single image to zoom in or out is standard. Google Photos lets you change the look of the entire mobile app with a two-finger move. Zoom from 'comfortable view' all the way out to the by-year view, with stops at days and months in between. Or use the ellipsis () menu to go in and change the view. Pinch outward on a single picture to zoom into a view for editing.Batch Upload to YouTube
If you shoot a lot of video on your phone, it's easy to add it to your YouTube channel all at once. With Back up & sync turned on, smartphone videos and images will auto-upload to Google Photos. So just go to your YouTube upload page and click the button to import video from Google Photos. Once they're ready, go in and give them a title and some tags.Upload Other App's Images
Back up & sync will grab images from your phone's main images folder. On Android, you can go deeper, and have Google Photos grab pictures from apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. In the Google Photos app, tap the hamburger menu () and select Settings > Back up & sync > Back up device Folders. Tap it and you'll see other folders from which you can/should grab images to back up automatically. Access those folders by tapping the hamburger menu and selecting Device Folders.Don't Share Your Location
Images taken with almost any device these days, especially smartphones, have location data. Google Photos uses that to actively map where your pics were taken. That's a nice feature, but sometimes when you share an image, you may not want the recipient to know exactly where the pic was taken. The workaround: visit photos.google.com/settings, click Sharing, and check off 'Remove geo location in items shared by link.' Then, when you generate a link to share an image, the person who sees the image at that link won't get any geo-data. (This doesn't work if you share by other means, such as social media.)Quick Select Pics
On a mobile device, hold your finger on a picture to select, then just start dragging your fingertip. All the pictures you touch will be selected. That makes it a lot easier to delete or move a bunch of photos in a batch or use them with the special tools like creating animations, movies, or collages.Save Device Storage
A feature in the mobile versions of Google Photos can save some space on phones or tablets: once an image is backed up to Google Photos, the app can delete the local version from your phone or tablet. (That means it's not really a backed-up image anymore; Google might have your only copy.) Find it in iOS and Android via the hamburger icon () > Free Up Space. It will ask if you want to really remove all the pictures Google Photos has backed up, which means instantly deleting them from your Android Gallery or iOS Photos app.
Using this feature truly depends on several factors. How much do you care about having a high-resolution version of every picture (assuming Google Photos is downgrading image quality as it uploads)? How much storage is on your device? Are you using other services for backup? You don't want Google deleting an image before it goes to iCloud or Dropbox.
You may simply want to plug your phone into the PC and copy photos over rather than let Google Photos make the decision for you. But if you're a frequent photo deleter, this is a handy option.
Convert Uploaded Images to Save Space
If you've been uploading images with the backup option set to 'Original' and the images are over 16 megapixels, you're using up your free online storage allotment from Google. However, you can switch the setting back to 'High Quality' (so Google automatically shifts image uploads to 16 megapixels if they're bigger) and convert existing images down to 16 megapixels.
On a desktop, go to photos.google.com/settings and click the RECOVER STORAGE button. Don't worry about this if you don't have a device that take images bigger than 16 megapixels (even iPhone 7 is limited to 12 megapixels). This also doesn't impact images you've stored on Google Drive—but it will convert images bigger than 16 megapixels you have uploaded on Blogger, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, and your previous Picasa Web Albums.
Make Sure Images/Videos on Google Drive Show
There's a setting in Google Photos that makes sure that any photos or videos in your Google Drive account (with the same username) synchronize with the rest of your Google Photos images. Turn it on and you'll see them all. The images have to be larger than 256 pixels and the file types supported are limited to JPG, GIF, WEBP, TIFF, or RAW. Note, it apparently doesn't work on PNG or HEIC files. It also doesn't work on work or school G Suite accounts.
Note that it doesn't actually move the files from Google Drive. Also, if you edit the image/video in Google Photos, those changes will not appear on the image in Drive. However, if you delete an individual image/video on Drive, it will be deleted on Photos... unless you put it in an album. Best bet: on Drive go to the gear icon () > Settings and check the box to Create a Google Photos folder. If you delete the whole folder, it will not delete all the individual images synced to Photos. (So many rules!)
One note: if the images/videos are in Drive, not Photos, they're using up some of your allotted storage, even if they're under 16 megapixels.
Deep Edit the Deep Blue
Basic photo editing on Google Photos is a breeze—click on an image, click the Edit icon (), and you're presented with filters to apply, sliders to adjust, light and color (plus a 'Pop' slider to make the image pop more), and a speedy crop/rotation tool. They're simple tools that work on mobile and desktop.
When you adjust light and color, you get a few nice extras by clicking the down-arrow () next to each slider. Under Light, there's exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and vignette (to put a spotlight on a section of the image). Under Color is saturation, warmth, tint, Skin Tone, and Deep Blue. That last one adjusts the color blue only, which is nice when the shots involve water. (Want more lush greens? Crank up saturation, then decrease Skin Tone and Deep Blue).
When making edits on the desktop, click and hold the cursor on the image (or hold the letter 'O' on your keyboard) to instantly see how the edits look compared to the original.
Apply the Same Edits to Multiple Shots
If you've perfected the edits on one image, you can apply it to a bunch of them. On the desktop, while editing an image, go to the More options menu ( ) and select Copy Edits. On the rest of the images, use the same menu to Paste Edits. You can also just use the copy/paste keyboard short cuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, respectively). This isn't an option on the mobile apps.Edit a Video Clip
Google Photos is obviously not just for photos, and neither are its editing tools. You can do some rudimentary edits on video too—but only on mobile devices. It's not supported on the web/desktop. Open a video and hit the Edit icon () to access some quick tools for trimming size and even rotating a vid up to 45 degrees at a time.Make a Movie
The fun comes in putting multiple video clips together into one movie. Go into Albums > Videos to find your clips, select those that would go great together, and from the Plus (+) menu, select Movie. The app will 'download clips' and display an interface with a little bitty clip from each of your vids, all strung together with music picked by the Google AI. You can re-trim each clip to pick the best part. Click the musical note to change the music that Google choose for you, or to remove it entirely. (Weirdly, you can't send the finished film direct to YouTube.)Create Collages, Animations, and More
Don't be afraid of that Google Photos section called Assistant. It displays 'cards' of suggestions, like making collages of photos that are similar, even creating animations of images in a series or from videos. Swipe them off the screen if you don't want what's in each card.
You don't have to settle for just Google's auto-creations. Click the buttons at top to create your own Album, Collage, Animation (and on the mobile apps, Movie, as noted above), and Photobooks (see below).
If you really hate the Assistant and just want the extra storage, turn off the suggestions at photos.google.com/settings under Assistant Cards > Creations, or in the mobile apps via Settings > Assistant Cards > Creations.
Save a Copy When Editing
When you go into the editing tools in Google Photos, you get the usual stuff. Change the lighting, the color, apply some filters, crop, rotate, etc. When you click Save at the end of editing, the app will ask if you want to save the changes, and then overwrite the original image stored on your device. If you don't want that to happen, hit the ellipsis icon () to either go back to the original or to Save a Copy, so you'll have both versions.
In the web-app version, it says Done instead of Save, and will not ask you first about overwriting, it just does it. But you can access the menu again to save a copy. What's nice is, if you go to edit the image in the future using the web interface, you can undo all previous changes, even if you did the edits in the mobile app.
Auto-Upload From Mac or Windows
Google Backup and Sync will sync your Google Drive documents to the PC as well as videos and pictures—and it'll copy any and all of them from the PC to Google Photos automatically. Backup and Sync also supports the High Quality upload option on photos so they won't count against your Google storage allotment.
Back Up With Wi-Fi Only
In the mobile apps under Settings > Back up & sync, you can turn off 'Use cellular data to backup photos' (or videos). It's a good idea for those with a limited data plan. Otherwise the auto-upload aspect of Google Photos can eat through your data like water dissolving cotton candy.Recover Items for 60 Days
Deleted an image you want back? Go to the menu (on mobile or web), and select Trash. Your deleted images hang out here for a couple of months before they're truly gone. That is, unless you hit the EMPTY TRASH option. Then they're toast.Download All Google Photos
The editing tools on Google Photos are, indeed, pretty weak compared to pro editing tools. If you need to import a picture or two from Google Photos into a desktop image editor, it's easy to download. For a single image, click the photo, then Download. Same goes for Albums (select Download All), or downloading multiple selected thumbnails. If you do it that way, you can only get 500 at a time; Google Photos provides them as a ZIP file.
The best (and only) way to download every single image in Google Photos is to use Google Takeout, a service Google provides so you can grab everything you've put on any Google service, such as Blogger, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Keep, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and others. If you go this route, the images may lose all their EXIF data, the information attached to each image about location, camera used to take the image, etc.
Scan Old Photos
Google Photoscan is a free mobile app that is not part of Google Photos. If you've installed it, you can access PhotoScan right from the menu in Google Photos. It's worth using if you're 'scanning' old snapshots. The app uses a special method of taking a picture of a picture with your smartphone camera to reduce glare, enhance resolution, and detect the edges of the original shot. The result is, of course, instantly saved into your Google Photos.Share a Library Auto-Magically
Sharing is a hallmark of almost everything you do with pictures online, and Google Photos is no exception. Specifically, you can share your entire photo library with your partner—and only one partner.
Go to Settings > Shared Libraries > Get Started. Pick a person from your contacts who also uses Google Photos as your partner, and then you can choose to share either All photos or Photos of Specific People (made easy with the built-in facial recognition), and you can even specify if you only want to share images from a specific date forward. Once confirmed, that person will have access to all images or that one face whenever recognized in an image (but even Google will warn you when you do so that it's own facial recognition isn't perfect, so its possible they'll see some images without that person or pet).
This is sharing one-way only. If you want to see the same person in your partner's photos, they have to share it back with you. Which is easy; when they accept, have them click Share Back at the top right.
Print a Book
Photo books let you share photos with that Luddite friend or family member who still thinks pictures are for paper only. It doesn't hurt that Google and its partner in printing can get a few extra bucks out of you. It's $9.99 for a 7-inch square softcover or $19.99 for a 9-inch square hard cover; each is 20 pages minimum, but you can add extra pages for 35¢ in soft or 65¢ in the hard covers. It's a max of 100 photos per book—that's 100 pages. Shipping is not included.
Google tries to pick the best images, but you can change them. If you want more than one image per page, make a collage of images using the Google Photos Assistant feature, then select it for the book—otherwise, it's one pic per page, with a big white margin around it.
Here's our full tutorial on how to create a Google Photos photo book.
Make Books Elsewhere
Not sold on that limited Google Photos book layout? Many other services that support photo books will let you work directly with the images you've already placed in Google Photos. Shutterfly for example (pictured here) can pull in images from Instagram, Facebook, and Google Photos. Click the Upload button to get access. (Shutterfly was buggy for me and didn't want to show anything, but give it a try with your favorite photo-book-maker.)Don't Rediscover Everyone
There's a feature of Google Photos Assistant called Rediscover this Day, which brings photos from days in your past bubbling to the surface. It's an option you can turn off or on in Settings > Assistant Cards > Rediscoverthis day. But sometimes it's nice—until you see someone you don't like, perhaps an ex. If you like the feature but not who is featured, use the facial recognition to cancel them out of rediscovery.
To do so, tap the search box, and you'll see a 'list' of faces. Click the arrow () and you'll see all the faces Google Photos recognizes. You should, of course, assign them all a name for sharing, but you can also merge faces that Google hasn't realized are the same person, and more to our point, select Show & Hide People, so you can prevent them from reappearing.
Archive Images Worth Keeping, but Not Seeing
If you're smart, your smartphone camera is used to take pictures of more than just friends and family. Use it for menus, store hour signs, notebook pages, license plates of cars that fill you with rage, etc. It can all be useful info later. Of course, it's not pretty and you may not want to see it in your Google Photos stream. The service knows: the Google Photos Assistant will suggest that you archive the non-photographic stuff, including screenshots from your phone or tablet, via a 'clear the clutter' card. Go ahead and use the archive. Go crazy. Just like with Gmail, an archived item is not deleted, and you can always find it later with a search.
Sadly, Google Photos does not search in the text in a picture, so you can't just type in words you've got in a picture (like a restaurant name on a menu) to find it.
Peak Inside with Google Lens
Want more interesting info on an image in your Google Photos? Google Lens is an option built right in, providing search results based on the image or it's hidden info. For example, take a pic of a book, use Lens to search with the image, and Google will show you some info. You can read the full tutorial at How to Peek Inside Your Photos With Google Lens.Live Photos Live
Live Photos—which add 1.5-second videos on either side of a photo—have been around since the iPhone 6s, and Google Photos supports these little mini-movies. You can tell which shots are Live Photos because they have a little toggle button at the top, which allows you to turn off the animation if you want. If you leave animation on, it plays in an endless loop, with sound. If you edit a Live Photo in Google Photos, it gets saved as a still.
Google Photos also provides another feature that can make Live Photos look great, or sometimes a bit off—it stabilizes the background of an image, freezing it to avoid a 'shakey cam' look.
Sharing a Live Photo from an iPhone to someone who does not have an iPhone 6s or above typically means losing the motion, and that's true if you just do a straight share from Google Photos as well (say, try to send it via iMessage). However, Google Photos has a workaround—use the menu on a Live Photo to Save as video. It'll save the vid right in Google Photos, even loop it three times for you. Use Google Photos tools to trim the length or rotate it, then share it anywhere. You can't save it as an animated GIF from Google Photos, but Google offers a free iOS app called Motion Stills to handle that.