Google Photos

Why I’m using Google Photos for my blog photo gallery

This is not a food post per se. One of the things about blogging, especially for blogs with lots of photographs is a desire on the part of the blogger to present their images in the best way possible. For a long time I’ve tried about a handful of gallery plugins hoping to get something that would approach the way Squarespace renders images in full size and across the display of any device whether it be a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

I could move to Squarespace but I’m heavily invested in WordPress.org and I really like using WordPress.org

Recently Google+ spun off Google Photos as a separate tool and in my opinion it’s doing almost everything I want.

So why do I like Google Photos?

  1. The photographs look good
  2. One click to full size
  3. Click the “open information” icon (top right corner, it is a letter i in a circle) and the relevant metadata comes up including a Google map (If the GPS coordinates have been included and exported).
  4. I can search my Google Photos catalog and make an instant gallery, e.g., I searched marmalade and this is what I got https://goo.gl/photos/vF5mDUufswwgsKUbA
  5. You can see photographs associated with a location
  6. You can see ‘things’ that Google ascribes a descriptor for, e.g., Birds Check out this gallery to see how accurately Google Photos identifies birds.
  7. I can capture images with my smartphone and it goes to Google Photos and from within Google Photos I can open the image in Snapseed and edit the image to my liking.
  8. I also use Adobe Lightroom and I can simply export JPGs to a DropBox folder which is also connected to the Google Photos uploader so that as soon as files are dropped into that folder they are automatically (assuming I’m connected to the Internet) uploaded to my Google Photos account and immediately available for social media sharing or sharing on my blogs.

There are also some quirks. For example, some of my photographs were ascribed to Brussels. Now if you now me and read this blog you know where I’m going with this…

Okay so this is a short post and I wanted to explain why I’m using Google Photos as my gallery solution.