The volunteer staff here at AC field a lot of questions and cried for help, but one of the most frustrating we come across is "I've deleted my photos, please help me recover them".
And we also know that this is one of the most easily avoided problems that we come across... the answer is simple; use cloud backups. There are several out there and most all are free or low priced and extremely easy to use and set up. I'm going to focus on one in particular (Google Photos), but theirs is not the only service available.
First, I thought it would be good to address the privacy concerns...
Let me start by reiterating something that I can't stress enough; Google does not sell your personal information, nor do they share that personal information with a third party. Yes, they collect pretty much every bit of stuff your phone is privy to, but all that information is locked away in your Google account. Google uses that information to then build a sort of digital profile of you, and then they use that profile in other parts of their business, but that profile is scrubbed of any personal bits. They do not give away your info to advertisers or third-party vendors, but they instead act as a sort of go-between... it's akin a marketing rep that hands a bouncer a stack of flyers and asks "Give these to all the sports fans inside that club". They have no idea who gets them, that is unless someone calls the number on the flyer and starts asking questions.
So you won't go on to some random website one day and see a picture of your grammy's 80th birthday party being used in promotional material... unless you go in and explicitly share those photos through something like 500px (who serve pictures to your Chromecast, for instance). And if you share any ANYTHING publically, there is little to stop a third party from snatching it up...
As for security, the photographs and videos you store are as secure as your Google account... which means it is as secure as you want it to be. If you use some of the more secure security features Google offers, like two-factor authentication, combined with a strong password that you don't re-use across all the other site accounts, then your stuff is very secure. I have not heard of any brute-force security breaches that have hit Google, only accounts that have been compromised due to a breach at an unrelated site combined with a weakly secured Google account.... or someone falling prey to a phishing scam.
OK, so now the good stuff... Google Photos... Photos is one of Google's best services that it provides to its users.... it's free, easy to use and has a mountain of features, many of which even regular users might not be aware of.
At its core, Google Photos starts out as a straightforward cloud storage service. The Google Photos app is included in pretty much every phone (it's included in the core apps installed with Google Play Services). Setting it up is simple; launch it. You'll get a pop-up prompt, asking you to enable 'Backup & Sync', and giving you some options which you can change....
Upload Size : This is one of the more important bits... The Google Pixels come with unlimited full resolution photo and video storage, but everyone else has to choose between free 'high quality' storage and full resolution storage that will count towards your Google Drive quota. Now, for photos, unless you really, truly want to keep them at full resolution, or you upbought Google Drive storage, selecting the high-quality option is more than sufficient. I ran some tests a while back and it would appear that Google uses a compression that's similar to about a 90% JPG... and comparing the original and compressed picture results in few compression artifacts or jpeg trash. The picture, even if you start to pixel peep, looks identical. Video is more heavily compressed, which may or may not be a problem.
But... Google throws you 100GB of Drive storage for free, with 1TB running $10/m.
So you are backing your photos up, now what? Well, there's a lot more to Photos than storage.... it does have a web portal, photos.google.com, and the app shares near all of the functionality of the web page. And there, there's some magic. Google uses machine learning and all sorts of other fancy pants tools to automatically index your pictures. You can go into a page that'll show you all the faces it has detected and ask you to name them, at which point it'll go through and classify them, along with other traits... if my wife asks "Do you have that picture we took at the beach, the one with the seagull mosaic? Could we do something with that at all?" There's no need to remember the year, month, etc.... just click on the search bar and type "seagull"... THERE SHE IS..... then a quick run through Photos' built-in editor (which is sneaky good) and
It'll make albums automatically, cool little animations automatically, if you haven't gone in there ever and looked around, please do, it's an amazing service....
And we also know that this is one of the most easily avoided problems that we come across... the answer is simple; use cloud backups. There are several out there and most all are free or low priced and extremely easy to use and set up. I'm going to focus on one in particular (Google Photos), but theirs is not the only service available.
First, I thought it would be good to address the privacy concerns...
Let me start by reiterating something that I can't stress enough; Google does not sell your personal information, nor do they share that personal information with a third party. Yes, they collect pretty much every bit of stuff your phone is privy to, but all that information is locked away in your Google account. Google uses that information to then build a sort of digital profile of you, and then they use that profile in other parts of their business, but that profile is scrubbed of any personal bits. They do not give away your info to advertisers or third-party vendors, but they instead act as a sort of go-between... it's akin a marketing rep that hands a bouncer a stack of flyers and asks "Give these to all the sports fans inside that club". They have no idea who gets them, that is unless someone calls the number on the flyer and starts asking questions.
So you won't go on to some random website one day and see a picture of your grammy's 80th birthday party being used in promotional material... unless you go in and explicitly share those photos through something like 500px (who serve pictures to your Chromecast, for instance). And if you share any ANYTHING publically, there is little to stop a third party from snatching it up...
As for security, the photographs and videos you store are as secure as your Google account... which means it is as secure as you want it to be. If you use some of the more secure security features Google offers, like two-factor authentication, combined with a strong password that you don't re-use across all the other site accounts, then your stuff is very secure. I have not heard of any brute-force security breaches that have hit Google, only accounts that have been compromised due to a breach at an unrelated site combined with a weakly secured Google account.... or someone falling prey to a phishing scam.
OK, so now the good stuff... Google Photos... Photos is one of Google's best services that it provides to its users.... it's free, easy to use and has a mountain of features, many of which even regular users might not be aware of.
At its core, Google Photos starts out as a straightforward cloud storage service. The Google Photos app is included in pretty much every phone (it's included in the core apps installed with Google Play Services). Setting it up is simple; launch it. You'll get a pop-up prompt, asking you to enable 'Backup & Sync', and giving you some options which you can change....
Upload Size : This is one of the more important bits... The Google Pixels come with unlimited full resolution photo and video storage, but everyone else has to choose between free 'high quality' storage and full resolution storage that will count towards your Google Drive quota. Now, for photos, unless you really, truly want to keep them at full resolution, or you upbought Google Drive storage, selecting the high-quality option is more than sufficient. I ran some tests a while back and it would appear that Google uses a compression that's similar to about a 90% JPG... and comparing the original and compressed picture results in few compression artifacts or jpeg trash. The picture, even if you start to pixel peep, looks identical. Video is more heavily compressed, which may or may not be a problem.
But... Google throws you 100GB of Drive storage for free, with 1TB running $10/m.
So you are backing your photos up, now what? Well, there's a lot more to Photos than storage.... it does have a web portal, photos.google.com, and the app shares near all of the functionality of the web page. And there, there's some magic. Google uses machine learning and all sorts of other fancy pants tools to automatically index your pictures. You can go into a page that'll show you all the faces it has detected and ask you to name them, at which point it'll go through and classify them, along with other traits... if my wife asks "Do you have that picture we took at the beach, the one with the seagull mosaic? Could we do something with that at all?" There's no need to remember the year, month, etc.... just click on the search bar and type "seagull"... THERE SHE IS..... then a quick run through Photos' built-in editor (which is sneaky good) and
It'll make albums automatically, cool little animations automatically, if you haven't gone in there ever and looked around, please do, it's an amazing service....
.
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