Sure Google Photos is great to store all those pics of your latest holiday but you might want to take a closer look at the features that can be useful in the classroom.
Google Photos
Google photos is available on most devices with Android usually getting the latest updates a little quicker than iOS (iPads & iPhones). Many Android phones come with Google Photos built in so there is not need to download the app, however if you're using an older phone or don't currently have access to Google Photos on your phone you can download it here for Android and here for iOS
Google photos is a place to store your photos in the cloud and is attached to your Google account. Photos are stored at reasonably high resolution so unless you're a professional photographer and require original files that are very high resolution you shouldn't have any issues getting all your photos stored in the cloud.
Working with Text, Business Cards, Landmarks and Books
With a new update Google Photos has added Google Lens. Basically take a photo and press the lens button to get a few very useful options...
Turn your photo into text and share it with pretty much any app on your phone including Google Suite (docs, slides etc.) and Google Keep.
- Get notes in digital form quickly don't worry about losing paper
- Add details to a calendar event just by taking a photo
- Save brainstorms/lists and collaborative writing digitally to edit later
Take a photo of a business card and add the details to your contact without typing a thing
- Quickly get parents details on open evenings
- Enter student details into your contact database for ease of grouping and sharing of information
Visiting a landmark snap a photo press lens in Google photos and get information about that landmark.
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| Photo from Pixabay |
Finding Photos
Ever needed to find all those photos from last weeks field trip and share them with your class, only to run into the lovely default photo names that cameras create like img20345 and have to sift through hundreds of photos to find what you're looking for? Try using the search function within Google Photos. Typing things like Beach in Auckland will retrieve very accurate results.
It'll even find specific people and you can tag those people within Google Photos. You can train Google to recognise faces within the Google Photos app. So when you need to show Johnny's parents all the fantastic things he's been doing in and out of class for the last term just type his name and up pops any photos with him in them. More details about how this feature works and how to turn it off are here
Sharing Photos
Creating albums within Google Photos is really easy and makes sharing photos with your students, friends and family something you can do regularly.
Basically select the photos you want to share, hit the share icon at the top right of the screen. Then you have a few options:
- Enter the email addresses of the people you want to share with and they'll have access to the photos
- Add them to an album and give that album a useful name (you don't have to name the album but it makes it easier to find later).
- Get a shareable link for the album and share this however you want
- You can even share directly with social media accounts
Clicking share once you've created the album or clicking the lock icon if you're sharing a link allows you to give those you're sharing with the ability to add photos to the album. A really useful feature if you're building an album from a recent trip like camp for example - all teachers can share the photos they have so you'll end up with lots of different photos of your class rather than just the ones you managed to take.
Other Features
There are plenty of other features in photos, too many to list here. When you get a chance take a look at the official help centre documents around using Google Photos. You can get to those docs here
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