Manage your images with ease

Google Photos is, hands down, the best photo management app on Android. And while unlimited storage is a thing of the past, it's still one of the best deals in town. If you're willing to live with slightly-compressed pics, Google is happy to give you up to 15GB of storage for free. And if you've been using the platform for years, none of your High quality or Express quality images saved to the platform before June 1, 2021, count toward your allotment.

A sleek design and intuitive UX makes Google Photos easy for beginners, but things can get messy quickly. Whether you're new to Google's photo management app or simply need tidy things up, we're here to help with a few of our favorite tips and tricks.

Google Photos's machine learning capabilities are incredible. It can group all photos of a person or pet together by name. Once you've assigned a name to a person or pet, you simply have to search for their name in the app to find all photos of them. Before you start labeling, however, you'll need to check you have Face Grouping enabled.

Once you've identified a person or pet, any new photos of them will be automatically labeled. Occasionally Google may ask you to confirm a label to improve its accuracy when you open the app.

While Google Photos no longer allows unlimited cloud storage, one workaround is to reduce the size of your pictures. This method won't drastically reduce the quality and only becomes noticeable if the photo is blown up to a much larger size. Likewise, it won't change the quality of the image taken, so your phone will store any images not backed up at their original quality.

You can save original-quality photos in Google Photos, but you'll need to subscribe to Google One. The least expensive plan costs $1.99 a month and comes with 100GB of storage.

The search bar is a pretty prominent feature in Google Photos, but what's not so obvious is how powerful it is. Google Photos can recognize similar faces, landmarks, Wi-Fi passwords, phone numbers, hiking trips, and more. It's a feature best explored on your own, but here are some examples of how to use this feature:

It's not as intelligent as I would sometimes like, and it can get confused if you include queries with more than one word. However, it's a fantastic feature that has saved me hours of scrolling over the years.

The basic search box has some pretty powerful AI behind it, but Lens is where it truly shines. You can use this tool to translate text, identify plants and animals, shop for clothing, copy text to your computer, solve equations, identify board game parts, and so much more.

Live Albums take the manual labor out of creating and updating an album. When creating a Live Album, you'll select which people/pets you wish to include. Any future photos of them will be auto-added to this album.

It's a nifty feature with a lot behind it. Check out our article on how to make the most out of Live Albums to get a deeper dive into this tool.

If you're looking to edit your photos or videos into something a bit more substantial than an album, Google Photos has you covered.

Creating movies provides a quick way of editing up to fifty photos and videos together with accompanying music. It's a relatively simplistic tool, but dead simple to use. Collages let you select two to nine photos, then automatically arrange them for you. Animations will simply play a slideshow of up to fifty photos.

You can find your creations by heading to the Search tab, scrolling down, and tapping Saved creations.

Portrait mode is a great way to enhance your selfies by blurring the background, but what about if you've already taken a photo? Luckily there's a nifty option within Google Photos that lets you do it. Unfortunately, this feature only works if Google Photos detects a face in the image, so unless you've taken a picture of a face-shaped tree, you'll only be able to do this with people.

Sharing albums is ideal for collecting holiday snaps or giving your friends a convenient place to look at all your cat pictures. All photos shared in this way can be edited and downloaded by the recipients.

Google Photos' locked folder is for those photos and videos that absolutely cannot be seen by others, you can only open the locked folder via the method you use to unlock your phone, and you cannot screenshot photos in this folder. There are a few essential things to know before you start moving files over.

Google Photos provides an excellent way of storing and managing your photos, but if you're looking for a different solution for photo management, check out our list of the top ten alternative gallery apps.

Jon's interest in Android phones began in 2013 and has been tinkering with them ever since. When not writing he's probably testing the limits of his laptop's hardware or re-watching The Lord of the Rings.