Google Photos is a great service for storing and organizing large collections of images. It has some amazing capabilities many probably never explore. Here is an anecdote illustrating a capability that can be quite powerful.
A year or so ago Cindy and I were able to take a lengthy trip to southern Africa. The opportunities for photography were unrivaled and I kept hundreds of photos on my computer, in Flickr, and in Google Photos. Yesterday, Cindy was putting together a gift to send to a friend she has not been able to see for months because of the pandemic and she wanted to include a couple of small things she had purchased in Africa for her friend. She wanted to send a picture of the market in which she had purchased these gifts to show something of the unique culture we had experienced. One of the gifts was a copper bracelet. Copper mining is an important industry and local artists create different pieces appropriate as gifts. She remembered taking a photo at the market but could not remember where or exactly when. What she did remember was that she had made the purchase while we waited for our bus to have its turn on the ferry that docked next to a large bridge that was still under construction.
I tried to find an appropriate photo of the market in my collection without luck, but I decided to search Google Photos using what she remembered about the event. I searched for “bridge”. Just to be clear, this was not a search of labels or text I might have added to the thousands of photos I have stored. I was asking Google to return all pictures of bridges.
The combination of bridge and an understanding of the general time period we were in southern African found the specific date and image of the bridge under construction.
Cindy was able to use the EXIF stored data of my photo to find an appropriate image in her own collection. So this is a capability worth exploring – use search in Google photo to locate images containing objects you know you have photographed.
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