One of the best web applications to come along in the past 10 years was Google Photos. Unlimited photo and video storage, mobile apps for Android AND Apple, a simple interface that uses image recognition to help organize your photos, and… it’s all free. Thank you Google.
However. There’s a HUGE missing feature in Google Photos. Labels! If you use Gmail (properly) you know, use, and love labels for organizing emails. The primary reason behind labels in Gmail is for organizing and finding messages. Dare I say, it’s the single most important feature beyond the basics of email. Yet Google Photos ONLY allows you to create “Albums” and organize photos that way.
Albums are a great start. They’re useful, simple, and easy enough to create… but when you’re talking to someone and want to pull up that one photo from 10 years ago, and spend WAAAY too long scrolling and looking, trying to remember when you took it… it makes Google Photos… UN-useful. BUT, if users could add labels (or TAGS) to photos, you might be able to find those photos from years ago.
Prior to Google Photos, Microsoft had the perfect solution for photo management, and it was called Photo Gallery. Photo Gallery allowed you not only to tag every face in an image (which made it possible to find all the photos of a specific person,) but you could also add meta data / tags / labels to each photo. For example, the photo below, I would add labels of: K-36, Cumbres & Toltec, New Mexico, railroads, trains, road trip, friends, Chama, outdoors, and travel. Along with adding labels for each of the people in the photo. Then, years later, I should be able to QUICKLY find all of my photos that have both labels “K-36” and “trains”… rather than trying to remember the date that I went to Chama (OR the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.)
Sadly, for now, Google has NOT made Google Photos as useful as it could. And it’s terribly frustrating. Without the ability to label (AND search those labels,) Google Photos just isn’t as good as it could be. Hopefully they’ll add this feature in the near future.
