On trips, we tend to take a lot of photos. If we’re at Disney or on a cruise, Amy always makes sure to get the photo package and we usually take advantage of *EVERY* opportunity offered when a cast or crew member has a camera in their hands. The girls just know at this point that its part of the trip and go along with the photos (on the Alaskan cruise they even surprised us with some of just the three of them that we knew nothing about).

Photo packages make it easy to get good photos on your trips and for us its worth it, but how do you manage all the photos you take on your phones or personal cameras? Enter Google Photos!

Google Photos is a free app from Google (it does require a google account, but these days who does not have one of those?) that will automatically back up your photos (or other image/video files) to your google account and then allow you to remove them from your device freeing up space for more photos! One of the nice features is that if you upload the original size image files, you have almost unlimited space.

You can set it to upload via wifi only (so it only backs up to the cloud while you’re connected to a wifi network) which is good for those of us who watch our data use and once uploaded you can create shared albums which allow those you share the album with to add their own photos. The nice thing about this is that while you’ll get some duplicates, you also get to see the trip through the eyes of someone else on it and they may have caught a different perspective than you.

You can share the album with as many people as you like and there are plugins for wordpress that make it easy to share in a blog post or on a site. I won’t go in to that now, but we’ll talk about those at a later date.

Adding photos to the albums is fairly easy as well, you just pull up the album you want to add photos to, hit the + button and select the photos you want to add. Once they’re added, everyone added to the album can see them (and the nice thing is that it sorts them by date and time automatically and adds the name of the person who added them). It makes it pretty easy for sharing photos from the same trip and if you have a smart display or chromecast device at home, you can set the albums to display on those devices as well as a digital photobook.

We have some albums with almost 5000 images in them (from our Alaskan Cruise) and from a quick search, it looks like you could have upwards of 20,000 images in a single album (talk about a new goal!).

In all, Google Photos makes it easy to share memories from trips or just in general.