How we manage our photos is an important aspect of doing family history work; whether photos from the past or photos from our present – they all tell stories.
Today, Facebook announced that everyone now has the ability to transfer your Facebook photos & videos into your Google Photos account. This is a handy feature to have, but should you use it?
Well.. if you are truly interested in organizing your digital media using sound practices, then my answer to that question would be “No.”
Why not? Google Photos is a very popular platform for storing the many, many digital photos and videos you have likely taken over the years. It offers some advanced searching functionalities based on artificial intelligence that raise it’s cool factor considerably. It can also be a good place to temporarily store your photos. And the word “temporarily” is key.
Photos and digital media play a very large role in working on family history and when it comes to their safety and security, I advocate that we practice due diligence when saving, organizing, sharing, and preserving them for future generations. Thus, it is important to follow industry standards. Google Photos has major limitations in this regard.
When organizing your photos, we have opportunities in Google Photos to add descriptions to photos. Though, any work you do to add descriptions and keywords to a photo, should not be trapped in the system where you do it. Adding descriptions is what allows us to tell the stories behind the photos and there are ways that software engineers can ensure the details you add stay with the photo when it is exported out of any specific platform.
If you have a picture in Google Photos and you’ve added descriptions and keywords – those details are only available as long as your photos remain in Google Photos; it is not included in the photo once you remove download it or export it from Google Photos – and that…. is tragic.
This is just one reason why I do not recommend Google Photos as a solution for organizing & preserving your precious digital memories. There are other approaches you can use that are more systematic, better align with standards, and will enable you to more robustly preserve your digital media.
When it comes to your Facebook photos, it’s important to capture them, but there are better ways to do it. I am in the process of putting together some education about digital photo organization, so if you’d like to be notified when I have it ready, let me know!
thank you, nice to know
You are very welcome! Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions about saving and organizing your family photos online!
Thanks for this, but, what I want to know is HOW did you find time to write a blog post this week? Lol!!
Thanks for sharing this info.
Renate
Ha ha! Fast and furiously is how 😁
Hello – So I agree with you, but would you say that transferring them to Google and then to a more permanent site is the way to go?
Hi Kim – Thanks for your comment! I personally recommend a different approach! When it comes to my Facebook photos, I do/did two specific things. Last summer, I exported all of my Facebook photos and transferred them to an external hard drive so that I would have a copy of them. From that point forward, I never posted on Facebook any picture that I did not have already saved and organized in my home “hub” for my photos. That way, anything on Facebook was just a copy and I don’t have to worry about its potential loss at any point in time. I use Forever (http://bit.ly/forever-taneya-referral) for all of my permanent digital photo needs and it has several advantages over Google Photos that make it an ideal solution. I will email you a follow-up!