Google Photos Best Practices for Parents and Kids

Published: 2020-06-28 by Brandon

As parents and Google Photos users we use a number of features and strategies to ensure our photos are safe, easy to share with family, and protected from disasters. This article will walk through our strategies for parents and kids using Google Photos.

Essential Features

If you are new to Google Photos there are a few key features that work great for families:

• Partner Sharing: automatically share photos with your partner; no fussing to remember who's phone got the best shot of that cute thing.
• Live Albums - automatically adds photos based on face recognition - a great way to give kids a copy of photos they appear in

Protect Photos from Little Fingers with Kid Google Accounts

Kids love looking at photos of themselves and the family. However, handing your kid your laptop or phone can easily lead to accidental photo deletion or photos forwarded to your boss!

To keep your photos safe setup a Google account for each child; the signup process is quick and easy. Then the parents can share the family photo albums and live albums with the kid's Google accounts.

We configure our devices to ensure the kid only uses their own account in these ways:

Android and ChromeOS: use separate user profiles on Android (Settings -> Multipe Users) and ChromeOS (Login -> Add Person) and log the kids into their accounts. Note: if you create a "Family Link" account for your children you can't use the Android multiple user feature; so we don't use that feature.

iOS and iPadOS: we dedicate Firefox or Chrome browsers as the "kids browser" and log that broswer into the kids Google account; then we pin the browser app using Guided Access so the kid can't escape and make calls or send emails.

macOS and Windows: the kids have dedicated user accounts where they can make whatever mess they want.

Separate Shared Albums for Family and Friends

Our family has a handful of separate galleries we share with different audiences. Your best friend might want to see every cute photo you have taken- even if that means sorting through dozens of photos per day. But, your cousins might only be interested in seeing major highlights a few times a month.

With the kids logged into their own account a parent will periodically add shared album photos to the kids collection by click the “Save Photos” button in Google Photos. This makes it easier for them to find their favorite photos.

Backups: Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe

Backups are essential to safeguard the precious family memories stored in Google Photos. With Clone Camel you can easily backup your Google Photos to an SD card that is mailed to your home. Use coupon code CCBLOG02 for 10% on your first order.

For more Google Photos backup strategies see our earlier blog post.

Conclusion

Google Photos offers a ton of features that can be used together to create a great family workflow. We hope this article helped to inspire your creative use of these tools.

Have more ideas? We would love to hear about them, email support@clonecamel.com.

How do I Backup Google Photos?

Published: 2020-06-23 by Brandon

Google Photos stores all your precious photos in the Cloud. But, what happens if Google Photos has an issue that loses your photos, your Google account password is hacked, or you need to migrate services?

Here are three ways you can backup your Google Photos in 2020:

Takeout is Google’s tool for users to download data from their products: including Google Photos.

The tool is simple: select the data you want to export. Then, in a few hours or possibly days, Google will email you links to download your data. For example if you have 1,000 5MB photos you will get an email with 3 download links of 2 gigabyte in size.

If you have average residential WiFi downloading gigabytes of data will require patience: on a 18Mbps connection, the US average, it will take roughly 45 minutes if no one else is using the WiFi. Also, be sure to stay organized because you need to remember to download all the zip files and also ensure each download completed successfully. Finally, be sure to save the files somewhere safe like an SD card or external hard disk (not your Downloads folder!).

Learn more about Takeout on the “Download your data” Google support doc

If you are tech savvy and know how to use the command line then rclone is useful for downloading your Google Photos. Unlike Google Takeout rclone copies the photos directly to your disk or SD card without a zip file. This makes it easy to visually verify the photos through your file explorer without extracting the images. Also, rclone downloads incrementally so you can start/stop the backup process without losing backup progress.

Learn more at the rclone Google Photos

Clone Camel is a service that sends you an SD card, yes in the mail with a stamp, loaded with a backup of your Google Photo images. You just click a few buttons and Clone Camel takes care of the rest. All you need to do is wait for a mail delivery, and as a famous computer scientist once said:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

In 2020 the delivery van replaced the stations wagon and the SD card replaced tapes. But, the idea is sound. Don’t let slow home internet or technical complexity stand keep you from taking steps to protect your precious memories.

Try out Clone Camel today and get a backup of your Google Photos delivered to your home. Enter the code CCBLOG01 for 10% off.