Share those friends and family party photos!

Share those friends and family photos!

You know the deal: everyone shows up at a priceless family party and takes tons of photos, each on their own phone (or worse, for each group shot, 10 different phones take turns at shooting the picture).  Unfortunately, when the party is over, all you end up with are your own photos.

Google is attempting to solve this problem by allowing you to create “shared albums”.  Send your friends a link via email or text and they can easily all add their photos to one place.  Let’s hope this works!

 

Sharing photos and videos between friends and family after your birthday bash or holiday gathering shouldn’t be difficult. But between the great shots your brother has buried on his iPhone and that friend who keeps forgetting to email you her pics, you’re often left reliving the event through just the photos and videos you took yourself.

Source: Official Google Blog: Shared memories made easy with Google Photos

Improved Google Drive Search is here

Google Drive/Apps users rejoice!  Search is improved. Just click on the dropdown in the Search box and you’ll see lots of new options, including the ability to separate searching of the file name vs. content in the file.

I still wish I could search within a folder only (for those of us still stuck in folder paradigms) but this is a marked improvement. Check it out.

 

Source: Google Drive Blog: Because it’s gotta be super easy to find your files

Chrome Browser on Android reduced mobile data usage up to 70%

Back in the good ‘ol Internet days of dial-up, a common trick was to turn off graphics in the browser by default and only once you arrived at the desired page would you manually press a button and show all the graphics. (Anyone remember Netscape?)

Well, what was new in the ’90s is once again new in the ’10s.  The latest Chrome browser on Android essentially lets you do the same thing. You’ll not only save on your data plan by not downloading images you don’t really care to see anyway, but in addition you’ll get lightning fast downloads of websites since you’re only pulling down the text.

All we need now is the Macarena playing in the background to give us that complete 90s experience.

 

Straight from Google’s blog:

Now, we’re updating this mode to save even more data – up to 70 percent! – by removing most images when loading a page on a slow connection. After the page has loaded, you can tap to show all images or just the individual ones you want, making the web faster and cheaper to access on slow connections.

Source: Google Chrome Blog: A new way to save data with Chrome on Android