Before becoming a parent, my photos were all over the place. You could describe me as “technology curious.” I love trying out new technology and thinking about how I can use it to make my life easier. But sometimes I am so scattered in my experimentation I’m in danger of becoming a dilettante.

Such was the case with my photo storage. I am a devoted iPhone user, so I, of course, have photos stored in iCloud. The lure of unlimited photo storage for Amazon Prime users was too irresistible, so for a time I was syncing photos to Amazon. Mostly due to work, at one point the OneDrive and DropBox apps were essential for my phone. Both of these apps have convenient photo backup functionality. I was an avid user of Flickr back in the day. With my perpetual interest in print copies of my photos, I have some of my most cherished photos stored in Shutterfly. And my all time favorite photo tool, Picasa, was shuttered in favor of Google Photos. I was very sad to lose Picasa, but I followed the pied piper (Google) to online storage.

Because of the Four Stages of an Event and my desire to expand my happy moments by luxuriating in reflection, my photos are very important to me. If the family is safe and sound, what I’m going to try to save in event of a fire is my scrapbooks. Six months into parenthood during which I was documenting every milestone (and everything was a milestone), I looked at my photo storage situation and realized my scattershot approach wasn’t working. I was frustrated with certain aspects of Apple Photos, especially with finding specific photos, but I wasn’t sure if there was a better option out there.

I knew I had to come up with a strategy.

Requirements:

• Be able to accommodate large amounts of photos at high resolution.

• Be easy to use and mostly hands-off:

  • Syncing has to be automatic from the phone.

  • Should automatically apply some tags (e.g. locations, faces, etc.) to make future search possible.

• Search support. The better the search, the better its value to me.

• Folder sharing for sharing large amounts of photos with family or friends.

• Bookmark or favorite functionality so that I can quickly file an image away for later use.

• Caption support so that I can add notes.

• Surfaces old photos for a dose of reflection when I’m in the mood for one.

Nice-to-haves:

• Automatic foldering of photos based on who is in the photo.

• Photo frame support: a digital photo frame should be able to automatically pull the photos directly from the storage service through the internet, preferably from a designated folder within the storage service.

• Print store support. I’d like to send a selection of photos to a print service, ideally with the option to automatically populate a photo book (with captions!).

• OCR support to facilitate search.

• Automatic video/slideshow creation to enhance moments of reflection.

Solution

After evaluating the above photo storage services (and a few others) against my requirements, I eventually landed on Google Photos as my best option. I did have to subscribe to one of Google’s higher tier storage plans, but the amount of time I’ve saved and the value I’ve received from the service make the subscription well worth the money IMO.

Google Photos meets all of my requirements and nice-to-haves except for the fact that it doesn’t pull in the photo captions when creating a photobook. But I love the search functionality. Not only does it allow you to search by person or location, it also allows you to search by the content of the photo, such as “puzzles” or “soccer.” It’s rare that I cannot find what I’m looking for with the Google Photos search feature.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Google Photos’ automatic creations, as well. Not only will the service create videos or slideshows (animations), it will also occasionally enhance a photo by adjusting the color or brightness or blurring the background to make the foreground pop. To me, the quality of the photo isn’t super important (I’m really only interested in revisiting the memory), but it is a fun way of seeing your photos in a different light.

I am often glad that I took the time to come up with a plan for my photos when I did. I’m mostly hands-off with my photos, and yet I’m regularly able to reflect on happy times, find specific photos, and quickly pull together a photobook or other photo gifts. How do you store your photos and what were your key requirements when coming up with a solution?