In our latest podcast episode, #47, we talk about creating a shared Google Photo file where you can upload your historical family photos and share them with other family members who can also upload photos to the same file. There are a few wonderful things about this project one being that you can download and save in your own files the photos that your family shares in the group site. Another is using Goggles face recognition abilities to help identify who is in the photos.
- The process is easy. First you need a google account which is free and easy to set up.
- Enter photos.google.com in the address bar
- click on CREATE in the top bar
- click on SHARED ALBUM when the drop down box appears
- Here you can add a title for your album and choose if you will upload photos or use face recognition to start. Can always upload your photos later if you choose “Select people and pets”
- If you already have Google photos set up then give the face recognition a try and see what comes up. This option will populate your screen with faces in your photos. (my historical photos are not all in my Google photo file so not many came up when I did this process).
- Click upload photos and all your photos that are in Google photos will appear, if you just signed up the album will be blank. In the upper right corner, click select from computer.
- Choose the photos from your computer file that you would like to share and upload.
- Click the SHARE button in the top right corner and pop up box will appear with your google contact.
- click the ones you would like to share the album with OR type in their email where directed.
- Once you have all your emails added you can add a message and then click the blue arrow to share. Everyone in your group can upload photos.
- Click on a photo and add a detailed description so everyone in your group will have all the information about who is in the photo, where it was taken, who owns the photo etc.
Give Google photo sharing a try and see what photos your family has to share that you may have not ever seen before.
Genealogy Happy Hour 
I love the idea of a shared album for historical photos, thank you for that! I was super excited about the facial recognition, which worked great for the camera photos that were already on Photos. However, I can’t figure out how to “force” recognition of the historical ones I’m adding. I tried googling for an answer, but it seems at this time you are unable to manually tag people. Did I miss something? Can I make Photos recognize these historical albums I’m making?
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Hi Vonda, thank you for listening to our podcast. You have a great question and I will have to work on it a bit to get an answer for you. Unfortunately I am away from my computer for the holidays but will get back to it next week.
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Hi Vonda, Sorry it has taken me so long but with all the holiday travel I am a bit behind. When you are on the photo google home page with all your photos you can click the search box and a new page opens up with different options to search. One of them is photo of faces. When you click on the arrow that is on the right the page opens with all the faces that are in your photos. Click on the one you want, in my case I chose Cecil Burke’s photo. A page then opens with “in albums” at the top and shows all the albums that his photo is in and then right below that you can name the person. Now at least you can use that name in the search box when looking for photos of that person. When you are back in the page that has all the photos listed a box opens at the top that says “improve your people groups” and offers you two photos of people and asks if they are the same and you can click yes or no. This is very helpful with the older photos.
In the case of my father, I named a recent photo of him then opened one of him as a child and Google asked me to name it but also gave me a list of names I already had named people so I chose that one. Then it asks if they are the same and I clicked yes. This helps Google learn who is who. I am not sure I answered your question but I hope I helped you better organize by name. Happy sorting!
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