Wonder Tools 📸 My favorite photo app

The easiest way to backup, edit and share pictures

Google Photos is the most useful free all-in-one tool for organizing, backing up, editing, sharing, and printing photos. Read on for an update on an earlier post about how to make the most of it. Plus: other apps to enhance your pictures.

Try these👇apps to supplement Google Photos for special effects.

• Snapseed (Android, iOS) is completely free, with 29 tools for editing any image quickly and easily. Try the lens blur, black & white and brush tools.

  

  The Snapseed app — free for Android and iOS

• PopPic (iOS) lets you instantly turn any photo into a 3D image. Free with a watermark.

• FreePrints (Android, iOS) lets you get up to 85 of your favorite pictures printed free every month, paying $2 and up for shipping.

• Prisma (Android, iOS) is my fave app for adding free special effects to photos.

Prisma is my preferred free app for quickly turning photos into artistic images

Best new Google Photos features

• Magic Eraser. Get rid of unwanted background elements.

• New video creator. Make an automatic short video by picking people, a place, and/or a time range to feature.

• Cinematic Photos. Create a moving version of any image.

1. Back up photos and videos

Digital files can easily disappear. If you've ever accidentally deleted a folder, dropped a phone, or lost a laptop, you’ve had pictures evaporate. So the first way to use Google Photos is to automatically back up all your Android or iPhone visuals, including photos and videos.  

You can also back up old photos or videos stored on your computer or thumb drive. Having a digital backup is important because a physical drive can wear out or get lost or damaged.

It’s free to store up to 15GB of photos and videos. I pay $30 annually for a 200GB Google One account because it also gives me extra space for GMail and Google Drive files. I can share it with up to five family members. Whether you have 1,000 photos or 100,000, they're precious.

2. Find a photo quickly 🔎

Type in birthday, Chicago, snow or someone’s name and you’ll see photo search results. You don’t have to file photos into albums, though you can if you want to. It’s surprisingly easy to find old pictures you’re looking for.

Type in “birthday” and Google Photos will quickly show you relevant images — no filing necessary. Photos from Google Photos

3. Edit easily 🏞

• Beginner: For a fast fix, open any photo and use auto-correct to touch up color and light balance.

• Intermediate: Crop an image to focus attention on your subject by clicking the crop button to pinch and drag an image. I like the tactile feel of using fingers to adjust an image, rather than clicking a mouse.

• Advanced: Use a drawer with precision editing tools to adjust shadows, highlights and more without leaving GPhotos.

4. Create collages, gifs and videos 🎥