7 advanced Google Photos features you should know about

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The Google Photos app is best known to users as an image library, where photos and videos taken or downloaded are stored for later viewing. However, the software can be used in many other ways.

With that in mind, we’ve selected seven advanced Google Photos features for you to learn about and try out on your phone or tablet. Check out more information below.

Google Photos: 7 advanced features you should know about

1) Capture a photo from a video

It's often possible to make a video with such good quality that you notice details that you'd like to immortalize in an image. Google Photos helps you do this: the software allows you to go through your video frame by frame and export a specific moment of the footage as a photo.

To do this is very simple: open Google Photos, select the desired video, click Edit > select the frame > Export frame.

2) Create a shortcut for screenshots

Anyone who has a lot of screenshots or prints would certainly benefit from a shortcut to access the album directly. That's why the gallery already has a function for this: click and hold the Google Photos icon and wait for the options to appear, look for the “View screenshots” button, click on the icon with two horizontal bars and drag it to a specific location on the desktop.

Then, you will have a shortcut that will directly open your print album, which will save you time when accessing the photos.

3) Hide sensitive media

Most people have sensitive media (photos and videos) that they don't want third parties to have access to. To hide this type of content, Google Gallery already has a native feature to help the user.

To do this, simply open the gallery, and click and hold on a photo. Then, select “Move to locked folder”. Then, to view the locked folder, simply go to the “Collections” tab, scroll down and select “Locked”, and unlock access with your fingerprint or password.

4) Delete an item without affecting what's in the cloud

Many users feel more comfortable with their files if they are saved in the automatic backup, which hosts everything in the gallery in the cloud. However, to ensure that deleting a file does not compromise what is in the cloud, you can use a native function that deletes the file only from the phone.

To do this, you must select the image, drag it from bottom to top, and click on “Delete from device”.

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5) Change date, time and location of image or video

Once media is stored on your phone, Google automatically gives it a number of characteristics, such as the date, time, and location the file was created or received.

However, this data is not always convenient or correct. Therefore, there is a native option to change it, as long as backup is enabled. To do this, select the image, drag it from the bottom to the top, and look for the options “Edit date and time” and “Edit location”.

6) Automatically crop documents

Not everyone has the patience to crop images one by one, especially when that photo is of an important document. Luckily, Google Photos has a built-in feature in the software that automatically recognizes that the image is of a document and then crops it.

Do the following, open the gallery, click on the photo that shows a paper (document), and select Edit > Crop > Automatic > crop and save. From now on, the gallery will identify the photo of any document and crop it automatically.

7) Stabilize videos digitally

It's always important to make videos in good quality, but we don't always have a tripod to stabilize the shaking of the image. However, Google Photos has a function that stabilizes the video digitally.

To do this, select the media, click on “Edit” and select the icon with the square symbol.