tagging google photos and assorted explorations

 A family member has been hard at work scanning pictures and letters for some time. I certainly can't tell you what is where. I am familiar with an album that was shared with me. As we looked at sharing it with other family members of the family we knew the question of who are these people would come up.

Once again I start from a perspective having done this elsewhere first, Aperature running on a mac. Tagging faces was easy as was searching on those people. It would pull other pictures in and ask if they were the same person. Slick. I have yet to attempt to restore that anywhere and see if it works without that software. That was before I remember easy access to apple information on the cloud.

I first started using google photos when I got some Android phone. I blame that on my dad, as I had to know enough about his devices to support him. I failed to sell him on a cell phone or an iphone. I am no curious as to what motivated assorted family members to use it...

My family member requesting help on this topic started naming the files with the year and a name and grade. I went OCD and had problems when the year and the grade did not match. This person could search on the name and get a list of files, but it did not have the accustomed functionality of google photo albums (ie slideshows).    (I will not go into the whole file naming thing I tried to enact on the advice of the genealogy group at the Santa Clara Pulblic Library in California on the same lost computer.) 

From the top level page of photos.google.com, in the left column, there is an option expolore. Once selected under the heading "people and pets"  is a collectiion of faces, which you can click on and add names to (or change them, sometimes). You will also be presented with a selection of photos with this person in (some tagged, some not) Promising.

Then we tried going from a single picture with a family grouping. We clicked on the information icon (a stylized i) to get a collection of faces, a filename (but no location) and other bits. The little pencil with the faces permitted us to attempt to add other faces and change names with mixed success.  (It was not just me having limited access to the shared pictures.) Does google need to run some approval and gathering algorithm? In some cases it permitted us to add faces. Definite failures on profiles and the person near the camera in the selfie with others in the background. While we had some semblance of a list of people for the picture, it was not obvious which youngster  turned into which adult.

Things for another time:

• Trying to do something similar with icloud.
• doing something similar with documents