Google Photos vs Preloaded Gallery App: Which one should you use on your Android mobile

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Asif Ahmed
Asif Ahmedhttp://techtippr.com
Founder and Cheif Editor of Techtippr, Get in touch with me on Twitter or Enjoy my Stories on Instagram. I think they are interesting. :-)

There are many uses of Android smartphones but one of the most common use is the use of the camera and the collection of photos you can keep on your mobile phone.

This is why the photos app of the gallery app is one of the most important apps on a smartphone for a lot of people.

In this article, we are comparing Google Photos, which you sometimes have to install from the Play Store, with the preloaded gallery app on your Android mobile, and see which one is better and which one should you use on a daily basis.

One thing to note here is that every Android smartphone manufacturer has a different version and style of Gallery app. It is not purely Stock Android unless it is Google Pixel smartphone or a smartphone which specifically has got Stock Android.

Presentation

When it comes to presentation, the default Gallery app usually has got the pictures on a smartphone in the form of folders such as one from the Camera, then a folder for Screenshots, and then maybe a folder with contains all the images of WhatsApp, also, for some Android smartphones, WhatsApp images are hidden from the gallery app.

But the gallery app differentiates these images so that it is easier for you to go straight into the Camera folder to view all the photos that were clicked using the camera of your smartphone.

Google photos, on the other hand, gives you a single area where you get to see all the photos that for either taken by your smartphone camera, WhatsApp photos, or the Screenshots, or the photos from any other folder.

For some people, the Gallery app would make more sense, when it comes to the presentation of photos and browsing through them.

Backup and Sync

One of the key features of Google Photos is that you can backup and sync your photos and videos to the Google clouds. This also allows you to free up space on your mobile phone if you have less storage.

But it also means that your photos will always be available to you even if your phone gets stolen and if you have enabled the option of backing up the photos.

And the fact that Google Photos offers unlimited storage for photos and videos on its servers for free, and there is 15 GB space if you want to keep the images in its original quality.

We have written so many praises about Google Photos so many times on the blog, so it is quite needless to write about it again to see how awesome the backup and sync feature of Google photos is.

The gallery app, on the other hand, does not have any such feature. So if you ever need to switch the smartphone, which happens every year or so, for a lot of people, you need to take a backup of your photos to your PC then move it back te another smartphone, there are other different ways to move your photos from one phone to another.

I would definitely recommend to have Google Photos and use the Backup and Sync feature to move photos from one phone to another.

One cool feature of Google photos is that you can free up space on your smartphone after the photos have been backed up to the cloud, Google photos will detect whether of the photo has been uploaded or not, and then it will safely remove it from your smartphone.

And if you want to view the file again, it will be downloaded from the clouds and served to you on your smartphone that like any other photo.

Finding the photos

Mostly all the gallery apps on Android smartphones make searching of particular photos easy by showing them in different albums all folders.

Like we discussed in the first pointer, all the photos were taken from the Smartphone Camera appear in Camera album, all the Screenshots are in a different album and then all WhatsApp photos are in the different album and so on.

Google Photos takes things to another level, even though it does not present photos folder wise, you can pretty much search any photo that is there in Google Photos.

You can swipe your finger from top to bottom on the right-hand side of the screen to scroll through all the photos in a timeline, the lower you scroll the father you go in the past.

Right now for me, my Google Photos album go as far as 2011.

Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning come into play when you can tag people in the photos.

And since you already have Google Contacts on your smartphone, we can take the exact name of the people in Google Photos and then search all the photos of that particular person, Google’s image recognition is on point since it can literally search every photo of that person.

You can even make searches of things like dogs, cats, toys, party photos, summer vacation photos.

Google is mainly known for its search capabilities and this is true for Google Photos as well.

Recovering deleted photos

Talking about the Gallery apps, some smartphone makers who use Android system, have got something like ‘Trash’ in place, where the deleted photo is moved to the trash folder where It stays for a period of time before it automatically gets deleted.

There are some Android smartphone makers who have this functionality, there are some who do not.

But if we have to talk about Google Photos, it does have a trash folder where all the photos that are deleted go, and Google Photos keeps these deleted photos for as long as 60 days before it gets deleted automatically.

So, Yes, it is quite possible to recover deleted photos unless you have cleared your trash.

Hiding the photos

Like we said in the pointer above, there are some Gallery apps that have the function of hiding a particular photo or hiding a particular folder altogether.

In Google Photos, there is no such option of hiding photos available. The only thing you can do is Archive the photo, which pretty much means the photo will no longer be visible in the display area.

However, it is much more advisable to hide photos manually by going to the particular folder and moving the photo to a folder which you are going to hide.

There are a few more features that are exclusively available in Google Photos, such as Automatic Sharing, where you can enable automatic sharing photos which have people tagged in it.

For example, I have photos getting automatically shared with my wife if the photos include my kids, I have tagged them, so the photos automatically get shared with my wife, and appear in her Google Photos app.

So, I would suggest you use Google Photos more often since it is easier to search for older photos and you would be able to keep the entire photo collection inside a single app that also lets you view it without much effort.

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