Managing photos on Google Photos

mossquant

mossquant

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6
Name
Jan
Edit My Images
No
I do scientific as well as some artistic macro photography. I have about 400 GB of photos stored in Google Photos, primarily because it's easy to get them there and there are not many cloud storage services specializing in photos which can offer that capacity.

What I'm looking for is some interface to Google Photos that will allow me to manage their descriptions. I do have them organized into albums, and I could create more albums and organize them more finely. But what I really need is to be able to semi-automatically go and update photo descriptions with new and revised classifications. Something that interacts directly with Google photos would be ideal. It would be okay to have something that downloads a group of photos, can be used to update them, and uploads them to replace photos again, but it would absolutely have to preserve all the EXIF data, or at least all the data where the description hadn't been updated. So maybe what I'm looking for is an EXIF editor that works with Google Photos.

Any thoughts?
 
So, I investigated and thought about this. I did find the PERL based exiftool and exiftoolgui which can alter EXIF tags. But this requires downloading (from Google Photos) and somehow getting the photo back up to replace the one there. I'm not sure there's any interface at Google Photos that allows a replacement.

There is also something called tropy which is advertised for scientific work, but it's underpowered and, although I saw a reference saying it could work with Google Photos, the version I downloaded didn't advertise any such capability. So that's a bust, too.

I have decided, however, that there's something I can do. While Google Photos has no way of tagging photos and organizing them accordingly, such as searching, which is unfortunate, it is possible to put photos in arbitrary albums. So, rather than writing a description on the photo, I can create an album called, say, "Polytrichum commune" or "Site 4, Instance B", tick all images that belong there, and add them to that new album. Albums can't be nested, so the hierarchical relationship between "Site 4, Instance B" isn't preserved with respect to an existing album "Site 4". But it's then easy to go to the specific album and see all the photos related to it.
 
There used to be something called Picasa that was essentially a front end to Google Photos which (apart from being really confusing) did pretty much what you want. Like a lot of their projects, Google lost interest and turned it off.

Without knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve, I'd be tempted to look at a PHP based gallery hosted on your own web space. You can edit all your exif on your local machine using your choice of tool (exiftool, Lightroom, PhotoMechanic, whatevs) and keep that folder in sync with some web space using an automated tool. Get one of the many free PHP scripts that can look at a folder and its subfolders generate a web gallery from it.
 
I was on Amazon Prime. Moved to Google. The transfer was painful. It was difficult to preserve EXIF.

I've decided not to write anything my own.

Thanks.
 
I have solved the problem by moving my collection to Adobe Lightroom. I figured out how to reliably get the EXIF data associated with Google Photos during a download. Google Takeout is useless for this purpose. It turns out that permission to see the EXIF or download it depends upon how an album is shared with others. Otherwise, to get the EXIF data, you need to go to the album in the Google Photos of the owner of the album.

Lightroom looks like just the thing, with its tagging, which I can use to associate photos with sites and instances, and taxa. The only concern I have is the 1 TB ceiling for the basic subscription. There is a 3 TB option, but it's expensive. But, I guess, it's cheaper than thrice the 1 TB.

I got this idea from Mr JonathanRyan above. I would have done that immediately, but I did not understand at the time that Lightroom was backed up on the Adobe Cloud.
 
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