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Family Tech: Here’s how to get the photographer in the family vacation photos

Several years ago I scanned my father’s slides of my siblings and me growing up. Dad had put together a nice presentation of photos of our lives, and maybe once a year we’d sit down and enjoy a slide show.

I noticed how few photos there were of Dad. He had been the self-appointed family photographer.

That is a role that no longer exists. Now, on a family vacation or outing, all family members over the age of 10 seem to have their own camera.

How do we keep those photos from being in their own universe, and make them truly family photos? I wrote about one possible solution three years ago, and a How-To blog post I wrote to go with that column remains the No. 1-read post at FamilyTechOnline.com.

That solution used Dropbox, that give you so much free space and hope you will buy extra space as needed. Photos take up a lot of room, so my solution most likely had most users needing to purchase Dropbox space.

When my son and I planned our Israel trip, I rethought this problem. Google Photos lets you store an unlimited number of photographs for free. The photographs stored at their original quality if they are 16 megapixels or less. Otherwise, the service downgrades the quality to 16 megapixels, but they are still great looking images. Google can save the original high-resolution photos, but you would likely have to purchase storage space from Google.

Before the trip, we each installed the Google Photos app on our phones. It didn’t matter that two of us were on Android and one on iPhone. We turned on the setting to have the app upload our photos to our individual Google accounts when we were on Wifi. That saved us using up data on our data plan.

Read the rest at www.FamilyTechOnline.com

A How-To has been created to help you use this process.

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