{"id":5500,"date":"2014-05-29T18:12:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T01:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/?p=5500"},"modified":"2014-05-29T18:12:53","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T01:12:53","slug":"google-plus-photo-backup-and-stories-automated-photo-based-trip-report-creation-for-us-lazy-folk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/2014\/05\/google-plus-photo-backup-and-stories-automated-photo-based-trip-report-creation-for-us-lazy-folk\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Plus: Photo Backup and Stories, Automated Photo-Based Trip Report Creation For Us Lazy Folk"},"content":{"rendered":"

i’m not a big Google Plus user (or Facebook user, for that matter, so it’s not like i’m playing favorites) but happened upon some pretty cool features recently, one of them being Stories<\/a>. Stories generates a timeline of events automatically<\/strong> based on photos that you’ve uploaded to the service.<\/p>\n

the example i’m using here is my Trip to Vilnius<\/a> — the only change i’ve made was to add a couple captions here and there, edit a photo to test things out, and remove a photo that was redundant. everything else from the title to the maps were all automatic.<\/p>\n

\"stories4\"<\/a>

I probably should change the cover photo since it picked a photo from my layover in Copenhagen. heh, shh!<\/p><\/div>\n

but wait, you say, if you don’t use Google Plus, how did it get your photos?<\/p>\n

using Google Plus as cloud backup for the photos on your phone<\/h3>\n

good question. i’ve been using Dropbox<\/a> (use that link and we both get 500 extra megabytes) to automatically back up the photos on my phone but i’m too cheap to pay for storage space. while accounts come with at least 2 GB of storage, i somehow signed up during a promo which got me 50 GB. i used another promo to get me yet another 48 GB, but that will expire in a year and a half. yes, that’s a lot of disk space, and yes, that’s still a ways off, but i wanted a service where i don’t have to worry about anything.<\/p>\n

that’s where Google Plus comes in. if you download the app<\/a> (if you’re not on Android, there’s a small link there for iOS) you can set it up so it automatically saves your phone’s photos to Google. this is great because if i run out of memory on my phone and have to wipe all the photos, or if i lose it or it somehow breaks, i know i have a copy of my photos in the cloud. the only downside to this (whether it be automatic backups via Dropbox, Flickr, Google Plus, iCloud, etc.) is that it backs up all<\/em> your pictures, whether they are ones you want to save or not. note, though (phew), that Auto Backup’d photos are by default private<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"photo1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

the changes i made to the default automatic photo backup settings:<\/p>\n