This article was written to guide people on How to Take and Share Train Photos and Videos Using Google Photos Album.
I am a member of the Metrolina Model Railroaders club (MMRR) and we kept receiving inquiries from people trying to sell us trains they own or inherited. Some of those people wanted our email address so that they could send us photos once I informed them they needed to take some photos of their trains. It can be difficult and frustrating to try to send photos via email, especially using today’s high megapixel photo taking devices, such as cellphones and digital cameras. This sight will eventually allow its members to share their entire collections of trains and other hobbies with the public, other members, and specific friends and family members. It can be a challenge to get hundreds and thousands of photos to website. But there is a very EASY way, especially if you already have or don’t mind creating a Google account! While the following is rather lengthy, when you learn the tricks mentioned in this article, you will really enjoy sharing your photos and videos with the world and you will be astonished at how easy it can be.
Allow me to start by sharing a few bits of information related to Photo sharing:
If you wish to share 1 or 2 photos with someone, you might be able to do that just by attaching them to an email. But if you start attaching 5 or more photos to an email you run the risk of your email being too big to leave your email service or too large to be received by someone else’s email service. In all cases, regardless of how many photos you directly email to someone, depending on the device they receive their email on, you could be increasing the size or their inbox or causing them to have increased charges if they have to pay for the amount of data being transferred via the device they receive your photos on. So, in a way, it becomes a little INCONSIDERATE to send a wealth of images directly to someone, whether they are expecting them or not.
Today’s digital cameras and cell phones take extraordinarily large photos in terms of file size. The pictures and videos look absolutely stunning, but, again, if you try sending those photos to others using email, this can have more negative impact than it should especially when you have no idea what circumstances the recipient is dealing with. There is a BETTER way to share your pictures and videos with others that has very minimal impact on everything concerned. The method I am about to share with you won’t use up any serious amount of bandwidth or diskspace for people to receive an an opportunity to view your photos. Note that actually viewing and looking at your photos will always generate bandwidth on the network the viewer’s device is using to see your photos and videos. There is no way around that. But, people will not fill up there inboxes and jam them up just trying receive the opportunity or invitation to view your photos and videos. Hereafter, when I say photos, just know that I am referring to both PHOTOS and VIDEOS.
Therefore, almost everyone can quickly get to your photos and videos.
The concept of this BETTER way to share your photos is based on having your photos stored and hosted on a web-based server popularly referred to as Cloud space, the Net, or the Web. Once your photos are stored in the Cloud, you can share ACCESS to those photos simply by sending someone a link. Your recipient can click on the link whenever they like and then they can visit the cloud space that hosts your media. For most people, cloud space hosting can be FREE or costs very little as part of an account you already have. Google, for instance, has such a cloud space server and it offers a good amount of space to its users for FREE. Millions of people have a FREE Google / GMail email account. Google Photos is one of the free services that comes with a free GMAIL account. Other companies and service providers have similar services. Microsoft has OneDrive. Apple has iCloud. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others all allow you to share photos stored in your cloud space accounts by them with others for free. Why is this important? These days, everyone with a modern cell phone has a camera built into it. Practically all of those cameras take photos and videos. If you link the camera app on your phone to one of these cloud space accounts, every picture you take will very quickly synchronize to your cloud space account, especially if your phone is also connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. There are settings typically on your phone that allow you to control whether photos taken can always and immediately upload to your connected cloud space even when your phone is only using a mobile satellite connection. It is a good idea to be aware of these settings and set them appropriately then check them before doing your first large photo taking session. Why? Well, let’s say you are about to try what I am talking about for the very first time. Let’s say you have a train collection with 150 items in it and you are about to take 5 or 10 photos of every train piece you have. Let’s say you even wish to take 15, 8-minute videos of some of your best train consists running around your layout. Maybe none of your friends or family members have ever seen your collection yet. Maybe you are preparing to sell the items you wish to photograph. Well, lets say all these trains are in a metal shed outside in your backyard. While you are inside the shed, you may not be connected to the Wi-Fi signal emitting from inside your house. But, you are able to receive phone calls in the shed. Well, if you have the setting turned on in your phone to use your mobile data to synchronize the photos you take, that is exactly what it is going to do. If you have a 10 Megapixel camera on that phone, you could generate a lot of very large picture files and even larger video files. The calculations for even a ballpark figure of how large these files would or could be is beyond the scope of this article mostly because there are too many additional factors to include that I cannot guesstimate your phone’s settings. The bit rate, image well over (150 x 5 x 10,000 = 7,500,000 x the bit density of your camera. Color photos at a low resolution are a minimum of 24-bit 8-bits, compression ratio, and even the color density or saturation of the images you are taking will vary the size of the files created. But, if you have 2 GB of mobile data on your cellular plan each month, you could very quickly go over that amount before you get halfway finished taking the photos. Some cellular providers will warn you that you are approaching your bandwidth limit. Others don’t, and simply send you a bill for the excessive over-the-bandwidth limit you use at a premimum rates. If you have “unlimited” bandwidth / mobile data on your account, you may experience a slowdown in Internet service once you reach the real soft limit cap on data consumption or you might not be affected at all. It is best to know what your limitations are BEFORE you go over them and to also know how your phone is going to react when you close to the limit. Be aware, there is NO PLAN offered by ANY CELLULAR PROVIDER that is truly UNLIMITED. Unlimited has a definite bandwith transfer number on every account on the planet that when you go over that limit, an adverse scenario will occur that differs from the way data is transferred prior to you hitting the limit. Find out what the limit as as data charges may apply. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE for your use of any suggestions of mine that you take or any charges you receive from any service provider, including, but not limited to your cell phone provider, your cloud space storage, your Internet service provider, etc.
prodispursement of the photos your
For instance, Microsoft and Verizon offer similar services.
Chances are good that you (and nearly everyone you know) owns or has access to at least one provider of publicly accessible and shareable cloud storage services.
[In your case in particular, you have a GMAIL account and therefore you have free access to Google Photos.]
The rest of my tips and tricks are going to cover how you can take advantage of your Google Photos account to share your photos and videos with anyone, anywhere, anytime, with practically zero impact on them or you, and definitely, in such a way that won’t catch them by surprise, fill up their email inbox storage, or cause them issues with their email service provider. Additionally, your media is far more likely to be accepted and viewed by more people.
A few notes about Zipping up photos (in case you thought doing so is just as good as using a cloud-based service).
Zip files or any compressed files are a good way to TRY to reduce the file size of a lot of items, bundle them together, and transfer them to someone else.
However, if you pay close attention to the compression ratio of photos taken with modern cellphones and digital cameras, you may find that the compression ratio on most of your photos is likely to be much less than 10%. If your camera takes 5 Megapixel photos or higher, zipping your photos isn’t really reducing the file size of the photos by very much. And videos almost never get compressed at all in a zip file. They are usually just stored inside of zip files.
Recipients of zip files may be cautious and hesitant to decompress and extract your media from a zip file.
Although most systems will scan a zip file for viruses and infections both when it is encrypted and again prior to opening or extracting it.
A recipient has to KNOW HOW to do USE a Zip file to be able to see your media and they have to SAVE both the zip file and the extracted media in order to view your pictures.
A .zip file has its compressed file size. It also has a much larger decompressed or exploded / extracts size which is the size of the items restored back to their original size.
To be able to use a zip file, a recipient must have both the compress file size and the uncompressed file size in available storage on their device to successfully be able to extract the contents of the zip file which must be stored on their device or storage connected directly to it.
The extracted file size will be at least the same as the zip file and depending on the overall compression ratio, the file size needed will be that amount multiplied by that ration plus the size of the .zip file itself.
This is a hassle and potential hazard for a lot of people and some just won’t open a zip file because of many reasons, one being they don’t know how, another reason is they may not have an idea of where the files are going to go when they do, or they don’t know how to get to the extracted location to see what was extracted.
Regardless, you limit interest and attraction to your items if someone has to receive and extract your files from a zip file.
Using a .Zip file is unnecessary when the BETTER method of sharing your media exist as mentioned above in 1-4.
Methods of taking photos and using online storage
A lot of professionals and high-end users actually have real digital CAMERAS these days.
Most of today’s modern cameras take photos that can either be stored on a transferrable medium such as a thumb drive or SD Card.
Most of them can also be connected to cloud-based storage accounts and can transfer their photos directly to your web-based storage.
Almost everyone else has a cell phone that can take photos and videos.
Millions of people have Android based cell phones which automatically require a GMAIL account to operate it at all, whether you know what that account is or not.
Every Android phone is associated with a GMAIL account.
Regardless of the type of smart phone you have, you can install Google Photos on it from the phone’s App Store.
In most cases, when you configure the Google Photos app on your phone, you can configure it to synchronize ALL photos taken with the camera on that phone directly to your Google cloud-based Photos account.
If your real camera allows for you to store photos directly to a cloud storage service, enter your Gmail / google photos account information and there you go — your camera will send your photos to Google Photos.
Otherwise, use a computer, take the transferrable media and upload it to your Google Photos account.
Keep in mind that your camera or cell phone sync’s, backs-up, or transfers your photos to Google Photos storage. This is a wonderful thing in most cases because you can have lots of storage space in your google account and can buy more when needed. Therefore, you can have access to far more media in your account than your device (phone or camera) can ever store directly in its own internal memory.
If you configure your device properly, Google will remove the photos from your device and keep them in the cloud and therefore you can always just keep on taking more and more media with very little impact on your phone.
Google prefers to transfer files using Wi-Fi. So, check your settings to be certain you are connected to Wi-Fi.
To force Google Photos to backup your photos,
Visit the Google Photos app
Tap the letter near the top right of the app that represents the first letter of your name. A pop-up menu will appear.
Usually, the second item listed there is the status of the Backup.
If it says, “Backup Complete”, then everything has been sent to the cloud.
Otherwise, it will typically let you know it is backing up and the number of files it is working on, or it will allow you to start the backup process.
Other settings elsewhere can control whether or not backup can occur using your mobile data, if you prefer or if you don’t have reliable high-speed Wi-Fi access.
NOW COMES THE FUN PART: HOW TO SHARE YOUR GOOGLE PHOTOS or VIDEOS quickly and easily with anyone via a LINK
This can be set-up using a computer or your smart cell phone.
Most people have a lot of photos and videos. They may not wish to share ALL of them with EVERYONE. So, the first thing to do is you need to choose exactly which photos and videos you want to share.
Login to or visit Google Photos (on your phone use the App).
When you are in Google Photos, you may see a large plus [+] sign near the top of the menu. Or you may see Albums on the desktop web menu. Click/Tap the PLUS [+] sign, select CREATE a new Album.
Type a TITLE for this Album. It should be representative of the media you want contained in the Album. For instance, “My Train Collection for Sale.”
The next thing you might see is a Share option. Bypass this option for now as I suggest you select it later.
Photos can automatically be added if you are interested in putting people & pets in an album by selecting the next option. Since we are looking for TRAINS, let’s bypass this option too.
Select the 3rd option that says, “SELECT PHOTOS”. All of your photos will appear. They are typically grouped by Date.
An easy way to get all the photos taken on a particular day into an album is to TAP/Click the round radio button beside the date the photos were taken and you will notice that a check mark will appear in the circle and a check mark will appear on all the media for that date. Optionally, you can move your pointer or mouse over individual photos and tap/click the circle, a checkmark will appear on the item. Repeat this process for all the media you want to be in this album.
When you are done with your selection, tap/click either the word done or add near the top right of the page. This option should appear to the right of a count indicating the number of media items selected.
Google will then display the top of the album with the name and other options either on the same line, above the Album name or below it. If you need to add or remove items, tap/click the icon to Add Photos which looks like a square with a plus sign in the top right of the box.
Now you are ready to create a LINK to this Album. To do so, click the SHARE option/icon which looks like an unclosed triangle turned sideways with small nodes/circles in each corner.
Next, Click/tap the Get Link option which looks like 1 link in a chain linked fence. Then tap Create Link to confirm. Google will create a link and may display the ability to copy that link as it is doing so. On a computer, go ahead and copy the link to your invisible clipboard. Once that is done, Google displays the Album again with available options and one of those options now looks like the LINK fence icon.
The album is created. However, I suggest you TAP/CLICK the link fence icon and adjust the SHARING PERMISSIONS options to suite your preferences.
Why?
Because by default, the Collaborate option is turned on. This option allows people with the link to ADD more photos to your album and you may not want that to occur.
Other options include getting notifications, allowing comments, and letting people see other people in the album.
There is also a Copy Link option on this page which will copy the link to your invisible clipboard.
You can also invite anyone in your Google Contacts to view the album by selecting them at this time.
You want to make sure that you copy the link when you are on the device that you wish to create your email or webpost so that when you are ready to insert the link into your message, you will simply use the PASTE option on that device at that time.
Once the link is copied, you can back out of the Google Photos website or app, close it, or do whatever else you wish.
To put the link in an email:
Create your email and wherever you want the link, use your device’s PASTE function and insert the link.
On most computers, press CTRL+V or Right-Click and select Paste.
On mobile devices, long tap (press your finger down and hold it there) until a pop-up menu shows up and then tap Paste.
{I am writing this message on my computer and following my own instructions on my cell phone as I go. I created an album to share my 2023-24 Christmas Trains, including their arrival, unboxing them, testing them out, dealing with issues, running them, and their latest run of me trying to get one of them to SMOKE. Although I created the album on the phone, I am going to open another Window on my computer, visit my Google Photos site, see the new album, click the copy link, and Voici, here it is, pasted right here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/GEdSxQjMM2NbE8Pn6 . I am using Yahoo to send this email. I could have provided different display text for the link, but I wanted you to see what a PUBLIC Google Shared Photos Album link looks like. When you create your link it will be similar. Now, my Album contains several hours of videos and over 50 photos. No one could ever email a collection of media that large to anyone. But in a line, I can give you complete access to all of it to view whenever you like.}
As you can see, using a cloud-base service to host your photos and then sharing them with whomever you wish is a much better and easier way to show someone your collection or to share your media.
And, you can add text to the album whenever you like using the [Tr] option. Or, if you allow comments, then you can click on an individual photo in the album and leave a comment about it.
Also, outside of the album looking at all of the photos, before you put them into an album or later after they are already in an album, you can provide a text description for each photo by clicking/tapping a photo, selecting the info button, and then typing a description of the photo. Any description you add will update and appear on the photo in the album. However, for viewers to see the description or any comments on a photo, they must click/tap on the photo to view it individually.
You can use this method of sharing your photos with anyone that has an email address. Anyone with the link can view the media in the album. You can use that SHARE button and the 1st or 2nd option that appears to select people you know and invite them to view the album.
When you no longer want the link to work, either change the preferences in the Link sharing options or delete the album. Deleting the album does not delete the photos. It only deletes the grouping of the items in the album. Items can be placed into multiple Albums simultaneously. Google doesn’t MOVE the photos from one place to another. It just creates a group / place holder that organizes and displays the photos typically in date-taken order (oldest to newest). If desired, you can sort the photos in 3 different orders via the menu on the edit album menu.
When you have a link to a photo album you can share that link with others in many different places.
One place that may be of interest to you is the Classifieds Ad section on my ShowMyHobby.com website.
If interested, visit https://showmyhobby.com/index.php/classifieds-2/.
For a fee, you can create an ad (using the Place Ad option) about the trains that you are selling.
If you wish, you can upload maybe 1 photo that shows the majority of your collection.
Then, in the body of the ad, insert the URL link to your Google Photos album of all the rest of your photos about your trains.
Make sure to include your email address when placing the ad.
My website will message you directly if anyone shows an interest in wanting to buy your collection.
Just as you did when you told me how you wish to sell your items, be certain to specify that you wish to sell the items in person with local pickup only and all items at once.
You can do something similar at other marketplaces such as Craigslist, Etsy, eBay, etc.
Other places may not accept your Google Link.
Some places may require payment.
Some places may limit the number of photos you can upload.
Some places may have a complete set of rules, regulations, fees, and requirements for you to use their selling / advertising platform.
While this is a very lengthy email, anyone reading this can probably benefit from the information presented here.
I wish more CLUB MEMBERS would create Google Photo Album links to their own train layouts and collections as well as of any Railfanning they may do and/or of media they take at events that we attend. If they will forward their photo links to me, I can publish them directly on our club’s website far easier than the tons of tedious hours it takes for me to edit photos and make them ready for use on our website, reduce them to a size that will load them fast and be acceptable by the website, and then upload them to specific pages on our website. Plus, if they add their own descriptions to their own photos, that will help out tremendously and I would not have to try to make up something about whatever it is they sent.
I hope this helps you out. And thank you for allowing me the opportunity to use your scenario to present this information. I will eventually post a version of this on at least my website and maybe on the club’s website as well, especially since more and more people are donating their items or reaching out to offer their items to us.
Thank you.
