Google Photos Stats

Google has some stats about Google Photos, the online photo sharing service released 5 months ago. Google Photos has 100 million monthly active users. They created more than 15 million animations and collages and their backed-up photos and videos use more than 3,720 TB of storage.

Paris is the top photographed place, followed by New York and Barcelona. Besides people, food and cars are the most photographed things. Sky, beaches and mountains are also included in the top 10 things photographed by Google users. The top 6 events in Google Photos are: wedding, concerts, Christmas, dancing, birthday and clubbing.

The most popular searches are for baby photos, but "me" is also a popular query.

Google's Play

Android started as an open platform that brought together many competing companies. iPhone's launch changed Android's development and was an important reason for Android's success. Phone manufacturers and carriers wanted an "iPhone killer" and Android was a good bet, but it still had a lot of rough edges and there were many missing features. This was a great opportunity for manufactures to fill in the gaps, create their own user interfaces and develop their own apps and widgets that brought value and differentiation.

Here's an image from Android's original SDK emulator:

Why did Google acquire Andy Rubin's company and invested in Android? One of the reasons was to make a better platform for developing mobile apps. Google already had a few mobile apps for feature phones, Symbian, Blackberry and it was very difficult to add new features and to test the applications because of the inconsistent APIs and their implementations. Android seemed like an interesting opportunity, but Google never anticipated that it will take over the world. It's obvious that Android became the dominant mobile OS because so many companies invested in Android, hoping to come up with better phones than Apple's iPhone.

While Android was open source, Google created a few proprietary apps that weren't part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The most important proprietary Google app was Android Market, which is now called Google Play Store, but Google developed other apps as well: Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps etc. Over time, many open source apps were replaced by proprietary Google apps: the music player became Google Play Music, the calendar app became Google Calendar, the browser became Chrome etc.

Android Market/Google Play is Google's own service and it was licensed to phone manufactures subject to confidential terms and conditions. According to the distribution agreements (MADA) revealed by companies like HTC and Motorola, Android Market was bundled with other Google apps and services, including Google Search and Network Location Provider, which had to be the default search and location services. "Devices may only be distributed if all Google Applications [listed elsewhere in the agreement] ... are pre-installed on the Device," mentions one of the distribution agreements.

The list of bundled Google apps increased over the years, as Google released more and more apps. Phone manufacturers were allowed to bundle competing apps from third-party companies and you'll find many phones that include Whatsapp and Hangouts, Microsoft Drive/Dropbox and Google Drive, Facebook and Google+. Here's a screenshot from Samsung Note 4, courtesy of Gsmarena, which shows that Samsung preinstalled Facebook and Google+, Hangouts, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Google Photos.

While many Android users complain that their phones have too much bloatware, some companies aren't happy that Google ties the Google Play Store with other Google apps and some default settings (Google = default search engine, Google Network Location Provider = default location provider).

Deutsche Telekom will file an anti-trust charge against Google, complaining that "Google uses its Android mobile operating system to unfairly promote its own products like Google Maps and online search over those of rivals". According to New York Times, "a number of large tech companies, including Oracle and Nokia, as well as small start-ups like Aptoide, a Portuguese online marketplace for smartphone applications, already have filed complaints to European officials connected to the Android investigation." The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Google's mobile operating system and the Federal Trade Commission started a similar investigation last month.

Is it fair for Google to bundle the Play Store with other apps and to dictate its own terms and conditions? It's obvious that the Play Store is the most important Android app and few people outside of China would buy an Android device that can't access the Play Store. By now, Google Play Store and the associated Google Play Services are hard to separate from Android, even if they're not technically part of Android. This is Google's play: it's holding the keys to more than 1 million apps and dictates its own terms to phone manufacturers. Many of Google's apps are actually useful and they are hard to beat by competitors (Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube), but some of the apps aren't the best in their category and Google uses distribution agreements to promote them (Hangouts, Keep, Play Books).

Back in 2008, Android Market was just another Android app store, but now it's the most important by far and it also comes with APIs that tie Android apps to the Google Play Store. I think it's not fair to tie Play Store licensing with bundling other Google apps and Google should use separate distribution agreements for them, just like Facebook and Microsoft.

YouTube Red

Do you remember Music Key, YouTube's subscription service that allowed you watch ad-free music videos, download them and play music videos in the background? It's now called YouTube Red and it's no longer limited to music videos.

YouTube Red is launching on October 28 in the US and it will bring the features from Music Key to all the YouTube videos. "YouTube Red lets you enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, while also letting you save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background, all for $9.99 a month. Your membership extends across devices and anywhere you sign into YouTube, including our recently launched Gaming app and a brand new YouTube Music app we're announcing today that will be available soon."

Just like Music Key, YouTube Red will include the Play Music subscription and Play Music subscribers will get access to YouTube Red for free. Of course, YouTube Red will need to be available in your country first.

There's another bonus feature for YouTube Red subscribers: exclusive shows and movies from some of YouTube's biggest stars. Reality shows, drama series, adventure series, scripted comedies, feature-length movies - there's something for everyone.

You can try YouTube Red for free and start a one-month trial. The service launches on October 28 in the US and Google plans to add more countries soon.

How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet

Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for a trending #hashtag, or an old tweet, or your brand name, and all the matching tweets get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And this archive would just update itself in the background as new tweets arrive.

Meet Twitter Archiver, the simplest tool for saving tweets, forever It is a Google add-on that takes 5-minutes to setup (watch video tutorial) and will easily capture all tweets that match particular search terms in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any conference hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms, save tweets from any geographic location and more.

Save all kinds of tweets with the Twitter Archiver

How to Save Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet

To get started, install the Twitter Archiver and it will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-on menu, choose Twitter Archiver and select the Authorize menu. Allow the Google Sheet to access Twitter on your behalf – the app needs this permission to only fetch tweets and will never post anything to your Twitter account.

Once your Twitter account is authorized, go to the Twitter Archiver menu again and create a new Search Rule. If you have every used the advanced search page on Twitter, this search rule screen will be very familiar. You can create rules that mention certain search terms, look for exact phrases, find tweets by #hashtags, tweets that @mention particular Twitter users and so on.

Now that you have created your Twitter search query, click “Start Tracking” button to initialize the Twitter Archiver. Internally, the sheet will connect to Twitter and pull in the historic tweets that match your search term(s). It writes these tweets in a separate sheet inside the Google Spreadsheet. After the initial set is pulled, the archiver will poll Twitter every hour and pull in the matching tweets that have been posted since the last run.

Video Tutorial – Twitter Archiver

In addition to tweets, the Twitter Archiver app will also import other data including the tweet’s retweet & favorite count, the tweeter’s friend & followers count and whether they are verified or not. This data will help you filter out the spam Twitter users or easily surface tweets from the most influential users.

If you would like to stop archiving tweets for a particular search term, go to the Twitter Archiver menu, choose Saved Searches menu and you’ll see a list of your exisitng saved searches. Select the one you wish to delete from the dropdown and hit the Delete button.

Install Twitter Archiver

Isn’t that simple? There’s no need to create any Twitter apps nor do you have to fiddle with Google Scripts.

Twitter Archiver – Frequently Asked Questions

How can I create complex search queries?
The archiver supports all Twitter search operators. For instance, you can put min_retweets:5 in the Advanced Rule box to surface the best tweets for a search term.

Why does Twitter Archiver access to various services?
The Archiver add-on connects to an external service (Twitter API) and saves the tweets to Google Spreadsheet. Also, should a problem arise, you can email the debug logs to the developer and hence it needs permissions to send mail.

What is your Privacy Policy?
The add-on runs inside your Google Account and directly connects to Twitter. It does not share even a single byte of data with anyone, including the developer.

My Twitter Archiver is not pulling all the old tweets. Why?
The Twitter API does not provide all the historical tweets via the API. It will only return tweets that have been posted in the previous 5-7 days or last 1000 tweets. The archiver will however fetch future tweets for any terms that it is tracking.

Do I have to keep the sheet open to save the tweets?
The archiver runs on Google servers and will therefore work even while the Google Sheet is closed. You can close the sheet, turn off your computer and the archiver will continue to work.

What is the difference between free and premium editions?
The free edition of the Twitter add-on lets you track up to 2 search queries. You can track more queries in the same Google Sheet with premium. The free edition polls Twitter every hour while the premium edition pulls tweets every 15 minutes so it is more suitable for tracking terms that are generating lot of tweets (like a conference #hashtag or a live sports event).

How do I upgrade to the Premium Edition of Twitter Archiver
You can use this PayPal link to upgrade to premium. It is $39.99 one-time flat fee and you can use premium for life.

I need help. Who do I contact?
Support is only available with the premium edition. If you have gone premium, use the contact form at ctrlq.org or email amit@labnol.org with your request.

Why user Twitter Archiver when IFTTT or Zapier can also save tweets?
The Twitter Archiver save complete meta-data of the tweets in the spreadsheet, it fetches tweets at a much faster rate and you can visually create and manage search queries from inside a Google Sheet.

I am getting a message from Google saying “The service is using too much computer time for one day”
You can only make a limited number of connections to the Twitter API from your Google Account. If you are tracking too many search terms in the Google Sheet, you might get that error. However, Google will reset the limit every 24 hours so it will resume itself the next day.

How do I save my tweets in other formats like PDF?
Since the tweets are saved in a Google spreadsheet, you can easily export the search results in various formats including PDF, CSV or even publish your data set as an HTML web page (choose File -> Publish to Web inside Google Sheets). Advanced users may try this technique to create JSON or RSS Feeds from Twitter.

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The story, How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/10/2015 under Twitter, Internet.

Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help.

No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

How to do Reverse Email Search

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the approximate location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has a billion users and the likelihood is therefore high that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the person into the search box and Facebook will instantly tell you if a profile exists with that email address or not.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download the profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the sender is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probability that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

Gmail users can install the Rapportive add-on and find the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles associated with an email address, if any of them exist. For details, see this tutorial on how to guess someone’s email address.

#4. People Search

Finally, if none of the above tricks work, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Also see: How to check if an Email address is valid & exists

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The story, Find the Person Behind an Email Address, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/10/2015 under Email, Internet.

Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes

John is not a professional photographer, the day job keeps him busy, but he’s an enthusiast who loves photography. One fine evening, he got a call from someone in his friend’s network who was willing to hire John for a photo shoot but, before signing the contract, they wanted to see more of his work.

John has captured some stunning and impressive photographs over the years but they are clearly not sorted and arranged in a manner that can be easily shared with a client. His photographs can be found all over the social web – from Facebook to Instagram to Flickr – but, for lack of time and technical know-how, he never considered building a portfolio website to showcase his work.

How to Make a Photography Website

There are WYSIWYG website building tools, Squarespace and WordPress for example, that make it extremely easy for you to build beautiful photography websites but the little downside with these tools is that you’ve manually update them every few weeks or months.

Siftr is a new web app that is trying to tackle the same problem but with a “build it, forget it” approach. The app, created by ex-Adobe employees, monitors your Instagram and other social networks, and automatically makes a portfolio website by pulling your ‘best’ photographs. Unlike other website builders that require you to manually upload photographs, Siftr syncs pictures from your social accounts, where you are actively posting pictures anyway, and puts them in your portfolio website.

Here’s a sample photography website that Siftr created using my Instagram page. It created the website and curated the photos automatically and the total time I spent in the entire exercise is 0 minutes. The website is responsive and looks great on a mobile too. Here are better examples.

Smart Categories, like Google Photos

You may be wondering why would anyone need such a tool when similar functionality can be emulated in WordPress using services like IFTTT. For instance, you can have an IFTTT recipe that will automatically cross-post your pictures to WordPress as soon you put them on Facebook or Flickr.

Well, there’s more to Siftr than just syncing your photos from social networks. The tool uses object recognition techniques to automatically classify your photos in categories. For instance, there are categories like “Nature”, “Buildings”, “People”, etc. and the photos are tagged automatically based on the pixels. So if a prospective client is only interested in the landscape photographs, you can directly point him to the relevant tag.

Siftr offers a host of layout templates and you also have the option to remove pictures that you do not wish to show in your portfolio website. At the time of writing this, Siftr can import your photos from Instagram, Flickr and Facebook but there’re adding support for 500px too, all the popular destinations where you’re more likely to upload photographs.

Siftr.co is completely free at though some of the upcoming features, like custom domains, templates, etc. could only be available to premium users.

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The story, Create a Beautiful Photography Website in Minutes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 17/10/2015 under Instagram, Photography, Internet.

Chrome Notifications in Google's Navigation Bar

It looks like the Google Notifications section is not only for Google+ and Google Photos. Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed a Chrome notification from a supervised user who sent a permission request.

It's likely that more Google services and products will show notifications in the navigation bar. Google already stacks the notification cards for Google Photos.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Google Families?

Google's password manager available at passwords.google.com has an interesting list of URLs in the source code. Most URLs redirect to Google's My Account page, but there's a new subdomain which returns a 404 error: families.google.com. It's not clear if Google intends to launch a new account manager for families.

Google Chrome already has a feature that lets you add supervised users and setup parental controls. You can block certain websites, review browsing history, change settings. Google Play has a Family section that highlights family-friendly content and Google Play Music will offer a family plan for $14.99. There's also YouTube for Kids.

{ Thanks, PhistucK Productions. ]

Google Shows Other Recordings of a Song

When you're searching Google for a song that has multiple cover versions, Google shows a new section below the video: "other recordings of this song". For example, if you're searching for [Felix Jaehn Ain't Nobody], Google shows the original version of the song from 1983 (Rufus and Chaka Khan) and a recent cover version from 2013 (Jasmine Thompson), which was remixed by Felix Jaehn, a German DJ.

You can click the other recordings to find more about them and watch their videos.

How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac

Apple’s Magic Trackpad 2 is a new and redesigned multi-touch trackpad that has a larger surface area than the previous trackpad, includes rechargable batteries and supports Force Touch, a technology that lets you do more with a single touch. For instance, you can press the trackpad to select a word on a web page, apply more pressure and it will pop-up the word definition.

Apple Magic Trackpad 2 costs $129 but it isn’t just expensive, it may not be compatible with your older iMac or Macbook. The Apple website suggests that the new Magic Trackpad 2 requires Bluetooth 4.0-enabled Mac running El Capitan (OS X v10.11 or later) and thus it may not work with MacBooks and iMac that are older than 3-4 years.

If you are looking to buy the Trackpad but are not too sure if it will work with your Mac, here’s how you can perform a quick check.

Does your Mac have Bluetooth 4 for Magic Trackpad 2

Click the Apple logo in the menu bar, select “About this Mac” and check for the version number. If it says 10.11, you’ve El Capitan. Next click on “System Report,” select “Hardware” underneath Bluetooth and look for the “LMP Version” in the report. If it says 0x6, it means you’ve Bluetooth 4 on your Mac and the Trackpad 2 will work without issues.

If you prefer the command line approach, open terminal on your Mac and enter the following command to know your Bluetooth version.

system_profiler -detailLevel full | grep “LMP Version”

The LMP (Link Manager Protocol) Version will be 0x6 if your Mac is equipped with Bluetooth 4 or 0x4 if it has an older version of Bluetooth. You should have also upgraded your Mac to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

There are inexpensive Bluetooth USB adopters, like the ones from GHS2 and IOGEAR, that will plug into the USB port of your Mac and bring Bluetooth 4 connectivity to even older models but they are not ‘officially’ supported.

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The story, How to Tell if Apple Magic TrackPad 2 will work with your Mac, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/10/2015 under Apple Mac, Software.

How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone

Capturing screenshots on a mobile phone is easy. If you have an iPhone, press the Home & Sleep buttons and the screenshot image will be saved in the Photos app. Android users can press the Volume Down & Power button simultaneously to capture the screen. And in the case of Windows Phone, press and hold the Start and Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot.

That’s a raw screenshot saved in your camera roll but if you would like to use that image in your website, a presentation or even in your Apps Store listing, consider adding device frames. This is important because people should be able to figure out whether a screenshot was captured on an iPhone or a Microsoft Lumia or a Google Nexus phone. The device frames can be actual photographs so your screenshot images appear gorgeous and more realistic.

Realistic Device Mockups for Beautiful App Screenshots

A layered photo editing tool like Adobe Photoshop (Win/Mac) or Pixelmator (Mac) makes it really easy for you to add hardware device frames to any screenshot image. Go to Dribbble and search for “freebies PSD <mobile name>” and you’ll find beautiful mockups for any mobile device. The Facebook design team too provides Handskit – photos of hands holding devices that you can use without restrictions.

Download and import the PSD file into Photoshop and then use the File -> Place command to place the screenshot image as a new layer over the device mockup. Then use the Save for Web option to export the image in JPEG format.

[*] Dribbble users usually add the tag “freebies” or “free” to indicate that others can reuse their design(s) for personal and commercial use. Other than Dribbble, Deviant Art and Behance are also good places to discover high-quality hardware mockups for all popular mobile devices.

If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use web apps like Magic Mockups, Dunnnk and Frame to add photorealistic device frames to your mobile screenshots.

These tools offers a collection of professional-quality photographs of mobile phones, tablets and computers placed in realistic settings. You need to drag your app’s screenshot image on to a photograph and it will automatically get placed in the screen area of the mobile device perfectly aligned with the hardware frame pixel by pixel.

Google’s own Device Art Generator lets you quickly add vector device frames around screenshots of Android phones and tablets. Device Art Generator includes templates for Android Wear and all Google Nexus devices. Drag the mobile screenshot image on to a device frame and it will quickly wrap that frame around your image. You also have the option to add screen glare and depth (for perspective) to the generated screenshots.

MockuPhone is another useful web app for adding device frames to your mobile screenshots with a unique feature. You pick a device frame, upload the mobile screenshot image and the tool will generate multiple screenshot images of the same device but at different angles.

The tool produces very high-resolution screenshots and they offer device frames for the iPhone, iPad & iPad Mini, Windows Phone, TV screenshots and Android.

PlaceIt and Mockerie are other good services for adding device mockups to your screenshots but they requires a subscription.

Scenery is a free Mac App that will helps you convert your app screenshots into professional looking and real-life photographs. Launch the app, drag the screenshot and you can instantly preview it inside gorgeous device photos. The starter pack includes a couple of free images of the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone.

You can also add realistic device frames to your mobile screenshots via email. Just send the raw screenshot image as an email attachment to smartphones@mailchimp.com and, within in a minute or two, they will send you the processed screenshot with the device frame. You can also attach multiple screenshots in the same email message.

The service will automatically detects the mobile device name and the image orientation (portrait or landscape) using the EXIF data in the image and adds the appropriate hardware frame. It supports iPhone, iPad, Galaxy Tab, Nexus and a bunch of mobile device – send an email with the subject “help” to the same address for a complete list.

Finally, if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, you’ll love devices.css. They have created realistic mockups of iPhone, Android, Lumia, iPads and Macbooks using pure CSS and you can add image screenshots and text captions inside the mockups by editing the HTML. The big advantage here is that your text can be read by search engines too.

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The story, How to Create Photorealistic Screenshots of your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/10/2015 under Mobile, Screen Capture, Internet.

How to Watch YouTube Videos with Picture-in-Picture on your iPad

The Picture In Picture support in iOS 9 lets you watch videos while you work on other apps. To get started, open a video inside Safari, click the PIP icon in the video player and it will pop-out the video to a corner of your iPad screen. You can switch to any other app on your iPad and the video will continue playing uninterrupted. The floating video play can also be resized using the pinch to zoom gesture.

The YouTube app on the iPad also supports Picture In Picture but that will only work while the app itself is in the foreground. You can watch a YouTube video in PIP mode while you explore other videos inside the YouTube app but as soon as you switch to another iOS app, the video will stop playing.

YouTube and iOS 9’s Picture in Picture

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could multitask and simultaneously watch movies on YouTube while replying to emails or checking your Twitter stream?

Meet YouTube PIP, my latest web app that lets you watch any YouTube video using the Picture in Picture mode in YouTube. While you are inside the YouTube app, tap the share button and copy the link (URL) of the YouTube video. Open YouTube PIP in your Safari browser, paste the YouTube URL and click the Play button.

Voila! The YouTube video player will have that picture-in-picture icon that you can tap to detach the video from Safari. Now switch to Mail, or any other iOS app and the YouTube video won’t stop playing. Also the YouTube video will support “true” full screen mode which is not available inside the YouTube app.

The trick is very simple. When you paste the YouTube video URL, the app embeds the YouTube video in HTML5 mode. And because it is an HTML5 video, the PIP controls are available automatically. This should work for all YouTube videos that support embedding on external websites.

The Picture in Picture mode is supported on all iPad models including iPad Pro, iPad Mini and iPad Air. Android doesn’t support PIP but there are a bunch of apps that will put YouTube videos in the foreground.

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The story, How to Watch YouTube Videos with Picture-in-Picture on your iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 05/10/2015 under Embed, IPad, YouTube, Internet.

How to do Reverse Image Search on your Mobile Phone

The Reverse Image Search option in Google Images can help you quickly discover related images from around the web. Upload a photograph from your desktop to Google Images and it will show you similar images used on other websites and also different sizes of the same photo almost instantly.

Journalists can use the reverse search option to find the original source of an image and also know about the approximate date when the picture was first published on the Internet. Photographers can use ‘search by image’ feature to know about other websites that are using their photographs.

Reverse Image Search on Mobile Devices

The little problem is that ‘search by image’ is only available on desktop computers and not on mobile devices and tablets. Thus, if a friend has sent you an image on WhatsApp or Facebook that you’d like to verify, you’ll have to first transfer the photograph to a desktop in order to perform a reverse search. Too much work, right?

Not anymore. I wrote a little web app that lets you perform reverse searches on a mobile browser as well. Go to http://ift.tt/1O1Mghz on your mobile phone, click the “Select Image” button and choose an image from the photo gallery of your phone. Next click “Search” and it will upload your photo to Google Images much like the desktop version.

Find related images with Google Images on a mobile device.

I’ve tested the search app on Chrome for Android and Safari for iPad but it should work on most other devices since it uses the standard HTML5 File System APIs. Internally, it takes your image file, converts it to Base64 (data URI) and submit the encoded image as HTTP POST request to Google Image. The browser then automatically redirects to the search page.

Also see: Find out where a picture was taken

There’s another workaround as well that will let you use the official Google Image Search website for reverse search on a mobile device. Open the Chrome browser on Android and under settings, choose “Request Desktop Site.” Now open images.google.com and you should see the Camera icon to upload an image for searching.

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The story, How to do Reverse Image Search on your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 30/09/2015 under Google Images, Images, Internet.

How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos

Casey Smith uploaded a bunch of scanned images on Google Photos but they are showing the date when the scan was made and not when the pictures were captured. She writes: “Do you have any recommendation on how to re-date pictures that are not appropriately dated? I have a ridiculous amount of photos that are dated as of the date I added them to Google Pictures as opposed to the date they were actually taken. It’s driving me nuts. Any advise?”

There are two ways to deal with the problem. You can either change the date of photos before uploading them to Google Photos or do it after the photos are uploaded. The former option is recommended since it will let you modify the date and time of multiple photos in one go while the latter option would allow you to edit the timestamp of one image at a time.

Both Windows Photos Gallery and Apple Photos for Mac OS X allow you to easily edit a photo’s date and time. Open Photo Gallery on Windows, select one or more pictures by holding the CTRL key, click the date in the Info panel and choose the correct date from the calendar. In the case of Apple Photos, select one or more photos and videos from the gallery and choose “Adjust Date and Time” from the Image menu.

Alternatively, you can use a more powerful command like tool like ExifTool (available for both Mac and Windows) that can “shift” the date and time associated with images by a fixed amount. This is useful if you have taken pictures with a digital camera that had an incorrect time when the photos were taken so the dates can be shifted relatively.

If you’ve already uploaded the pictures on Google Photos, you can still edit the timestamp but you can only do that one image at a time. Also, the date editing option is only available on the Google Photos website and not inside their iPhone or Android apps (yet).

Go to photos.google.com and click on any photo. Next click the “i” icon to open the Info page and then click the pencil icon next to the date to modify the date and time of that photo. Tedious but works.

If you are to edit the date of multiple photos that are already on Google Photos, a less time-consuming option would be that you download them all to the desktop, delete the copy from Google Photos, empty the bin, edit the dates of images on the desktop and re-upload them to the Google Photos website.

And you would still need a desktop based photo editing program to add or edit the geolocation data since Google Photos doesn’t support that yet.

Also see: How to Edit the EXIF Data of Photos

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The story, How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/09/2015 under Image Editing, Images, Internet.

Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets

Would you like to know how much traffic (or page views) other websites in your niche are getting for competitive analyis? While it will be difficult for any third-party to accurately measure the traffic of a site, there are a bunch of traffic estimation services that can give you a better understanding of the popularity of a website. Here’s a list:

1. Alexa – Enter the website’s domain and Alexa will reveal the ranking of that website based on a combined measure of unique visitors and page views. The rank isn’t based on a site’s traffic alone but is relative to the traffic of all other sites that are monitored by Alexa. Webmasters are often skeptical of Alexa number but they the rank is still a good indicator of a website’s popularity over time.

2. Compete – You can use Compete to estimate the total US traffic (unique visitors) for nearly every site on the web. Compete uses data from ISPs, their own toolbar and other data sources to measure the traffic. It offers other metrics like Page Views, average stay duration, demographics, etc. but these are only available to paid users.

3. Similar Web – It started out as a tool for finding similar sites but now offers a range of data including traffic analysis in a clean interface. You get to know the site’s traffic over time, the countries that are sending the most traffic, what search keywords are bringing the organic referrals, how much time users are spending on a site and so on. The traffic reports can be downloaded as PDF files for archiving.

4. SEM Rush – It offers plenty of information around search (organic) traffic for any website. Put in the website URL and you’ll instantly know how the site has fared in organic search over time. The data can be split by country, you get to know which sites are sending traffic and also the keywords that are bringing the most visitors. Open Site Explorer is another popular tool in this category.

5. QuantCast – Like Compete, you can use QuantCast to determine how many people have visited a selected site during a give period from desktop or mobile phone. For sites that have implemented the QuantCast tags, you get more accurate metrics including visitor demographics, traffic by country, and the split in mobile and desktop traffic.

Also see: Know Everything About a Web Site

Find Website Traffic with Google AdWords

Few years ago, Google Ad Planner and Google Trends for Websites were the go-to tools for estimating a site’s traffic but they have since been discontinued. You can however still use the Display Planner tool inside Google AdWords to get a good idea of a site’s traffic and demographics. Here’s how:

Go to Display Planner and sign-in with your Google Account. You need not be an AdWords advertiser to use this tool.

Next put the site’s domain in the search box, set the Campaign targeting to United States (or remove geographic targeting to see global traffic) and click “Get Placement Ideas.” Google will now show you the average impressions per week for that domain and if you multiply that number by 4, you get a good estimate of the site’s monthly traffic (hits).

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The story, Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/09/2015 under SEO, Internet.