Good and EVO

Snow Madness, four days with Google Photos

Maggie in the 2016 snowThere were warnings that a snowpocalypse would be ensuing at 3pm on Friday in Nashville. If you’re a Nashvillian you know to take these warnings with a grain of salt and a stout resolution that you will not purchase milk and bread while all the panicking members of your community are slamming Kroger with a passion. You’re not one of those people.

WTL;DR Paul makes home movie slideshows with free software, can’t do product reviews/tutorials due to kiddos trapped at house.

TL;DR of this article is this is some of the neat stuff you can produce with Google Photos if you haven’t bothered to play with it in a while. This is also all I managed to get accomplished as most of my weekend involved things breaking and needing to be fixed before flooding ensued and carrying toddlers up a hill.

Nashville’s in what we call a snow dome. It rarely snows here, and when a winter event hits us it’s usually rain, then freezing, then a light dusting of snow to give you the illusion that it’s not solid ice that you’re about to embark on.

This was different. I woke up about 4am Friday morning and everything was white. My phone informed me that I needed to play a game of Words With Friends and also that there was a severe alert for my area. Yeah, it’s snowing. 11 hours earlier than anticipated which was odd.

Friday morning I assessed the roads. This basically consisted of me trudging to my street, saying “[expletive!] no,” and walking back.

The decision was made, since the last time there was snow to speak of was 2003, to throw the toddler into it and take a lot of pictures as she might not see this again until she was in college. It would also give us the opportunity to use a snowsuit that someone gave us. It would also probably generate an awwww moment and get her some clothes for her nearly naked summer Barbie, but that’s an entirely different story.

I broke out some Head Sensatec Ladies Gloves of my wife’s as mine were in my car, which was snowed under with five inches of snow at this point, and set about documenting some of the events that would take place over the next few days.

Google Photos Assistant had stitched together a couple of ok videos, tweaked some of the images, and otherwise did an interesting enough job that I wanted to see what would happen if I Bushed it up and became the Source Decider.

What followed was the realization you need to stop at about thirty pictures or the audio’s going to loop weirdly, but also a much more meaningful little video montage. I mean, I knew it had to be, but it was something I’d never played with because with a lot of free software I don’t dig deep down into what can and cannot be done with aspect X of function Y.

I got this:

Do you want to build a snowmanWhich depending on your like or dislike of 4 & 5month olds is either cute, disgusting, or something in between.

Stylized photos were hit or miss, but it was nice to see the hits it produced. Things I probably wouldn’t have bothered looked pretty good and with a little tweaking were good.

The best of the best went into a shared album so they can be accessed by others, and the wife uploaded some of hers to the album as well as she’s a maintainer. All the pictures from two accounts that were worth anything are accessible to me and her, and accessible by anyone we give access to view, add, etc.

Anything where you could see a face was appropriately tagged and filed.

Eh, that’s it. Free software. Free storage. Ability to make slideshows and photo scrapbooks that aren’t boring as all getout.

Use it.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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