Google Product Helping Blog

A year ago, we introduced Google Photos with one mission: To be a home for all your photos and videos, organized and brought to life, so that you can share and save what matters. Now 200 million of you are using Google Photos each month. We�ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You�ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices�it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We�ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 billion of those have been for ... selfies. To celebrate our first birthday, we�ve gathered a few of the team's favorite tips and updates we�ve made in the past year, so you can keep all that good stuff going... 1. To fly through Google Photos on the web at photos.google.com, press Shift-? to see a list of keyboard shortcuts. 2. Narrow down your search results by searching for more than one thing at a time. Search for two people: �Mom and Dad,� or a person and a place: �Mom Yosemite,� ...

This is the second of two posts spotlighting our Top Contributors. Read part one here . - Ed. If you�ve ever asked a question about a Google product in the Google Product Help Forums or on Twitter , chances are you�ve encountered a Top Contributor �passionate Google product experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge with their fellow users. We introduced you to two of the super users in this program yesterday , and now we�re shining a spotlight on a few more. If you�re interested in becoming a Top Contributor, start participating in a Google Product Forum or on social media , and let us know you�re interested . Leonika Sari says: I�m a developer and founder of the startup Reblood , which aims to awareness and promote blood donation in Indonesia. But in my downtime, I help people regain access to their Gmail accounts. Imagine not being able to access your Gmail or finding out your account was hijacked�it�s quite scary! I like helping people get back into their accounts so they can con...

This is the first of two posts spotlighting our Top Contributors. Read part two  here . - Ed. If you�ve ever asked a question about a Google product in the Google Product Help Forums or on Twitter , chances are you�ve encountered a Top Contributor �passionate Google product experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge with their fellow users. Last year, Top Contributors helped more than 55 million people with 30 different Google products, answering questions and providing tips. The super users in the Top Contributor program come from 60+ different countries. Their passion for our products and willingness to help others make them a community. To showcase the faces and stories behind this group of helpful users, we asked a few Top Contributors to share a bit about themselves. This is the first of two posts�come back tomorrow to learn more. Jo says: As a writer, editor, and all-around book enthusiast, I spend a lot of time using word-processing programs. I first discovered Google Docs ...

Last week thousands of developers joined us at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA, at Google I/O, our annual developer conference, for three days of talks, sandboxes, and some festival fun. Here�s a look at I/O beyond the keynote: 1. It�s not just for grown-ups. A day before Google I/O officially began, we hosted I/O Youth . Over the course of the day, 120 students from Bay Area-based schools engaged in four hands-on activities focused on storytelling, designing, and coding. They heard from inspiring speakers that bring creative solutions to their jobs like Brent Bushnell, CEO of the entertainment company Two Bit Circus , and Pavni Diwanji, who leads our Google-wide efforts to create a better experience for kids online. Check out 11-year-old Cindy Zhou�s coverage of I/O Youth for Time for Kids . 2. Machine learning is already making products smarter. As Sundar said during his keynote, machine learning and artificial intelligence are changing computing in incredible ways. One o...

This morning in our Mountain View, CA backyard, we kicked off Google I/O, our annual developer conference. Much has changed since our first developer event 10 years ago, and even more since Google started 17 years ago. Back then, there were 300 million people online, connecting through desktop machines; today that number is over 3 billion, with the majority using mobile devices as their primary way to get information, organize their day, get from point A to point B, and stay in touch. In a world in which the mobile phone has become the remote control for our daily lives, Google�s mission �to organize the world�s information and make it universally accessible and useful� is truer and more important than ever before. The Google assistant When we think of the Google search experience today�a rich panel of information on [Zika virus], or an alert telling you your flight is delayed�it�s striking to see how far things have come from the early days of 10 blue links. Many of these advances hav...

Whether it�s welcoming a new baby, celebrating the winning shot in overtime, or discovering the best taco stand ever�we all want to share these moments with friends and family the instant they happen. Most of the time, this means picking up our phones and sending a message or starting a call. Today we�re sharing a preview of two new apps that take a fresh look at how people connect. Allo, a smart messaging app Allo is a smart messaging app that makes your conversations easier and more expressive. It�s based on your phone number, so you can get in touch with anyone in your phonebook. And with deeply integrated machine learning, Allo has smart features to keep your conversations flowing and help you get things done. Emojis, stickers, Ink, and our Whisper Shout feature in Allo Allo has Smart Reply built in (similar to Inbox ), so you can respond to messages without typing a single word. Smart Reply learns over time and will show suggestions that are in your style. For example, it will le...

So much of the beauty and power of art lives in the details. You can only fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it. As you step back from the brush strokes, you wonder how it all comes together. At the Google Cultural Institute, we know that people love experiencing art in close detail. Millions of people spend time exploring our ultra-high resolution �gigapixel� images, inch by inch�spotting something new every time, like a hidden signature or the individual dabs of paint that give the impression of shimmering, turbulent waters. Zooming into these images is the closest thing to walking up to the real thing with a magnifying glass. This is why we�re so excited about our new Art Camera�a custom-built camera ready to travel around the world to bring people more of these ultra-high-resolution images than ever possible before. The Port of Rotterdam by Paul Signac, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen ...

Group sharing isn�t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging. Sharing things typically involves hopping between apps to copy and paste links. Group conversations often don�t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can�t easily get back to when you need them. We wanted to build a better group sharing experience, so we made a new app called Spaces that lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic. With Spaces, it�s simple to find and share articles, videos and images without leaving the app, since Google Search, YouTube, and Chrome come built in. When someone shares something new to a space, the conversational view lets you see what the group is talking about without missing a beat. And if you ever want to find something that was shared earlier�articles, videos, comments or even images�a quick search lets you pull it up in a snap. You can create a space with just one...

Whether it�s sharing photos, searching the web or translating languages, billions of requests are sent to �the cloud� every day. But few people think about how all this information flows through physical locations, called data centers. Because these buildings typically aren�t much to look at, people usually don�t�and rarely learn about the incredible structures and people inside who make so much of modern life possible. To begin to change that, we created the Data Center Mural Project : a partnership with artists to bring a bit of the magic from the inside of our data centers to the outside. We�re starting with two data center locations. In Mayes County, Oklahoma, digital artist Jenny Odell �s mural is made up of Google Maps satellite imagery. Her mural artwork focuses on types of infrastructure that enable the flow of goods, power and information�not unlike data centers themselves. Belgium local street artist Oli-B took inspiration from �the cloud� for his colorful mural on the outsi...

iPhone users�this one�s for you. Meet Gboard, a new app for your iPhone that lets you search and send information, GIFs, emojis and more, right from your keyboard. Say you�re texting with a friend about tomorrow�s lunch plans. They ask you for the address. Until now it�s worked like this: You leave your texting app. Open Search. Find the restaurant. Copy the address. Switch back to your texts. Paste the address into a message. And finally, hit send. Searching and sending stuff on your phone shouldn�t be that difficult. With Gboard, you can search and send all kinds of things�restaurant info, flight times, news articles�right from your keyboard. Anything you�d search on Google, you can search with Gboard. Results appear as cards with the key information front and center, such as the phone number, ratings and hours. With one tap, you can send it to your friend and you keep the conversation going. Search in Gboard You can search for more than just Google search results. Instead of scrolli...

Of the 500 million+ people who use Google Translate, more than 9 in 10 live outside the U.S. We've talked with thousands of you in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Thailand to learn what works and what doesn�t�and today we�re rolling out some big improvements. First, say hello to  Tap to Translate on Android. We know millions of you painstakingly copy-paste text between Google Translate and other apps. Now, you can just copy the text of a chat, comment, song lyric, etc. in whichever app you�re using, and a translation will pop up right there�no need to switch apps: Watch the video to learn more. Tap to Translate works for all 103 of Google Translate�s languages on any Android phone running Jellybean (4.2) and above. Next,  Offline Mode  now works on iOS, and joins Android in using small offline packages. We know that many of you found the previous packages too big to download on unreliable data connections or to keep on your phone�s limited storage. That�s why we shrunk t...

Back in February, we announced a new effort from Google.org focused on racial justice, including support for organizations working to end mass incarceration. This is a critical issue in the United States, which represents 5 percent of the world�s population, but 25 percent of the world�s prison population . And Blacks are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites �in fact, the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its Black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid . An often overlooked fact of mass incarceration is that many first-time, nonviolent offenders who receive prison sentences are parents. There are 2.7 million American children with a parent behind bars, and Black children are 7.5 times more likely to have a parent behind bars than their white counterparts. The experience of having a parent in prison is traumatizing to a child: a new study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that the incarceration of a parent can have as much impac...

Access to clean drinking water is a concern all over the world, but in the United States it�s often a foregone conclusion. That is not the case recently for the residents of Flint, Michigan, many of whom we now know have been exposed to lead in their tap water. It�s a crisis, one to which the American people readily responded by donating water and resources to help alleviate the immediate pain. But the problem won�t go away quickly, and understanding its extent is both challenging and an absolute necessity. Today, Google.org is providing $250,000 to partners in the Flint community to help, with a special focus on a technical solution for understanding and resolving the crisis for the long term. First, we�re making a $150,000 grant to the University of Michigan-Flint to enable the University of Michigan-Flint to develop a comprehensive data platform that will assist government and community leaders in making more informed decisions about the crisis and providing critical information to...