The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

My sister and brother-in-law are in town from Milwaukee. So were two of their kids, their spouses and four children¹. They’re renting a house near Disneyland for the week. That’s ten plus the three of us.

Because Jess and fam were leaving early, much of the ‘big’ stuff was shotgunned into the first few days. By yesterday the remaining visitors were in tail drag mode. What good is vacation if you come home worn out?

Exhibit A: Jessie and Evan’s kids at Milwaukee Airport. See what I mean?

One thing that’s changed on family vacations is the number of photos taken. Everyone totes a smartphone picture taking machine–probably the best camera they’ve ever owned. On this trip five of us took the bulk of the shots.

Software automatically backs up my photos to Google. I clicked a few buttons and put the vaca photos in their own album then shared a link with everyone. Before long nearly everyone was putting their photos and videos in the album.

Nearly everyone! Will this be enough to spark the remaining two?

Google automatically adds tags with the shooter’s name then organizes everything. You can sort by chronological order or just ask for shots with a specific person seen (this is the love part of my love/hate relationship with facial recognition). The photos remain private only to those with the very long and unguessable link.

Every day my dad gets to look and see what’s going on. He likes this a lot. We like that too.

There are other places to do albums like we’ve done, but Google is ubiquitous (all of us have Gmail accounts), are the database kings and have a very good track record on security.

Having this album makes all our pictures a whole lot better. This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

And now, fireworks.

¹ – Alas, work has taken my niece Jessie and her family back to Wisconsin. Boo for adult obligations.