Google Photos is almost three years old. It was unveiled in May 2015 after being spun out from Google’s failed social network, Google+. Thankfully, Google Photos has fared much better than its parent. Last May Google announced Photos had over half a billion users and those users were uploading 1.2 billion photos A DAY. Google Photos is heavily tied into the Android ecosystem. It works in much the same way as Apple’s Photos app works: by automatically uploading all the pictures you take on your smartphone and storing them online for safe keeping.

Google Photos is a great solution for the non-pro’s out there. It makes storage and organization of your pics easy, and while it’s not a Photoshop replacement, it’s got some simple and useful editing tools. But beyond simple editing and organizing, there are some hidden features in Google Photos that many users don’t know about. Here are some of our favorites.

Google Photos: Create Animated GIFs

One of the coolest hidden features of Google Photos is the ability to turn your pictures into animated GIF images. To do this is really easy and straightforward:

1. In Google Photos, click the Assistant button in the sidebar.
2. Under the Create New heading, click the blue Animation button.
3. On the Create Animation screen that pops up, choose between 2 and 50 photos you want to turn into a single GIF. 
4. Once your photos are selected, click the Create button in the upper-right corner.
5. Your animation will now be created and if you click the More Options button you’ll be able to download it as a GIF to your computer.

Google Photos: Turn Your Photos Into A Collage

Google Photos also gives you the ability to merge multiple pictures into a single collage. This will join them all together in a single image. It’s quite a cool tool as you can then use this single image of multiple photos and share it to social media sites like Instagram. To create a collage:

1. In Google Photos, click the Assistant button in the sidebar.
2. Under the Create New heading, click the purple Collage button.
3. On the Create Collage screen that pops up, choose between 2 and 9 photos you want to turn into a collage. 
4. Once your photos are selected, click the Create button in the upper-right corner.
5. Your college will now be created and if you click the More Options button you’ll be able to download it as an image file to your computer.

Google Photos: Create A Slideshow

Another out of the way–but an extremely useful feature–of Google Photos is the ability to turn any Google Photos folder or album into a slideshow. It’s deceptively simple how easy it is to do this, which is why so many people look right over it. To create a slideshow in Google Photos:

1. In Google Photos, click the Albums button in the sidebar.
2. In the album, in the upper-right corner click the More Options button.
3. In the drop-down menu that appears, click the Slideshow button.
4. The slideshow will automatically begin playing on your screen. Use the toolbar in the lower left-hand corner to pause it or skip forwards or backwards in the slideshow.

Google Photos: Search For Almost Anything

Many people organize their Google Photos into albums so it’s easier for them to search for the pictures they are looking for later. But did you know there’s a much easier way to find the specific photo you want? Google is a search company after all, and they’ve used their expertise to build powerful image and object search capabilities into Google Photos. If you’re looking for images with a birthday cake in them, you simply need to type “birthday cake” into the Google Photos search bar at the top of the Google Photos homepage. This works for thousands of objects and events. It’s actually quite mind-blowing how well this kind of search works.

Google Photos: Quickly Download All Your Photos

While it’s nice to have all our photos backed up online, you may come to a time when you want to download all your Google Photos so you can save them locally, or just remove all your pics from Google’s servers altogether. Luckily, Google makes it very easy to download all of your pics. Here’s how:

1. Go to Google’s Takeout page at https://takeout.google.com. On this page, you can download all your Google data, but for our purposes, we just want to download all your pics. So…
2. Click the Select None button to deselect all your Google data.
3. Now scroll down until you see Google Photos in the list and click the button so the slider is activated.
4. Make sure “All photo albums” are selected.
5. Scroll down and click Next.
6. On the next screen choose the file type you want to download your pics in and your delivery method. 
7. Click Create Archive and you’ll be notified when your pics are ready for download.