google chrome | Genealogy Gems

How to Use Google Chrome to Identify Old Photos for Genealogy

by Lisa Cooke | Aug 6, 2016 | 01 What's New, Google, Tech Tip Tuesday, Video

Learn how to use Google Chrome to identify old photos for genealogy and family history with this quick and easy-to-follow YouTube video!

How to Use Google Chrome to Identify Old Photos for Genealogy and Family History

Take 4 & 1/2 minutes to watch this video from our Genealogy Gems YouTube Channel. Your family history will be glad you did!

Like I said, there is more than one web-browser out there. Maybe you are a fan of Firefox or Internet Explorer, but I want you to head on over to Google Chrome to see this really slick feature.

Why Google Chrome Image Search Works

Google Chrome can do a lot of amazing tech things. By learning how to use Google Images, you may be able to finally identify some of those old pictures you have stuffed around the house! This technique works especially well for identifying locations, maps, and high profile buildings. Why does this work? Google has a stellar process for surfing the web (they call it “crawling”) and indexing everything it finds. This effort builds an incredible wealth of information, including information on all of the photos and images it comes across. Google Chrome, Google’s web-browser, can use this data to quickly match your image to other images Google has crawled on the web. Not only can it find the image, but it can bring along with it any other information (such as details about the image) that is attached to the image. And that can all mean big answers for you!

Take It Further: Identify Original Locations of Images and Photos

In my video, I share with you how I used Google Chrome to identify an old family postcard. In this blog post today, I want to share another tip for using Google Chrome to identify old photos. It never fails.

If you’re like me, you get pretty excited as you make family history discoveries. You might find yourself saving documents and pictures to your computer without accurately sourcing from whence they came. Six months later you find yourself wondering, “Where in the world did that image come from?”

Google Chrome can help. Just use the step-by-step instructions found in the video to upload the image to Google Images, and click the Search by Image button. Voila! Google finds the match and you uncover the website where the image came from! This saves valuable time (and I think we can all use more of that) and provides the information you need to properly cite your image source.

Sharing is Caring

Thanks for watching and reading, friends. Did you share this tech-tip video with your genie buddies? I hope you did. For more tech-tips and savvy tricks, be sure to subscribe to our Genealogy Gems YouTube Channel.

Free Videos: Genealogy Tech Tips with Lisa Louise Cooke

by Lisa Cooke | Jul 11, 2016 | 01 What's New, Google, Tech Tip Tuesday

We are delighted to share genealogy tech tips with you each week in these new videos. It’s Lisa’s way to share tips and tricks for your genealogy and your overall internet research success. You don’t have to be a lover of all things genealogy to love a good tech tip and we think you’ll agree!

Our Google guru, Lisa Louise Cooke, has been busy creating short, informative tech tip videos for you. You will find these videos first posted to our Facebook page. Be sure to always see what’s new by “liking” The Genealogy Gems Podcast page.

Additionally, you can comment, like, and share directly from Facebook. This is a great way to share these tips with your genealogy friends and society members.

You can also find our tech tip videos at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems YouTube channel. Subscribe by clicking Subscribe in the bottom left corner of any of our videos or at the top right corner of our YouTube channel homepage.

Each week, Lisa will share with you what’s new in the world of technology and especially those tips that will make you a better and more effective genealogist.

Lisa’s first video, Free Google E-Books for Genealogy and Family History, walks you through the steps of accessing free digital books from the comfort of your home. From county histories to family histories, Google e-books are a treasure trove of genealogical information. Using Google e-books helped me find several pictures of ancestors that I had never seen—and that was just the start.

We think you’ll also enjoy our most recent tech tip video entitled How to Use Google Chrome to Identify Old Photos and Images for Genealogy and Family History. Using Google Chrome for your internet browser can be an effective tool for identifying images that are more universally known. While this likely won’t be able to identify an unknown person in your ancestry, you may be able to figure out the location a postcard image was taken.

Join us each week as Lisa shares these great tips for genealogy and more! If you find the information helpful, why not share with your genie friends too!