How to Download Auto Awesome Photos

Auto Awesome is one of the best features of Google+ Photos. It's a good reason to upload your photos to Google+ instead of choosing a different service: you get something in return. Auto Awesome photos and videos use your photos and videos to create something new. Some of them improve your photos, others are funny, while some of them would normally require professional software.

Just because they're so nice, I decided to backup my Auto Awesome. Here's how to download them:

1. open this page: https://plus.google.com/photos/search/%23AutoAwesome (or go to Google+ Photos and search for #AutoAwesome)

2. click "show all" below the first photos from that page

3. select the first photo: mouse over the photo and click the tick icon.

4. use your browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F or Command+F on a Mac) and search for from your circles. That's a different section which shows Auto Awesome photos from your circles and that's where your Auto Awesome gallery ends.

5. Shift+click the last photo above the "From your circles" section and you should see a message like "230 selected".

6. click "more" in the navigation bar and select "download".

7. You'll get a Photos.zip archive with both photos and videos. The filename includes the type of AutoAwesome effect. The archive should also include the "year in review" video titled 2013-MOVIE.m4v.

Google Contacts Shortcut

If you want to quickly open Gmail's address book, you can bookmark google.com/contacts or type the URL in the address bar. Another option is to add a shortcut to the standalone Google Contacts page in Google's app launcher:

1. go to google.com/contacts and sign in

2. click the app launcher icon

3. click "add a shortcut" next to the Contacts icon

4. you can move the icon using drag and drop

You can add similar shortcuts for other Google services: Google Keep, Google Sites, Google Groups, Google Play Music, Webmaster Tools, Patent Search, Google Voice.

Go Back to a Specific Date in Google Web History

For some reason, Google Web History no longer has a way to navigate to a certain date, at least not from the UI. Fortunately, you can change a URL parameter and go to a certain date. Here's how to do that:

1. use the Unix epoch time converter. Scroll to the "Convert date to epoch timestamp" section, enter the date, enter 0 for hours, minutes and seconds and then click "Convert". You'll get a number like 1305072000. This is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1st 1970.

Copy the value you've obtained and add six zeros to convert the number from seconds to microseconds. For example, 1305072000 becomes 1305072000000000 (this corresponds to May 10, 2011).

2. go to https://history.google.com/history/lookup?st=web (you may need to sign in)

3. add the following parameters to the Google Web History URL:

&lts=MICROSECONDS&fts=MICROSECONDS

You'll need to replace MICROSECONDS with the value you've obtained previously. For example:

&lts=1305072000000000&fts=1305072000000000

Search Tips for Chrome's App Launcher

Chrome's app launcher has an interesting way to match results. Let's say you want to open Google Play Music. You can search for google play music, play music or you can just type the the first letter from each word and search for gpm. It also works if you type the first letters from the first word, followed by the first letters from the second word and so on. For example, you can also search for goplm, gplam, gmu.

Another example: launch Mahjong Solitaire by searching for ms.

{ via François Beaufort. }

Chrome Bandwidth Stats

Chrome has an internal page that shows the amount of data transferred this session and the total amount of data transferred ever since this feature was added or you first used Chrome. Just open a new tab, paste this in the address bar: chrome://net-internals/#bandwidth and then press Enter.

Check the Original (KB) row of the table, where you can find bandwidth consumption data in kilobytes. For example, I used 40,024.5 KB since launching Chrome. The Savings values are only useful in the mobile Chrome for Android and iOS if the data saving proxy is enabled.

Savings = Original - Received