These notes are as much for my own benefit as for anybody else because I will forget how this stuff works after a few months.
Using Google Photos from Lightroom
Lightroom's "publish" feature is very useful to manage photos in the online world, and I published my photos on Flickr for several years using this method. However, I switched to using Google Photos once Flickr began to charge for storing more than 1,000 photos online. There were several "gotchas" to learn about Google Photos, and here are some of the things I learned while publishing the photos to my Travel page.
Use the "Photo Upload" Lightroom plugin from www.newpproducts.com to publish photos onto Google Photos. A free version of the plugin is available, but it's well worth the price to register the full version because it encourages the author to maintain the product. I just installed version 5.2.6 which fixed a bug and made the plugin much more useful.
Create collections in the Publish service to correspond with Albums in Google Photos. Version 5.2.6 will create the GP albums directly from LR, a capability that was missing from previous versions.
GP albums are private by default, but they can be made shareable. Sharing to individuals in your contact list is the obvious way for sharing, but you can open an album to public viewing by creating a link from the Sharing dialog. Anybody with the link can view the photos in the album
You cannot easily control the sort order for your list of albums. Apparently it is set by the most recent photo in each album, but does not work for me, so I don't try to control the sort order for the list of albums. I just use the search capability instead.
Once you have created links to albums, you could email those links to your friends and family but how would you inform them when you create new albums? Sending multiple links seems like a dumb idea. My solution was to use Google Sites to create a page of links to various photo albums, and then distribute the URL of that page.
You can control the sorting order within an album. Open the album, then click the three-dot icon in the top-right corner and choose "Edit Album". Next, click the "two-headed arrow" icon in the top-right corner to display a list of sorting options. I wanted to have Oldest First, but found it necessary to choose Newest First (to force a resort) and then choose Oldest First. Or drag-n-drop individual photos to create a custom sort order. Finally, click the checkmark in the top-left corner to lock the sort order.
Using Google Sites and Google Groups
A tagline at the bottom of every page says that it's "an effortless way to create beautiful sites". Well, I admit it's relatively simple, but it also has a few things that are not immediately obvious.
One set of permissions applies to a whole site. In other words, each page has identical permissions. That's why I created subordinate sites for each of the items on the home page because I needed to restrict who could view the info.
Create the subordinate sites, then create links to each site and assign a link to the button that opens the site.
Assign permissions to groups defined by Google Groups. This is much better than assigning permissions to individuals. Membership to the group is handled in a single location, which is a huge benefit for long-term maintenance.
Create an entry for the Group within Google Contacts so you can send an email message to the whole group with a single address.
Permissions to the web pages and recipients of bulk email are handled through a single list for each group.
Content such as Google Maps and Google Sheets have their own permissions, which fits into the same Google Groups philosophy as described above. However, some content can be "published" independently from Google Sheets and Google Docs, and this content cannot have permissions assigned to it. I did not want this "public-permission" content to be included from my main site, another reason for creating the subordinate sites for my community groups. It was the only way within Google Sites to control who can find and view these wide-open documents.
GMail storage space
Google issued constant warnings that my free space was almost gone and I should purchase additional storage space. I had no intention of spending money for online storage, so I needed to reduced the space used. Google limits each free account to 15 GB of space, divided between Drive, Photos, and Mail, but the online tools can only show the aggregate amount of space consumed in each of these categories. GMail was the biggest user, with about 8 GB of space consumed, but there is no ability to view the consumption in any more detail, so I didn't know where to trim the space. The most obvious tack was to delete old messages, but I did not want to lose the history from some old email threads. That set me on a path to figure a solution, which ended up needing several tools and techniques. This is a summary of my learnings.
Archive all email
MailStore Home (mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/) is an email archiving program that is free for home use. It copies all the email messages from a GMail account to local files on the computer so they can be safely deleted from GMail to reduce the online storage. It has a nice UI for searching and displaying the email messages. Just set a schedule (e.g., once every three months) to archive the emails periodically to ensure old messages are retained.
Delete old messages
Use GMail's search capability to find all messages older than a specified date, and then delete those messages. I will retain a minimum of two years of messages, and will do this task each year about January 1. Enter a search term like "before:01/01/2023" into the GMail Search box. Each message will have a selection checkbox, with a "select all" checkbox at the top. Check the "select all" to reveal a prompt that allows you to select ALL the messages, including those that are currently off-screen. Then delete the messages. Deleting the messages will merely move them into the Trash bin where they remain for 30 days before being permanently deleted.
Verify the space consumption
The GMail space consumption seemed unreasonable even after deleting the old messages, so I wanted to investigate further. Mozilla Thunderbird can link to a GMail account, and its ImportExportTools NG add-in can export message summaries to a CSV for further analysis. I used Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to show that sum of the individual messages exactly matched the space summary reported by the Google tools. The analysis also showed that the space was primarily consumed by message attachments. Messages without attachments comprised only a small portion of the total GMail space. The analysis also revealed that email replies duplicate all INLINE photos. For example, my GMail account contained some long message conversations with up to 50 messages, each containing 5 or 6 inline photos. Photos that are Attached to the message are not duplicated like inline photos, so they do not present the same problem.
Dealing with large and duplicated attachments
This lead to the question of how to retain the message body while deleting the duplicated attachments? Unattach (unattach.com) is a commercial website that allows selection of messages to download or delete attachments, or to downsize photos. After some experimentation, I decided to remove attachments from messages older than one year while retaining all attachments for last year. For example, "has:attachment larger:2500kb before:01/01/2024 label:travel" finds old Travel messages with attachments larger than 2.5 MB. This was combined with archiving and deleting older messages as described above.
Unattach has several paid tiers plus a free tier for processing up to 10 messages per day. The "pay as you go" tier uses a "small payments" website in which you pay an upfront fee against which each processed message is charged. The processing fee is only $0.01 USD per message, which typically applies to a small number of messages, so the cost is very reasonable.
Conversations and Labels
I found that Unattach may not work as expected when GMail is used in "Conversation" mode instead of "individual message" mode, especially with regard to Labels that are applied to the messages. The problem occurs because GMail does not explicitly assign labels to messages that are part of a conversation. Instead, GMail just incidentally displays such unlabelled messages alongside the other messages in the Conversation. This works fine for GMail itself, but it results in Unattach failing to find and process attachments that are "buried" within a Conversation. I manually searched for, and corrected, such messages before processing with Unattach, which was not the ideal solution. Unattach has an experimental "Threads" mode that may address this problem, but I haven't investigated. Instead, I configured GMail to use "individual message" mode to have parity with Unattach. I reverted to Conversation mode after finishing with Unattach.