Chromebooks (1 Viewer)

Hi I am hoping someone on here could help. My old laptop finally died on me (I had it for over a decade so no surprises). I replaced it with an Asus Chromebook (32gb hard drive, 4gb ram). I just want to use it essentially for temporary storage of my photos (I took about 2000 on a recent trip to Morocco and a few videos), for basic editing and then transferring the images to my two external hard drives. I also want to use it for a bit of surfing but nothing else really.

Part of my problem is that I am not familiar with the Google OS having used Windows for a long time. I’m not sure if the machine is capable of doing what I want it to do and I spent a long time yesterday on the phone to various call centres of John Lewis, Asus and Google. I am at the point where I think some of my photos are on google drive, some are on google photos and some are on the external hard drives. I need to consolidate them. I could do with a tutorial really. Does anyone have any advice?

I have a Chromebook. Originally they were purely intended for surfing, and the file manager you see on your machine is just Google drive. I think you can make google drive files and folders available offline, in which case you could access them when not on the internet.
But you have to be careful here that you don't end up with two versions of the same file etc. I don't like it personally.

What I would suggest, is you go into the settings(bottom right of screen, click the time or battery icon)
scroll down the settings and if there are options for "google play store" and "Linux (Beta)" then select these and install them. The Linux one takes a few minutes.

Then come back, and we can go from there.

(The play store lets you install android apps, which is useful)
(The Linux option, gives you a "linux PC" within the chromebook, which you can also install software like Gimp for editting photos, and I find it useful in that it gives me a disk space to manage files offline without using google drive)

Pitta Patter said:

Hi I am hoping someone on here could help. My old laptop finally died on me (I had it for over a decade so no surprises). I replaced it with an Asus Chromebook (32gb hard drive, 4gb ram). I just want to use it essentially for temporary storage of my photos (I took about 2000 on a recent trip to Morocco and a few videos), for basic editing and then transferring the images to my two external hard drives. I also want to use it for a bit of surfing but nothing else really.

Part of my problem is that I am not familiar with the Google OS having used Windows for a long time. I’m not sure if the machine is capable of doing what I want it to do and I spent a long time yesterday on the phone to various call centres of John Lewis, Asus and Google. I am at the point where I think some of my photos are on google drive, some are on google photos and some are on the external hard drives. I need to consolidate them. I could do with a tutorial really. Does anyone have any advice?

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Having a Chromebook is similar to having an Android phone at some point. They are actually the same. By the way, do you have one? If so then you'll figure it all out in a moment. Getting Android apps on your Chromebook is extra easy and as for the photo management, I would suggest this app or just use Google Drive built-in tools.

Hi Jay,
there wasn't any interest subsequently for this query.
Having used Chromebook further, I wouldn't recommend it for physical storage. The Linux partition is fine for temporary use, and access to GIMP etc. but quite volatile, during system updates, with a risk of losing data.

Chromebook is best used as a quick an easy route to your cloud storage, IMHO.
Good for processing data, via Linux or Androiud apps, then returning the data back into the cloud.