Google Photos: the photo app to rule them all

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If you’re an Android user who takes a lot of photos, you’ll want to pay attention. Google just redesigned its photo app and there are some pretty significant changes.

Photos provides a new way to organize your memories, it’s now able to organize by People, Places, or Things. You can pick a specific person, location, or object and it will search through all your photos for that selection. While it isn’t perfect, it is pretty amazing how accurate it is. I tried to fool it by performing a search for Christmas trees, but was immediately provided with dozens of photos containing Christmas trees.

Additionally, Google will provide unlimited photo and video storage free of charge. There is a catch, photos must be 16MP or less and videos 1080p or less. If you’re capturing these moments with your phone this shouldn’t be an issue; however, if your photos or videos are too large, they will count against your Google Drive storage limit.

For more information and to discover what else has changed, check out Google’s blog post.  

2 thoughts on “Google Photos: the photo app to rule them all”




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  2. Just understand what the trade off is when you use this service. From the EULA:

    When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

    This license continues even if you stop using our Services.

    Maybe not a big deal for some folks – but just remember Google services are never “free”.

    1. That’s true, but other solutions (from Apple) don’t even offer the ability to search your photos for people or things, even if you’d pay for their cloud service.

      It would be nice if there were face recognition built into the ios photos app so that you only have to tag 2 or 3 photos of a person and photos would comb through the rest of the camera roll and appropriately tag the right person.

      Does Android has this? funny picasa has this since quite a long time but haven’t seen this on a phone yet, where it would even make more sense since most people take pictures with their phones.

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