There’s a few apps that I use day in and day out and Google Photos is one of them. The funny thing is, that I’ve become so used to it in my life I’d never even think to write about it. Watching Google I/O it occurred to me that I barely hear people talking about how much they love Google Photos. Fearing people might not know about how great it is, here’s why you should be using it already.
Google Photos is Google’s fastest-growing product ever
What is Google Photos?
Google Photos first came onto the scene in 2015 and ever since it has been backing up billions of photographs. You can upload photos from your PC or smartphone and view them on both too. There are a few small caveats like 1080p images only with a max camera quality of 16MP but you get unlimited cloud storage for your images – which is pretty nice. Better still, you can set your smartphone to automatically backup everything to the cloud and even delete them from your phone to save memory. While this is all great, Google Photos goes far beyond simply backing up your photos.
Google Photos Assistant is amazing
Similar to Facebook, Google Photos will regularly invite you to remember this day over the past few years. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power of Google Photos Assistant. You’re just one tap away from creating super simple collages or adding a rake of filters. Even more impressive is how Google Photos uses AI to categorise your photos. This allows you to search for images over a massive timeframe matching a single piece of criteria, like every gadget you’ve ever taken a picture of:
Sharing photos
Probably one of the handiest features in Google Photos is the ability to share photos. You know the scene, you’ve been at a wedding at the weekend and everyone remembers you taking a geansai load of photos. All you need to do is lump the photos into an album and share that with whoever wants it. In return, they can even throw their snaps into the photo album too. Holy collaboration Batman. It’s all fine and dandy, but Google wasn’t happy leaving it there.
New Google Photo features
At Google I/O 2017, Google Photos had some of the best-received features.
Even smarter photo management
Photo sharing is handy for a rake of reasons, but if your parents and you snap your kids a lot, you’ll love this. Auto-sharing will recognise that you’re taking a picture of your kids and share it with your other half. This is the example Google provided at I/O but I’m sure there will be a load more uses for auto-sharing.
Photo Books
Google are absolutely and online business but they’re also commercial and love making a buck. Even so, Photo Books is sure to prove popular as it allows people to get a physical book filled with all their memories. You create this from within Google Photos and the app will even help you pick out the best snaps from your photo gallery.
Google Lens
I genuinely forgot Google Lens was a thing, even though it was one of my favourite things just a few years ago. Google Lens is a smart layer over the photographs you take which effectively scans anything like a human eye and processes. This is great for getting information on landmarks and the likes, but the real cool bit is snapping something like a phone number and being able to dial straight from the image.
Towards the end of the talk, machine learning was dropped a few times which basically means any time you use Google Photos and it’s not great, it will be better next time.
Google Photos is available now on Android and iOS.
