One thing that virtually everybody on Earth does these days is take photos. This is because everybody nowadays has a camera on them at all times, their smartphone camera. Long gone are the days of needing to purchase something like an expensive DSLR camera to be capable of taking great-looking photos. There is a side-effect of everybody taking pictures all the time though, everybody either has a surplus of photos, don’t keep backups of their photos or don’t have their photos organized in any fashion. The new Google Photos will take care of all of those things for you, automatically.
There are quite a few photo cloud backup services that will attempt to assist users in doing things such as organizing their photos, but they are usually lacking in one area or another. A service might offer great automatic sorting and organizing of photos, but then any decent amount of storage will cost you an arm and a leg. It’s situations like this that deter a lot of folks from putting all of their precious photos on a cloud service. Well, Google set out to change that with their new Photos app that they announced at Google I/O this year. This app allows users to just sit back and let Photos take care of everything automatically. Everything from organizing, beautifying, uploading, pretty much everything that you can think of, Google’s Photos app will do for you. As a matter of fact, let’s take a minute to discuss all of the great features that make Photos an amazing photo backup service.
Definitely the first thing worth mentioning about Google’s Photos app is something called Assistant. What Assistant does is it creates surprises for you using the photos that you take and upload. For example, when you take a quick cluster of photos Assistant will sometimes take those photos and create a .GIF image for you automatically. Assistant will also do things such as stitch together a panorama using photos that you take without you having to prompt it to do so. Of course, you can manually use Assistant to create these types of things if you desire.
Next up are the two most important features of the Photos app, organization, and search. You see, the Photos app has all of the mighty power of Google behind it, which means that search will naturally be really good within the app. Well, search definitely is great in the Photos app. When your photos are uploaded they also get scanned by Google’s accurate object recognition software, said software can detect things from basketballs to different types of dog breeds. You can even search for something such as, ‘football game in the snow’ and Photos will pull up any photos of football games being played in the snow for you instantly. But, if you don’t feel like searching for certain Photos you can just scroll through your photos within the app because they are organized pretty well. Photos are organized in two ways, date, and collections. When you take photos in a certain area all withing a certain amount of time, the Photos app will organize them into a collection. This is great for looking at photos from a certain trip because all of said photo will be organized into a single collection.
Last but certainly not least there is pricing, how much is this all going to cost you. The service itself is completely free, the storage is also completely free. That’s right, you can use the Photos app with unlimited cloud storage completely free although there are some small limitations that won’t affect most people. That free unlimited storage can consist of photos that are up to 16MP and videos that are up to 1080p. Again, this limitation won’t affect most people as most smartphone cameras don’t have a camera with more than 16MP. But, if your smartphone camera has a 20MP sensor or you are uploading your DSLR photos, can you still use the service? The answer is yes, but it will cost you a little. When you sign up for Photos you get 10GB of free high-quality storage, but you can also purchase more for really cheap. Just to show you how cheap it is, one of the options offers 100GB for $2 per month.