Google on Tuesday announced the Google Photos Partner Program, a new initiative that’s opening its flagship multimedia service to third-party developers and promises to help anyone who embraces it by providing them with tools to make their apps and services more versatile, efficient, and generally smarter. As is the case with similar programs launched by the company in the past, the Google Photos one revolves around a new Library API which allows developers to communicate with the app’s servers and rely on its framework to either start or perform actions.
The Mountain View, California-based tech giant says the possibilities enabled by the program are vast and can help developers create apps that allow users to identify photos, pull basic information from them such as the time and place when and where they were taken, organize albums, and allow for collaborative work via shared albums. While the vast majority of use cases that can be accomplished with Google’s latest solution aren’t groundbreaking, the main selling point of opting for the service is saving time and money given how developers won’t have to create anything from scratch and they also won’t have to maintain their own infrastructure and cloud storage meant to support their multimedia apps.
Additionally, Google’s industry-leading artificial intelligence that’s already deeply integrated into Google Photos is also on offer with the newly announced program, providing third-party software engineers with access to functionalities such as smart filters. Some basic user interface behaviors like deep-linking and thumbnailing are part of the package as well, primarily because Google wants all Google Photos-powered apps to behave consistently. The initiative is already live and developers interested in taking advantage of Google’s tools can express their interest in doing so by referring to the banner below. HP, Xero, NixPlay, TimeHop, and Legacy Republic are all already leveraging the Google Photos Library API, the Alphabet-owned company revealed today, having made the announcement at this year’s Google I/O which kicked off this morning in the firm’s home country.
Google Photos Partner Program