Why Google Photos is the Only Photo Service You Need

One of the highlight features that came out of Google’s I/O a couple of weeks ago was the introduction, or should we say separation, of Google Photos their new do-it-all, all-in-one photo service. Despite the updates of Android and announcement of some other interesting features, Google Photos stood out for a lot of people because it offered by far the easiest and best way to get all your photos on your iOS devices, Android devices and computer…without doing a whole lot of work. Really, the one work you have to do is download the application on the relevant devices.

But what makes Google Photos so amazing? What differs it from the other services out there such as Flickr or DropBox or even Facebook? What makes Google Photos, without a doubt, the most logical place for most people who enjoy taking to store their photos? We’re about to tell you now…

It Is Free and Unlimited

Google Photos is free. That’s already a great thing to hear. But what if we then told you that that’s for an unlimited amount of image uploads too. You aren’t going to get a free 15gb or something and then have to pay if you want more storage. No, you ca have as many of your pictures in the cloud as you want for absolutely nothing at all.

There’s one minor flaw to this and that’s that you are limited to 16mp photos and 1080p video, if the images are shot higher in this, they’ll simply be scaled down. However, the most popular smartphones in the world right now offer less than 16mp camera (excluding the HTC One M9, but the camera on that hasn’t got a great reputation) so you should be fine.

Search Is Like Magic

Once you’ve got the application downloaded and your images uploaded, there is a really incredible search feature that will have you amazed. With a simple tap of the button, you’re brought to a page where you can instantly select a group of images by people, place or things. The facial recognition software is incredible, it can not only recognise the same person in multiple photos but can also recognise them throughout time, all the way back to children (if you have photos that old of them.) In addition, the things recognition is great, allowing you to select “boats” or “planes” or “cups” and it will bring you back photos of such.

However, it gets really clever when you want to enter your own personalised search query. Yes, you can search for something such as “blue” for images with the colour blue in or “tree” with images of trees in. But it’s when you begin to connect words together that it gets intelligent. For example “snow in Paris”, it will show you images of that day that it snowed whilst you were in Paris. Or “golden dog” it will show you the picture of your Golden Labrador and not pictures of your friends’ Miniature Husky. Intelligent stuff that is well worth playing around with.

Auto-Awesome

Something that a lot of people already liked about the Photos in Google+ was the auto-awesome feature that made uploading your photos feel a little bit more worthwhile. Basically, auto-awesome does what it says on the tin. It will stitch, create and animate your images for you to create great memories.

Google Photos will bring your memories to life with Collages of similar photos from a similar venue or will create an animation of a burst mode set of photos of your friend jumping in the pool. Google Photos even creates incredible stories for you to enjoy. Stories cleverly work out if you’ve travelled away from your usual destination of home and create you a timeline of your day out or weekend away, along with dates, pointers on the maps, names and more. It even picks the best photos so on that Thursday night when you were on the table, it shows you the picture of you before you fell off, still looking glamorous and able to control your drink.

Or Do It Manually

Without a doubt, having these sort of incredible creations made for you can be beautiful, but a lot of people these days just want to create a collage and edit their photos themselves. This is also very possible with Google Photos and allows for great sharing options. For example you can use select a few photos and create a collage or put them into a separate album. You also have some basic editing features such as an auto-setting and some filters and basic editing choices. You can then go ahead and share these photos either as images themselves (which downloads the image first and then shares to the platform) or as a link to the Google Photos link which works far better for stories and animations and such that may not format well on other services.

And Finally… It’s Really Fast

Google Photos is quick! When you open up the application, within seconds your tiles have loaded (remember this is all from the cloud) and once an image is tapped, give it  a few more seconds to load the image in it’s high-quality glory. It’s a great experience for showing your images to others and looking through your photos. We are also almost certain that Google with be working effortlessly to make these processes almost instant, instant tile loading and instant rendering of the image to it’s highest quality for your viewing pleasure.