Big things are happening. Dropbox? iCloud? Flickr? Eeer One Drive? Have a seat. Google Photos, a spinoff of the Google+ Photos feature baked into Google’s own not-so-trendy social network, will offer all users free unlimited storage for their photos and videos. There’s a catch though. One that won’t bother most casual users: the photos that can be uploaded should not be more than 16 megapixels while the videos should have a resolution not higher than full HD (1080p).
For the pros out there who such a limitation will really matter, the new Google Photos also integrates with Google Drive so it can take advantage of your Drive storage to keep your huge RAW image files intact.
Google Photos is not all about the free storage. That may be the best thing alongside the fact that you finally can access a decent service to save all your photos without having to sign up for yet another social network. Google is interested in making the application and the service in general a user’s one stop shop for all their image sharing needs. It’ll now be as easy as a tap on the share button to fetch an image on Photos and directly share it with your social circles not just on Google+ but on other platforms like Twitter as well.
Google Photos also analyses the images you store for proper organization. It will not just group them sequentially according to the specific calendar dates but also detect other details like the location and the contents of the photo and group them so as to be able to bring them up quickly and easily when you search for them. It’ll also automatically identify any individuals in the images without the need for tagging.
Other features like Auto Awesome that have been available on Photos while it was still tied to Google+ remain present but have been beefed up as well.
Google Photos is now live on the Google Play Store for Android device users, on the iTunes store for iOS device users and also available on the web at photos.google.com. There was no mention of Windows during the entire keynote so don’t expect an app to pop up in the Windows Store any time soon.
