At the company’s most recent I/O conference, Google unveiled a host of new products including a photo management service called Google Photos. The application is designed to be your one-stop location for all of your photo needs, including online storage, organizing your library, and sharing files with others, and shows that the California-based company isn’t slowing down when it comes to housing the world’s data.
Unlimited Data
Perhaps the biggest announcement was that Google is offering unlimited storage of images and videos for free. This includes photos up to 16 MP in quality and movies with a resolution up to 1080p. If you need to store files that are larger than this, they’ll start to eat into your Google Drive storage plan instead. While this will be more than enough for the majority of users, those looking to make larger prints may need a higher fidelity.
The service, which is available for the web as well as mobile platforms Android and iOS, compares favorably to rival platforms from Apple and Microsoft, who offer just 5 GB and 15 GB of free data allowance to users.
More Than Just Storage
Google Photos isn’t simply a storage platform though. The company has also introduced features such as Assistant as well as new ways to organize your photo library. Assistant acts as a sort of notification center for your photos. From here, you’ll be able to find out information such as if your latest photos are being backed up or if your phone needs to be charged before it can start uploading your files to the servers.
One of the most interesting things about the service’s unveiling was how Google aims to make organizing our photos much easier. Your images will be clustered into “stories’ or “collections” of similar pictures and you’ll be able to search for items, people, or locations through text. In a feature similar to Apple’s Faces, where you tag a person by name to see other images containing the person, Google Photos use facial recognition software to group individuals together without the need to painstakingly apply metadata to each file
As more of our information becomes a part of the cloud, many of us will undoubtedly question the security these kinds of services offer. How do you feel about trusting so much of your data to large companies? Let us know what you think in the comments below.