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Last week, Google separated its photo backup service Google Photos from its unpopular social network Google+ and revamped it with new features. The company also announced that it would provide users with unlimited photo and video storage for the moment.
The move is very similar to the one in 2004, when the web search giant rolled out Gmail. Back then Google offered one gigabyte of free storage when other services offered only several megabytes.
Gmail was so popular that invitations to the new web-based e-mail service sold like hot cupcakes on eBay. As of now, Gmail has 900 million users worldwide.
And the company promised that Google Photos would revolutionize the way we store and organize our photos just like Gmail did with our e-mal messages more than a decade ago.
Additionally, just like in Gmail’s case, Google Photos doesn’t put all bets on storage space. It also tries to lure users with smart and unique features. Google’s photo and video storage service heavily relies on artificial intelligence technology and image recognition software to make your work of organizing your albums a lot more easy.
For instance, it can recognize a face in a group of people and match it with other photos of that person. By using image recognition software, Google Photos can automatically organize photos under three sections called People, Places and Things.
The photos depicting places are sorted by their geotags. If those tags aren’t available, the service tries to estimate the location by taking into account notorious landmarks such as the Big Ben in London.
So, the service doesn’t require you to manually sort pictures or tag them, and you can use keywords to find what you are looking for just like on Google’s famous search engine.
Also, Google photos can easily create GIFS and albums from the uploaded photos.
The new service can be accessed both from iOS and Android mobile devices, as well from Mac and Windows desktops. The photos are compressed but users hadn’t reported a loss in image quality.
Additionally, any new photo or video you upload into the cloud would be synced among all devices.
Some users that had already tested the service hailed it as the best photo backup service on the market; even better than cloud-based storage services offered by Microsoft, Dropbox or Amazon.
Google Photos won’t require a Google+ membership anymore. You can now upload and share pictures outside the company’s social network. But the photos will remain private until you tweak some setting to either make them public or share them with friends alone, Google said.
You can also share images stored on Google Photos on other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook or you can send a link of a photo to a friend, which can be accessed even though your friend may not have a Google Photos account.
Image Source: Tech Crunch
