Google Photos: One smart photo organizer, with lots of polish

Image: Mashable, Pete Pachal

It's finally happened: Google's excellent photos service is now fully separate from Google+ and is a standalone app in its own right. And it's really impressive.

The basics: Google announced a Google Photos app for Android, iOS and the web. Formerly a Google+ service, it's been upgraded with a bunch of new features, the most notable being all users get unlimited free storage for photos and videos. That is, photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution. Exceed that and you have to start paying (though Google gives 15GB free).

The thrust of the new Photos, as described by product lead Bradley Horowitz, is to provide a "private secure, safe place where all of my memories can live without compromise or agenda."

From the "agenda" part, Google wants to make clear this isn't Gmail: the Photos app isn't scanning your photos to sell you things via ads (although it is scanning them for other reasons). Others, including Apple, Dropbox and Lyve, are trying to solve the immensely difficult problem of photo management, but Google thinks it has the best approach, and from a look at the new app, they might be right.

From the first time you open the app, you can see why Google took so long to debut Photos: The amount of polish on the experience is palpable. The introductory tutorial is thorough but not intrusive, connecting with your existing Google accounts is seamless, and the design incorporates Android's Material language but is also undeniably iOS.

Admittedly, Google had a leg up since it already created big chunks of the service for Google+, but this isn't just a spin-off: It has many new tools and implements good use of swiping gestures: You don't often have to retreat to the "hamburger" in the top-left corner to get to a specific tool.

Once you give the app access to your photos, it'll automatically back up all your photos and videos. During setup you can specify whether you want the generous "free" option or to back up everything at full resolution.

But Photos isn't just some dumb bottomless bucket of bits in the cloud — once the app has your pics, the Google magic kicks in: The service looks at geolocation and other photo metadata (like all services), but it can also recognize landmarks, faces, animal types, venues (e.g. nightclubs) and organize your photos accordingly.

You can see all this organizational power by tapping the search icon. When I called it up, I saw the faces of the people I photograph the most (correctly, my wife and kids were were put first), the places I've been, and then "things" I take a lot of pics of, which includes cars, skylines and food, apparently.

As I explored the various categories, it was clear Google knew what it was talking about. There weren't many incorrectly categorized photos — a flower cookie was put in "flowers" and it once thought a random bald guy was former Mashable staffer Evan Engel, but otherwise it did really well.

Google Photos automatically organizes your photos in several ways (left), and it still incorporates features of Google+ (right).


Image: Google

One of my favorite features of HTC's phones is the way they build highlight videos, loosely called Zoes. A Zoe takes a series of still photos and video clips and puts them together with some royalty-free music and a little filtering.

Photos does the same thing, though it eschews any kind of fancy name for the highlight videos, just calling them "movies." Like Zoe, Photos will automatically generate movies for you around the events you capture (living in the cloud, so they don't take up space), and you can create them on your own, too, via the Assistant screen, which is just a left-swipe away. You can select up to 50 photos and videos to be part of the video, and here's where one of the best features of Google Photos comes into play.

When selecting files to use for your movie, you don't need to tap each and every file you want to use. Instead, just tap and drag your finger across all the pics you want to use. Boom, the little blue check mark spreads to every photo you swipe across.

This select gesture works no matter what you're doing, be it sharing, deleting or creating. It's a genius feature, and I hope it gets imitated by others soon — including Apple.

Another brilliant feature Google has incorporated into Photos is Instant Delete. Once your phone begins to run out of space, the app will suggest deleting all the photos stored locally that have already been stored to the cloud, potentially freeing up gigabytes of data. It's another great idea, and one that iOS would do well to imitate. And if you're not backing up at full resolution, don't worry — photos won't get rid of anything that's not fully backed up.

At the same time, you still get all the cool photos tools that Google+ was known for — it will still automatically generate GIFs and "auto-awesome" versions of photos. Your Stories will still be there, too. One caveat, though: Photos no longer automatically saves stories or highlight videos; instead, it suggests them in the Assistant, but it's up to you to keep them.

Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information. It's clear how that drives its core search products, but Google Photos is now one of the strongest examples of what it can achieve when it applies that expertise to the individual. It's not a panacea — it doesn't, say, reach across to other services like iCloud or Flickr to bring in all your photos on other services — but it's a huge step forward from where we are now.

In an era where storage is cheap and cameras are ubiquitous, out-of-control photo collections have become one of the biggest first-world problems. With Google Photos, there's now a first-class solution.