Of the different product announcements from last week’s Google I/O developer’s conference, many people were most excited about Google Photos. Compared to other great announcements like offline navigation using Google Maps and Brillo, an operating system for the Internet of Things, Google Photos garnered a lot of attention.
This cross platform service is designed to work in a browser but also Android and iOS. A huge benefit of using Google Photos is that rather than being something completely new, it helps people organize photo collections similar to what they currently do.
Because today’s phone cameras and video recorders are of such high quality, many people prefer them to more traditional devices. In 2006 when the smartphone revolution began, an average person took just 177 photos annually but as of this year at 322, the number has almost doubled. With so many stored photos, trying to locate one in particular can be a challenge.
Google Photos is an online storage service for still images and video recordings with unlimited storage. Photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution are stored and while larger images and videos can also be stored this takes up Google Drive storage.
Opposed to being just a cloud storage like OneDrive or Dropbox, Google Photos is designed with outstanding technology that makes it easier to manage a full photo collection. With this platform, Google automatically sorts, organizes, renames, and tags photos as they are being uploaded and processed.
When searching for something in particular using Google Photos, all an individual needs to do is scroll through a collection around the timeframe when the photo or video was taken. However, photos and videos can also be searched using keyword specifically suggested. Google has the ability to determine when and where photos and videos were taken thanks to geotagging but it also performs levels of face and pattern recognition.
Although Google Photos will not automatically group photos according to buckets of keywords, it will search using virtually any term you have in mind. Compared to anything else on the market used for storing photos and videos, Google Photos is truly in a league of its own. Because of pattern and face recognition, the need to organize photos manually is eliminated.
