Organizing the flood of photos and videos we all have is the central challenge of today’s photos apps.
Director of Photos for Google, Anil Sabharwal, took the stage Thursday morning at the annual I/O conference to detail the company’s new offering that aims to solve this problem: Google Photos.
While initial screenshots on stage looked quite a bit like Apple’s own Photos app, the functionality of Google Photos uses machine learning and algorithms to create what may be turn out to be the most useful way to store and share your photos.
Available sometime Thursday on Android and iOS, Google Photos aims to do three things: provide a home for all your photos and videos, organize and bring your important moments to life, and make it easy to share and save what matters to you.
Not only will Google Photos let you backup and store unlimited high-quality photos and videos for no cost (up to 15G), but they’ll even keep the original high-resolution files for you, up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p for videos. You can also opt to just keep compressed files that will still look good in print but take up less space.
The killer feature here, though, is the deep intelligence in the Google Photos system.
In the brief time Sabharwal had on stage, he showed off finding photos of his recently graduated (from pre-school) daughter, all the way back to her birth. It’s able to track specific people in your photos as far back as you have photos of those folks. That’s pretty amazing.
Photos will organize your files so you can find objects, people, locations and more when you need to. No more scrolling down massive lists of thumbnails trying to find that one photo you remember taking last year.
Google Photos also goes a quite a bit beyond Apple’s offering with its automatic editing features, as well, letting you tap and drag across several photos at once, then creating a movie, collage, or animated gif in seconds.
Ultimately, Google Photos sounds like a fantastic leap forward in organizing, storing, and sharing the important images and videos we all capture on a daily basis. Here’s hoping that these will also stay private and only available to us and trusted friends.
