Google Photos offers free, unlimited photo and video storage.
Of all the adjectives we might apply to Google, relentless increasingly feels the most apt. Google’s new photos app for iOS and Android has one truly standout new feature: It offers users suggestions to delete similar photos, potentially freeing up tons of space in the process, as Business Insider highlights.The online photo service announced Thursday is the latest example of Google’s desire to wrap its tentacles around virtually every part of people’s lives. The more you use the company’s offerings, the more you should like this trait, because something enormously powerful is taking shape—a collection of services that will make a lot of people’s daily lives easier to manage. A Google employee demoing the new product this week called it a “free-up space ability.” During the demo, the app reportedly suggested that he delete over three gigabytes of duplicate photos, illustrating how useful the feature could be to users looking to get more space on their mobile devices.
It’s a variation of the photo-management tool on Google Plus, a social networking service that has struggled to compete against Facebook since its 2011 debut. “There has been a renaissance in the thinking of what Google Plus is for,” said Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of photos and streams. Photos uploaded to Google Photos for free, which was taken from Google’s semi-defunct Google Plus social network, will be capped at 16 megapixels, while users can upload videos with resolution up to 1080p.
Google Plus will stick around, Horowitz said, although it is likely to focus on bringing together people who share common interests and hobbies instead of trying to connect friends and family. Horowitz predicted Google Photos will free people from the hassles of managing their picture and video libraries, much like Google’s Gmail service eased the burden of sifting through email boxes by offering larger storage capacities and a powerful search engine. Google Photos is importing technology from Google Plus to automatically sort images into common bundles tied together by a vacation destination, activity, or even species of animal. More than not, and despite incidents that should worry everyone, I trust the current management not to abuse the power it’s amassing as it collects, analyzes, and acts on all that information, but I have no doubt that some future management could laugh out loud at the quaint “Don’t be evil” mantra that the company, more than not, tried to follow in its early days. At Google I/O, the world got its first glimpse of Photos, the company’s new solution for managing the billions of images we collectively create every year.
It includes lightweight desktop software that will scour your Mac or PC for photos and videos new and old, uploading them to a private album in the cloud. It uses impressive machine learning to understand what’s in a photo, turning each picture into a series of keywords that are as searchable as Gmail. Google Photos, which is now available on the web, Android, and iOS, illustrates the falling price of storage and the growing power of Google data science. When it was introduced in 2012, Gundotra touted its unique privacy model, which asked users to group everyone they knew into “circles” of friends, family, co-workers, and so on. In return I’ll be able to look through them more efficiently, and Google will helpfully tag them, identify people in them, sort them in various ways, and in general give me better ways to manage them.
I’m deleting the app, now that I’ve tried it, on the principle that the greater ease of use isn’t worth the tradeoff, just as I don’t use Gmail for my primary email accounts. Amid that confusion, Google found that people were reluctant to store their photos on its servers. “We needed to go back to the first principles,” Sabharwal says. “We need to go back and start over. ” In the wake of Gundotra’s departure, the Photos team began to rethink its approach. It’s only fair to note that Google, unlike some tech companies, does pay more than lip service to giving users privacy and opt-out options (though not to the degree I believe it should).
Or he can zoom in and out of his collection by pinching — going from a month-by-month overview to more immersive grids of five or six photos at a time. How will Google—and the other tech companies that have made surveillance their business model—protect our privacy when they persuade manufacturers to support their Internet of Things ecosystems? Google and others have made a half-compelling case for our homes and cars being smarter, more adaptable, and more efficient, but the industry has done very little to persuade me that they won’t ultimately give spies, including themselves, a collection of windows into the most private parts of our lives. Tap Google’s familiar magnifying glass icon inside Photos, then, and that’s what you’ll see: there are the faces that appear most often in your photos, ranked by frequency.
Again, what’s essential to remember in our understandable bedazzlement over the improved tools and services is what they’re based on: feeding data to Google’s beyond-massive databases, which then sends back relevant and useful information. Sure, our phones are more powerful today than “supercomputers” were a generation ago, but they have ant brains compared with the one inside Google’s leviathan. And, finally, there’s access to your videos and to what Google calls “creations” — algorithmically generated animations, collages, photo albums, and video montages.
Of these features, face detection is the one that truly astounded me. (Apple’s Photos product offers face detection, too, but it requires much more set-up and hand-holding.) I’d never labeled a single photo in my collection, and yet Google had quickly assembled every photo I’d ever taken of my mom, dad, brother, and nephew, keeping them all straight even as they aged and changed. (It was particularly impressive in tracking my nephew as he transforms from an adorably chubby blob into a lean-and-mean three-year-old.) Google’s face detection is so powerful that I’m glad you have the option to disable it. It created an amazingly comprehensive photo album of my ex-boyfriend, and instantly reliving every holiday and road trip together just by tapping his face overwhelmed me. It’s magic, yes, but it can catch you off guard. (And it’s not perfect: a colleague who tried the service discovered that Google thought his wife was at least four different people.) Google has built some clever tools for sharing photos as well — drag to select a few shots, and with a couple clicks, you can create a web album for your friends to see. Although we’re taking more photos each year, we’re less precious with them than we’ve ever been, and resistant to thinking about what to actually do with our troves of snapshots. And its machine-learning features for organizing photos are sometimes superior to Google’s — I used it to find and delete old screenshots, for example, where a search for “screenshots” in Google Photos returns strange false positives. (Say what you will about this photo of my friend Joe smoking a cigar, but he’s no mere screenshot.) Google’s machine learning is still best at what I think of as the category level — search for “breakfast” and you’ll get a great selection of your breakfast photos; search for “waffles,” though, and you’ll get … a great selection of your breakfast photos.
But increasingly, I can’t help but notice that Flickr suffers from the same problem Google+ did — it wants to be a photo archive and a social network simultaneously, and the results are sometimes awkward. (Flickr has to place a padlock icon on every photo you upload just to remind you that it’s private.) Ultimately, both services are quite good — and miles ahead of the options we had even a few months ago. If you’ve ever run out of space on your phone because you took too many photos, you owe it to yourself to try a service like Google Photos or Flickr. (When you’re low on storage, the “Assistant” tab inside Google Photos’ mobile app offers to delete the pictures and videos on your phone, since they’ve all been backed up to the cloud.) Surveying cloud photo solutions earlier this year, I complained that none of the major players seemed to be trying all that hard. It’s tough to blame them: photo storage is a money-loser for most companies, Google included. (Unlike Flickr, Google Photos won’t have ads.) Some will look at Google Photos and point out where it has borrowed features from its competitors. I can get an estimate for this by taking the derivative of the total number of pictures with respect to time. (Here is a quick intro to derivatives.) If I put in 14.5 years (my numbering scheme says that right now I am in the 14.5th year) into this expression, it says that I am currently taking 5,604 pictures per year.