Gadgetory

our smartphones have become the best cameras that most of us have so we're taking more photos and videos than we ever have before this creates a challenge managing all those photos and videos like when I finish shooting this video what am I supposed to do with it well there are a lot of services out there that are supposed to help you handle this problem but frankly they aren't very good one of the best has actually been Google's which had offered through Google Plus the problem there was that most of us didn't want to use Google Plus storing your life's memories inside a social network just felt kind of weird well Google is announcing their new solution to this problem they're calling it simply photos and I have to say maybe the photo management solution that I've been waiting for billions of photos are taken every single day the problem is we thought that taking all these photos and videos would mean that we could relive these moments later and it turns out it's actually a lot harder right the sheer volume of this is made it near impossible we needed to go back to first principles and look at this and really understand the problem space and rethink and rebuild from the ground up so the Google Plus version of photos is dead and in its place comes the new Google Photos a total solution for managing the archive of all the pictures you've ever taken that means an uploader for your Mac and Windows PCs and new apps for iOS and Android and starting today Google will start storing for free nearly identical versions of the photos that you're uploading downscaling them slightly in exchange for giving you unlimited uploads and in our tests most of the photos really do look almost the same as their original version particularly when you're just browsing them on your phone the best way that I like to think about it is you know drawing the comparison and music this is like us saying we're gonna store all your CDs is mp3s unlimited for free and I think that's pretty compelling for a lot of people who want to be able to maintain these memories and be able to do so now if you're the type of person who wants a story original down to the last byte we still offer 15 gigabytes for free shared across your Google services and one terabyte you can buy for example for $10 a month but this really unlocks for everyone to be able to have their memories their entire life backed up so an online photo management service needs to do more than just store your photos it should also help you enjoy them and that means finding things so here's where the power of Google search comes in Google is using all of its machine learning technology to help understand what's in your photos even if you've never tagged them it recognizes famous landmarks it knows what a boat looks like it knows what a whale looks like all you have to do is tap in key words and Google will find it inside your photos it creates a whole new way of looking through your photo archive and it's something I think people are really going to enjoy we have this really great technology and we try to decide like how should we surface this what's the best way that users are going to really even understand how this would work and what we found is that people describe photos in basically four different categories one is who's in the photo two is where was the photo taken three is what is in the photo is it a dog is it a hat whatever it may be and then four is what is the type of photo is it a panorama is it a video so you just tap that blue search disk and what you'll find here is your entire life of photos automatically organized into these little categories so I have all my people all the important places in my life so the place I live the place my girlfriend's family lives the place we go in Hawaii my hometown in Garland Texas we have all the things that are interesting in your photos so all my food photos my photos from the beach and and these are sort of dynamically generated based on what you say what I have yeah you're a huge sky person evidently you live in a cloud if you could so now that I've uploaded my entire photo archive to Google it's been really fun to see what Google is finding in those photos and one of the best things they've found is faces of all my friends and family Google simply can judge based on how many photos you've taken of a single person how important they are in your life and so when I click on faces inside Google photos it now shows me my mom my dad my brother my sister-in-law and most importantly my little nephew and I can now go back years and time even as their faces have changed over the years Google can still hone in on what they look like and show me basically our entire relationship there's a flip side to all of this algorithmic wizardry though and it's the creeping sense that now Google knows more about me than it ever has before talk to us a little bit about what privacy controls there are on photos is is like geo-tagging just kind of like the price of admission or do users retain some sort of control over maybe metadata around photos yet with the goal of Google photos is to start on a foundation of user trust that's a most important thing we're asking you to store your lifetime of memories with us so at the most base level there's a lot of these things that you can say look I don't want and I choose not to do so for example you could say I don't want to do the face groupings and you have the ability to turn that off in the cases of geo information location history is something that you can disable and say I don't want to have location history used as an input but all of these things are purely private again only for you they're stored on the content of the photo or or associated with your account only visible to you so we're definitely trying to do a lot more here than and we're going to continue to do more because for us again it's it's really on the foundation of building that trust with our users so after playing with it for a couple of weeks I'm convinced Google photos is the best free solution on the market for most people and I feel that way because I trust Google with those photos but if they were ever to start selling the ads or try to sell me products or services based on what they were seeing in my photos well that trust will go away in a hurry Google says that they have no plans on doing that and I hope to keep their word but even if you decide Google photos isn't for you it's important you start thinking about the photos you're taking on your thumb because if it falls into the water or you'd lose it or it gets stolen all those memories are gone and they won't just be lost to you they'll be lost to everybody else in your life who might have enjoyed them so the time has come to start thinking about this it has never been cheaper it's never been easier and it has never been more important