Google Photos is a complete mobile and web photo workflow app that allows you to automatically back up, organize, edit and share your digital photos. Although it no longer offers unlimited storage, the app is still impressive. What really sets it apart is the artificial intelligence, which automatically produces artistic content from your photos. Google Photos is an Editors' Choice winner, highly recommended for anyone who wants to find photos easily, edit their images quickly and easily, and back everything up to the cloud.
Web Interface
As you would expect from Google, the web interface is clean, minimalist, and friendly, with thumbnails of your photos organized by date. The menu at the top left offers options for Photos, Browse, Share, and Store Prints, and below that, in the Library section, you have Favorites, Albums, Utilities, Archive, Locked Folder, and Trash. A progress bar indicates how much space you have used and how much you have left. At the top right are the options Search, Upload, Help and Settings.
Mobile App vs. Web Version
The Google Photos mobile app is in some ways more powerful than the web version. It offers sleek new tools like Magic Eraser and an updated Memories view with its own button at the bottom, replacing the Search button that was there before. The Android and iPhone interfaces are virtually identical, with buttons at the bottom for:
- Photos
- Memories
- Library
- Search.
Both versions of the app show a single row of Memories at the top:
- Featured photos from previous years
- Photos of a single person or event.
Photo Adjustment and Enhancement
The Google Photos web application has a good selection of photo editing and enhancement tools. The first tab on the Edit page is Suggestions, which includes computational AI image enhancements. You get more options, marked with a colorful 1 icon, if you're a Google One subscriber. The number of effects available varies depending on the content of an image. For example, those with faces have more options, such as Portrait, which blurs the background and boosts the lighting on the face.
Social and Sharing with Google Photos
The Share button takes you to conversation entries to share photos and albums as if they were messages. From this view, you can see everything you have shared, and each entry becomes its own conversation group, to which any participant can add photos and write messages.
Google Photos’ Best Feature
The app is also exceptional at finding photos in your collection based on people, objects, and places. Today, almost all photo services are capable of identifying a human face, and many can even group photos of the same individual with remarkable accuracy. Google goes even further with its facial recognition technology and can detect the same person throughout their lifetime, and pets too!
New Functions
You can find out new features since the last update, such as:
- The private Locked Folder feature.
- Photo Stacks, which groups multiple takes of the same shot.
- Automatic categorization of screenshots and document photos; Cinematic photos, which are pseudo-3D animations.
- Magic Eraser, which removes distracting people and objects.
- Updated Memories view.
A Feature-packed Photo Cloud
With 15 GB of free online storage and plenty of free image editing and organization tools, Google Photos is easy to recommend. Its automatic improvements and the ease with which you can view and organize your photos make it stand out from other photo apps.
Apple Photos and Windows Photos both offer a couple more editing tools, but they're only available on some devices. All in all, Google Photos' multi-platform availability makes it an excellent app for keeping all your photos accessible and backing them up, with great editing capabilities and automatic AI creations.
