The latest Google Photos came out a couple of days ago and it looks quite promising after playing around with it, albeit it may mislabel some things.
Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz said that the new Google Photos aims to be a sort of Gmail for pictures, making everything more organized. In order to achieve this, Google Photos leverages powerful algorithms and search to sort through all of your images, putting them into collections so you can easily find what you're looking for.
"The more moments we capture, the more challenging it becomes to relive those memories. Photos and videos become littered across mobile devices, old computers, hard drives and online services (which are constantly running out of space). It's almost impossible to find that one photo right at the moment you need it, and sharing a bunch of photos at once is frustrating, often requiring special apps and logins," Google touted in a recent blog post announcing the new Google Photos.
"We wanted to do better. So today we're introducing Google Photos-a new, standalone product that gives you a home for all your photos and videos, helps you organize and bring your moments to life, and lets you share and save what matters."
After trying out the new Google Photos, the difference is indeed noticeable. The app neatly organizes your trove of images and puts them into collections that you can browse, and you can also search for a particular thing you've photographed and find the image more easily. Typing "dog," for instance, will retrieve your photos of dogs, but not all sorting gets everything right.
As you can see in the image above, for instance, Google sifted through my synced images and created various collections based on the subject of the photos, but my dogs apparently seemed big enough to be categorized as horses. Said images of the dogs also appear if I search for "dog" within Google Photos, but some of them will also appear if I search for "horse."
Nevertheless, leaving aside dogs that look like horses for Google, the new Google Photos is quite useful and can save you a lot of time by automatically sorting your photos so you don't have to do it manually. Some refinements might make it better, but it's already pretty good. You can find your images neatly categorized by date and place, but also by their content, in folders such as "cars," "forests," "sky," "motorcycles," or others such.
Google has also improved sharing options, now allowing users to share even hundreds of photos at once by creating a link and sending it to friends. The recipient(s) don't need any app or login to see the photos you shared, and they can also save the images with a single tap. If you want to take someone off the list or add a new recipient, you can also add or revoke access to the link at any time.
Google Photos is now available as a free download on Android, iOS, and the web, and it's worth trying out. If you already gave it a shot, drop by our comment section below and tell us what you think of it. Do you have any mislabeled collections?
Get Adobe Lightroom if you prefer ratings and flags for photo management.
