Category: Uncategorised

Google Photos is an amazing product. After Search, Gmail,(Google Drive; there is legitimate competition from Dropbox & MS) and Youtube, Google Photos is the next billion-user product for Google.

The USP and differentiator is the object & facial recognition technology. It’s scary how good it is already. Facial recognition is amazing and it not only works with photos but also with videos. It’s super convenient to search for “Jasper” “Snow” and within milliseconds I see the photos of my son from the winter holiday. Or jump back in time to a specific location, super easy with Google Photos. No manual tagging needed, no elaborated folder structure required.

Collecting vast amounts of data and organizing it is Google’s mission. I believe I read somewhere that per day 1.2 billion photos are uploaded. The computing and storage requirements must be gigantic. For $10 you get 2TB of storage now with the upgrade Google One Plans. That is a hell lot of space to store all your photos for the foreseeable future photos, and all of them will and need to be processed.

So far all my smartphone photos from the last 4-5 years are in Google Photos. It’s enticing to upload all digital photos that I have. There is a good amount of photos from my DSLR and the photos from the early years with a digital compact camera. They lack the geolocation data, unfortunately.

Another nice feature of Google Photos is the feature to share the entire library or parts of it automatically with a partner. That comes in pretty handy for families. The integration feature with Google Drive in both direction is another useful feature of Google Photos.

A question for sure is the price that we as users pay. Don’t be evil isn’t easy when the currency is user data and Google is getting a vast amount of private data from each users who uploads his photo library.