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Google has launched a new service, this time designed to organize your digital photos in a revolutionizing way. Google Photos, the name of the tool, is marketed to be as good for your photo library as Gmail is for your email.
And as the tech giant has delivered so very successfully before – we just need to remember how awesome has Gmail been in the last 10 years since its launch – we are surely on board with Google Photos being a huge game changer.
Along with announcing the service last week in a blog post, Google also revealed it will come with free unlimited storage: all your videos and photos organized together in one neat spot. Google is doing with Photos what it did with Gmail back in 2004; back then, all users signing up received 1 GB of free data, while most of the email service providers just offered a few options for free.
Even though the free storage really helped convince users to switch to Gmail, it’s not the feature that convinced them to stay; it was the revolutionizing way of turning emails into threads, making it so much easier to search and view exactly the ones you needed.
To this effect, Google Photos shares a close resemblance. The company put a lot of thought – and professional algorithms – into creating a tool that can identify people and places and organize your pictures according to the desired criteria. No need to tag or manually sort through them.
Basically, the algorithm will be able to sort all your pictures from Paris by looking at the people appearing in them, as well as the landmarks. The biggest advancement, however, is the ability of using keywords for searching a certain picture.
There are plenty of services out there that offer their users unlimited photo storage in exchange for a small fee (see: Amazon Prime), but they don’t have any tools to help you make sense of the thousands of pictures you have taken in the last year.
Google Photos, however, has more than enough to become a best seller, with the advantage of being both free and unlimited. All you need to do is trust Google with even more of your private data.
One thing that not even Google has sorted out yet is how is Google Photos going to become a source of revenue – which ultimately the purpose of each new product. And there’s the problem of what happens after you’ve uploaded 200 GB of pictures into Google Photos and then, all of a sudden, they decide to update their privacy policy for the worse.
Are you supposed to download everything and close your account, or are you just going to let Google have it all and do whatever it wants with your data?
Image Source: Digital Trends
