The Pros and Cons of Google Photos

Google Photos is a photo transferring and storage service developed and owned by Google. Officially, Google photos became public in 2015 and spun out from Google+, the company’s social network. Google Photos practically gives users and clients free, almost unlimited storage for all kinds of photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution.

Google photos tends to acts as a back up when photos are sent or in Google terms ‘Shared’. This is undoubtably a primary backup tool when photos are shared between social media  channels or other platforms or apps.

Google Photos (GP) has an option to upload all your photos to their cloud account and they give you two options:

  1. To upload them in their full resolution, but they count against your 15 gb free limit.
  2. To upload them, but they downsize the picture and the quality is reduced. The good deal is that there is no limit to the number of files you upload and everything is free.

This also works for videos with resolution of up to 1080p. If you have a resolution higher than this, then it will downsize it.

Features and Tips:

  1. After you set this up in your phone, any photos or video you take are sent directly to Google Photos.
  2. The above application (GP) could be a problem if you are doing a long video. You might use a lot of your data.
  3. Collections are done by Google Photos. It organizes groups of photos and makes a collection.
  4. Computers – If you drag a number of photos into Google Photos, you can create an Album.
  5. You can’t drag folders into Google Photos.

Google Photos

The easiest way to back up all your pictures and videos from your computer is to use their Desktop app – https://photos.google.com/apps you can choose which folders to backup. When you add a new picture to your computer, it will automatically be added to Google Photos.

Once you setup Google Photos download, you can look at the settings by looking for the hidden icon in the lower right desktop screen. It will show you a screen. Notice that it has a number of options to automatically backup pictures that are in an SD card or any sort of removable media.

Another limitation is that Google Photos will not backup Photoshop /PSD files. It will backup .png files, but you have to select that in the Google Photos Settings Menu.

From the Google Photos app, first ensure all your new photos are backed up. Slide right from the left side of the screen.

  •  Settings.
  • Free Up Device Storage
  • Organization

One drawback about Google photos which can be quite annoying is that you lose all of the organization that you may have setup originally. While photos are put in date order, any other folders you may have setup gets lost. For that reason alone, you should not rely on Google photos, but keep your own copies at home or in a safe place.

Deleting Photos on Google Photos:

If you take a look at the screen, it seems to indicate that if you delete a photo on Google Photos, that it will also be deleted from other synchronized devices. You can check this on your phone to know whether the pictures have not been deleted from your phone; they will still be intact after deletion from Google Photos.

Google Photos Storage

Google Photos has two storage settings: “High quality” and “Original quality”. High quality includes unlimited photo and video storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution (the maximum resolutions for average smartphone users in 2015).

Original quality photos preserves the original resolution and quality of the photos and videos, but uses storage quantity in the users’ Google account. For the Google Pixel phones, it offers unlimited storage at Original quality for free. The storage is shared with Gmail and Google Drive, it’s called Google One. Up to 15 gigabytes of storage is offered for free with paid plans available from Google One.

Google photos Growth

In October 2015, five months after the successful launch of the Google photos service, Google announced that Google Photos had 100 million users, who had uploaded 3.72 petabytes of photos and videos and this was remarkably awesome and unprecedented. However, this growth didn’t just stop here, it kept increasing massively. In May 2016, a year after the release of Google Photos, Google  also publicly announced the service had achieved approximately 200 million monthly active users. Other statistics it revealed was at least 13.7 petabytes of photos/videos had been uploaded, 2 trillion labels had been applied (24 billion of those being selfies), and 1.6 billion animations, collages and effects had been created based on user content. In May 2017, Google announced that Google Photos has over 500 million users,who upload over 1.2 billion photos every day.

Conclusion

As you can see clearly, Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Giants,Google. Thus helping all its users easily  back up their important photos when photos are sent or in Google terms ‘Shared’. Google Photos has undoubtably  received critical acclaim after its decoupling from Google+ in 2015 and everyone can see that clearly. All its customers,clients and reviewers saw and talked about the updated Photos service for its visual recognition technology trend, search, apps, and loading times. However, unusual privacy concerns were  sequentially raised, notably involving Google’s motivation for building the service, as well as its relationship to governments and possible laws requiring Google to hand over a user’s entire photo history. Google Photos has seen strong user adoption.