Well, the digital world and big data scene is happening really fast. Just a week or so after I published my blog on Shoebox, Google (the giant) just announced in their annual Google I/O event ion San Fran on May 29 (3 days ago) that they have launched the Google Photos! This is directly targeting and competing with Apples Photos/iCloud, Shoebox, etc. If you’re interested in what this search engine giant is offering, read on ….
First, on the bells and whistles, as the forefront in searching engines, you would expect that they would offer more searching options and you’re right! Here are what they’re bragging about:-
- Free and unlimited storage – for photos up to 16 Megapixels and videos up to 1080p – well that’s generous! even more than Shoebox! see my previous blog here. To keep your full resolution photo library there, they count as your Google overall storage, at the moment, 1 TB would cost you US$9.99 per month.
- King of searches – and this is its trump card – I think. Without need for tagging (except for naming faces in the photos), you can search for the typical ones like dates, locations and now THINGS! – e.g. type “cat” and it brings up all your photos there with cats in them; type American shorthair and voila, photos of Muffin (sorry, that’s my American shorthair’s name) and his bros and sis come up! (some user complaint that it does not show “rabbits” – but my search in my collection came up with an easter bunny!); type “rainbow” and you got all your photos having rainbows; search for “snow” and and you your photos with snow (and something similar – like artistic shots of running water, clouds); type your friend’s name- say “John”, and it brings up all photos with John in them (that’s provided you have John recognised as a face in the photos). You can do combined searches like “John in Japan”, or “cat in bathroom”, etc….. Such powerful fuzzy searches are amazing, although not extremely accurate yet, but something which is again fun to use, and useful in digging out what you want from tens of thousands of photos in your library.
- Multi-platform and devices (except at the moment, no app yet for Windows phone);
- Would do all the organising for you.
- Offers cloud photo editing – at this stage, you can “Auto,” “Light,” “Color,” “Pop” and “Vignette.”
- Easy to share.
- Saves you storage space on your mobile phone (just like Shoebox), you can choose delete all your photos on your phone once uploaded to them (just a click at the setting).
So should you dump everything else and rush into it? At this stage, my 2 cents after trying and reviewing others’ comments would be give it a bit of time to mature and respond to ‘complaints’ from users; e.g. reports said that it has problems with very slow/interrupted uploading of photos from iOS devices (iphone 5 and 6), the desktop uploader is not recognizing the Mac Photos library (but if you have Apertures library, that’s OK), etc. I’m definitely not saying that Google Photos is not great, it’s actually amazing and has huge potential. But as with every newly launched software/apps, there are bound to be bugs or significant areas for improvements. By all means, try them out, especially if you already got Google+ set up for some of your photos, they’re now automatically accessible via Google Photos. This is the link to to help you “Get started with Google Photos”, it has links to the uploader for your desktop and app for your mobile phone.
At this stage, I’d try it out and set up my tertiary backup here, and when I’m satisfy with whatever winner (at this stage – the runners are my Shoebox and Google Photos), then I’d decide and I’d tell you then here. With some much competitions around, my predictions would be the stronger contenders would continue to improve (and at a fast pace to survive), and the storage costs would continue to drop while volume offered continues to grow – this is the trend of the Big Data world!