Sharing photos is probably one of the things you do most often from your smartphone. Yet it can be a clunky process, particularly if you’re doing so across platforms or have large images and videos that can take forever to transfer.
Google Photos is trying to fix those problems, while of course making the service even more appealing to you.
The best feature comes to those who are sending pictures from one Google Photos user to another. You’ll get a ping to import the pictures right into the app, so you don’t have to mess with MMS or other third-party sharing options. While Apple’s AirDrop is convenient for iOS and Mac users, you’re stuck with other methods if you’re trying to transfer between an Android and iPhone.
The other major improvement comes to the automatic movie-making studio that’s baked right into Google Photos. The company said in a blog post that more movies will be automatically generated from your pictures, based on “creative concepts.” In essence, all that machine learning is going to try and emulate the types of movies you might want to pull together yourself. Google offered an example:
To get the latest features, make sure you have the latest update to Google Photos for Android and iOS. The changes are also rolling out to the web version.
Why this matters: Google Photos is one of the best products to come out of Mountain View. If you’re willing to live with some compression, you get unlimited storage for all your photos and videos or rather cheap storage options for keeping everything at full resolution. The real strength is in all the machine learning that Google has applied that makes it easy to find relatives or past vacations with just a simple search.
