Google Photos, the photo and video storage app-meets-service for Android and iOS, has hit an important milestone in the Google Play Store. The app has now been downloaded an eye watering 500 million times, putting it in very rarefied air in the Play Store. To put this into perspective, Snapchat is only in the 100 million download range along with Pokemon Go. Yep, the app that has been the craze for the last month hasn’t come close to where Photos is when it comes to downloads. Even Netflix is only at 100 million. You get the idea: 500 million is a big deal.
For those of you who haven’t tried Google Photos, is stores all of your photos online (which you can get to via https://photos.google.com) so your photos are stored not only on your phone but in the cloud. When you use the Free Up Space feature (which was highlighted in adverts during the Olympics), the photos are deleted from your phone but kept safe online. Even better, if you store photos in High Quality, it doesn’t count against your Google Drive storage.
High Quality storage is great for those who are shooting photos less than 16MP in size as you don’t lose any quality. Google simply compresses them. Further, there are some basic photo editing
Google Photos for Android
features in Photos that will let you edit things on-the-fly. It isn’t as powerful as say a Snapseed but the editing tools will cover about 90% of what most folks need to be honest. Plus you can create albums, collages and the search engine will let you search for locations, people or things in your photos.
I’m a big fan of the app and, in fact, I’m a Google Top Contributor for Google Photos. If you haven’t tried it out, give it a go.
