Today marks the first birthday of Google Photos, the photo backup and sharing service-meets-app. It was announced at Google I/O 2015 and was officially launched on May 27, 2015 as a website and an app for Android with iOS being added shortly thereafter. In that year, the service has grown tremendously as have the functionality of the apps and the website. Today, as part of the celebrations, Google has released some facts and figures on how the service is used and how much it has grown in popularity. We knew of course that it had grown to over 200 million active monthly users based on comments from I/O this year. But there are even more interesting figures to discuss.
As Google put in their blog, there have been so many photos uploaded to Google Photos that it would take over 4 centuries to view them all.
Google Photos for Android
We’ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You’ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices—it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We’ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 billion of those have been for … selfies.
Think about that folks 13,700 terabytes of photos.
The great thing about Google Photos is that it continuing to evolve but as a service and the apps for Android and iOS. Recently the apps were updated to allow for commenting on photos you have shared in albums as well as captioning photos. And for the web, just today, there is a new timeline feature along the right edge as you view your photos.
Readers who visit often will know that I’m a big advocate for Photos and I am also in Google’s Top Contributor program for the app. I firmly believe that it is the best photo storage, backup and sharing app out there and it is only going to get better with time.
