It has been rumored for weeks, but it is now official: Google is launching a photo service separate of Google+. It was announced during Google’s I/O keynote held last week.
It’s called “Google Photos”, and will live at photos.google.com.
Google said it has unlimited storage, considering the fact that previous Google photo hosting services (like Picasa) ate into your Gmail/Drive/Google+ storage limits. “Unlimited” tends to come with caveats, because photos would be capped at 16MP and will also store video, capped at 1080P.
A new Photos app is coming to Android, iOS, and Web; it’s got better photo sorting (with things like day-by-day sorting) and a feature called “Assistant”.
This is, obviously, something that users have been requesting forever: a way to store photos with Google without having to deal with all the social cruft involved with Google+.
Unlimited cloud storage on Google Photos is free — which means the product promises to cover all back up photo needs. There is also a paid version, for pros wanting to upload the most high res content; but for everyone else your photos get squeezed gently through a lossless compression algorithm and shelved within Google’s infinite storage cloud for no monthly fee.
Photos, as Google’s marketing materials reminded us, are not just a collection of pixels. These are your precious memories the company is offering to host gratis. (Well, and all the other quotidian stuff you end up photographing and screenshotting with your phone — like receipts, documents, directions, maps, menus, price-tags, places you’re going, things you like the look of and want to buy, etc etc.)
TechCrunch reported there’s even a feature that will delete photos from your phone when you’ve run out of local storage if the shots have already been backed up to the Google Photos cloud platform. So a full strength photo storage lock in mechanism is go here.
The lure of free unlimited storage masks another motivating impetus. The big one: data. Oodles and oodles of personal data which Google is hankering to apply its data mining algorithms to. And how better to get its hands on all that personal content than by encouraging people to upload it themselves to a free storage repository. After all, the unloved Google+ was just acting as bottleneck on what could be a(nother) very sizable personal data funnel for Google’s business.
Its algorithms don’t just see your photos as a random collection of pixels, of course. They’re far smarter than that. Google has even dolled up these underlying data-mining smarts as another consumer lure: Google Photos’ computer vision-powered image search lets people mine their personal photo repository via natural language queries, doing away with the tedium of having to tag stuff. So now you can query your personal photo bank to find every picture of a craft beer bottle you’ve ever snapped, or all the meals you’ve ever photographed, or each and every selfie you’ve ever taken. Should you really want to.
And just as you can trivially navigate and review your visual history using this tool, so too can Google.
Its algorithms are even smart enough to geotag images based on stuff they recognize in the shots — like landmarks — so even if you’ve turned off that type of location-stamping in your phone’s camera setting, Google can still work out some of where you’ve been based on what its algorithms can pull out of your photos. And photo time-stamps give further signals the company can data mine for intel on your passions and preoccupations. Truly a treasure trove of personal data for its algorithms to ingest and feed into its ad-targeting machinery.
There’s no doubt Google Photos is a massive landgrab for personal data — at a time when visual imagery is the biggest social currency of the web. Just as, a decade+ ago, Google launched its own webmail product with significantly more storage as the carrot to peel users away from rival email products, it’s now repeating the trick with photos — using the competitor-beating promise of free unlimited photo storage to lure in and lock down access to mobile users’ principle expression stream. And the price of its ‘free’ unlimited storage? You giving Google unfettered access to every vista (and its associated metadata) on your camera roll.
