“With the invention of the smartphone, there was nothing that humans did, absolutely nothing, that they didn’t also make an image of,” said Martin Hand, a sociologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the author of “Ubiquitous Photography,” an academic inquiry into the blessed problem of too many photos. “But that brought about its own problems — it started to get overwhelming.”

More than a decade ago, the tech world hit on one partial solution to picture overload: Make images social. Through services like Flickr, then Facebook and Instagram, we tried to curate our images by getting others to do it for us. The best photos of you were the ones that were ranked highly in your social feed; the worst were the ones you didn’t post.

But social media created another set of problems — there was a fear of missing out, a sense of performative anxiety, loneliness and an erosion of privacy. “There was a sense in which because everything was public, young people had to constantly curate the idea of themselves in public,” said Mr. Hand.

Google, too, tried to play the social photo game. The earliest incarnation of Google Photos was part of Google Plus, the search company’s ill-fated, just-shuttered social network. A few years ago, after realizing that social networking was not its forte, Google went back to the drawing board with Photos.

Its reimagined service would do three things: Offer nearly limitless storage for your photos essentially free (you can pay more to have your images stored in higher-resolution sizes). It put them in the cloud, so they could be accessed anywhere. And, crucially, Photos would lean on Google’s famed A.I. to address what it saw as the key problem of the smartphone era — the fact that we all take photos but rarely look at them.

“We noticed that you would never relive or reminisce about any of these moments,” said Anil Sabharwal, the Google vice president who led the team that built Photos, and still runs it. “You would go on this beautiful vacation, you’d take hundreds of beautiful photos, years would pass, and you would never look at any of them.”

When it started in 2015, Google Photos brought immediate relief. For instance, face recognition made sharing pictures automatic. Now, when I take a photo of my kids, Google recognizes them and shares those photos with my wife; her photos are shared with me. Incredibly, instantly, without thinking, we each have a complete collection of the children’s photos, and any anxiety about keeping them secure has vanished.