New Google Photos app offers unlimited uploads

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Preview Google's new Photos app Google just launched its all-new Photos app which offers free, unlimited photo and video storage along with a few unique features for organization and sharing. Jefferson Graham previews.

VENICE BEACH, Calif. -- Google is doubling down on photo sharing, with a new app for Apple and Android, and the Web.

With Google Photos, available for free today on Google Play and the Apple app store, the search giant is taking on Facebook, the No. 1 photo-sharing site, with an app that aims to collect every image you shoot into one place.

"Sharing photos is really hard," says David Lieb, the Google product lead overseeing the Photos project. "Here we are, it's 2015, we have self-driving cars and flying drones, yet I can't really send you 25 photos that we've taken together. We want to change that."

The app has been adapted from the photos app in the Google + social network, with its most popular feature, auto-upload. Give Google the thumbs up, and it will grab every image you take on your smartphone, and it will be visible on smartphones, tablets and the computer.

Now, with the additional download of the "Auto Uploader" for the computer, Google is picking up every shot you import to the computer as well.

The app "will be a home for a lifetime of photos, auto organized, and searchable," says Lieb.

UNLIMITED STORAGE

The good news: Google offers unlimited storage for photos and video. The fine print: Google compresses the images, although Lieb says they're still high quality. A 1080p video will still be 1080p high def, he says.

If the photographer wants to keep the images at full resolution, they can buy storage from Google. The first 15 gigabytes are free, and then it's $10 a month for 1 terabyte.

Facebook attracts nearly 2 billion photo uploads per day to the social network and its Instagram, What's App and Messenger units, and photos there have resolution greatly lowered.





GOOGLE LIBRARIAN

The difference between what Facebook does, and Google's goals for the Photos app, is privacy. Facebook is about public sharing, while Google wants to be the one-stop library for all our photos.

For sharing, you can select one or many images, to be sent in an e-mail link, or even posted on Facebook or the Flickr photo sharing app. Recipients can download them at (the nearly) full resolution.

Like Facebook, finding older images stored in the app can be a challenge, as they are presented by day, month and year, in rows and rows of visual thumbnails.

Google encourages folks not to tag and label the photos, but to rely on its visual search. Click the search button in the app, and Google shows the faces most often photographed, like yourself, family and friends.

But in our tests, it often missed many of those shots, which could be found when scrolling through the app, by pages and pages of dates.

Beyond visual search, Google offers other auto tools in the app. In the background, it makes collages and mini-movies created from multiple images of the same setting, and "Stories," like pictorials of events.

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