Yesterday Google introduced the new Google Photos service which actually it’s mostly just a rebranding of the already awesome Google+ Photos. They now allow anyone to upload unlimited high quality photos and videos. I have already had my phone upload every single photo I took to Google for years. In turn Google do awesome things with them.

First I know that all my photos are safe and always accessible from any device. I know that the app will automatically upload every photo I take on my phone as quickly as it can and scrolling back to emails that are more than 9 years old in my Gmail I have greater confidence in Google’s ability to store my data than my own. The app is delightful to use: When I scroll through my photos in the app, they all just appear instantly, just as if they were actually on my phone — even though most of them are not.

The photo stream on my phone

Second Google indexes my photos in meaningful ways: When I search for “snow” I get photos with snow. When I search for “France” I get photos from the vacation in France. Locations are of course “easy” to extract from the photos’ geodata, but I never told Google which of my photos contain food, or dogs, or snow. They are using machine learning to do this, and even though my search for “snow” does return a few photos without any snow, it’s still a very powerful and useful feature.

Third for a long time I have enjoyed Google’s ability to organize and present my photos in ways that are meaningful to me. I may take a lot of photos during an event, and the next day Google presents me with a story, that has been put together based on the best photos and where/when they were taken. The generated stories are not perfect, but they are usually good enough as drafts that it only takes a few minutes of tweaking to actually make it into something that is a delight to look at. See how nice it can be.