Google Photos faces extraordinary competition from the likes of Apple, Flickr, and any number of storage services, but the company has diligently leveraged its strengths to produce a product it hopes users will view as a visual equivalent to Gmail: a standalone free service with a premium option for more, super high res, storage. (You store all you like in normal resolution.) It has the requisite functions of editing and, also as one might expect, allows for sharing on social sites. Using pinch and zoom functions, it’s easy to target specific clusters of images. But perhaps the most impressive aspect is its ability to search through a vast collection and automatically collate images by category. It can recognize not only faces, but trees, flowers and birthday parties.

On the eve of the launch of Google Photos, Horowitz spoke to me about the product, as well as the future of Google Plus.

[Steven Levy] There’s a lot of competition from places like Apple, Flickr and even RealNetworks to be someone’s go-to photo service. Why would someone choose Google?

[Bradley Horowitz] We aspire to do for photo management what Gmail did for email management. Gmail wasn’t the first email service. But it offered a different paradigm of how one managed one’s inbox. We want to do that for photo management: To give you enough storage so you can relax and not worry about how much photo bandwidth you’re consuming, and enough organizing power so you don’t have to think about the tedium of managing your digital gallery. It will happen for you transparently, in the background. I don’t think there’s another company on earth that can make that claim.

What problem does Google Photos solve?

We have a proliferation of devices and storage and bandwidth, to the point where every single moment of our life can be saved and recorded. But you don’t get a second life with which to curate, review, and appreciate the first life. You almost need a second vacation to go through the pictures of the safari on your first vacation. That’s the problem we’re trying to fix — to automate the process so that users can be in the moment. We also want to bring all of the power of computer vision and machine learning to improve those photos, create derivative works, to make suggestions…to really be your assistant.

People have their photos on Instagram, Flickr, iPhoto and other services. Do I have to input all my photos in your system to get the most of it?

We believe it’s essential. We think that social photo products are great and we continue to support sharing. Only a small fraction of your photos are actually shared. We heard from our Google Plus photo users that we had great technology, but they didn’t want their life’s archive brought into a social product, any social product. It’s more akin to Gmail — there’s no button on Gmail that says “publish on the Internet.” “Broadcast” and “archive” are really different and so part of Google photos is to create a safe space for your photos and remove any stigma associated with saving everything. For instance, I use my phone to take pictures of receipts, and pictures of signs that I want to remember and things like that. These can potentially pollute my photo stream. We make it so that things like that recede into the background, so there’s no cognitive burden to actually saving everything.

You use artificial intelligence to surface photos on a given theme, or find specific people in the photostream. What’s the percentage of getting it right?

It’s good enough. It’s not perfect, in the same way that voice transcription five years ago was not perfect. The key to getting that last percentage which tips it over will come now, when we deploy it at scale. Getting all that data will create a virtuous cycle of getting better and better.

Do you think you’ll face resistance from people who don’t want a lifetime of photos stored in Google?

I’m not worried about that whatsoever. We have a very good track record. Look at Gmail — its usage has continued to grow. People are very comfortable entrusting their data to Google. If you provide the right user value with no agenda, with no apologies or agendas, I am sure we can win the faith of users.

Is that information in photos siloed, or is that going to be available to enhance my Google experience in other products?

The information gleaned from analyzing these photos does not travel outside of this product — not today. But if I thought we could return immense value to the users based on this data I’m sure we would consider doing that. For instance, if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering, with appropriate controls and disclosure to the user. Google Now is a great example. When I’m late for a flight and I get a Google Now notification that my flight has been delayed I can chill out and take an extra hour, breathe deep.

Does the face recognition in this product understand who the person actually is, in the same way your search engine might identify a person and link the image to information about that person?

Not in this incarnation of the product. If you look at the faces we have here Google has no idea who these people are, it’s actually face clustering, not face-recognition, so I can click on my stepdaughter Charlotte and see other pictures of her. But it doesn’t know Charlotte’s identity [and can’t make use of any of her own personal information].