Review: Google Photos app great idea, but needs taming
LOS ANGELES - The idea of Google Photos is sound: what if there could be one digital home for every photo you've taken, whether it be on the phone, tablet or camera?
It's a great notion and Google isn't alone in trying to solve this problem.
But now, if Google collected everything I shot, how would I then go about managing and finding all these images?
Because if you take a lot of photos, like I do, you could find Google Photos to be a monster that needs to be tamed. Thousands of photos, in one place, that are desperately calling for organization.
The app is free and available for Android and Apple devices. It's an update to the photo app that worked within the Google + social network, but is now available as a stand-alone, at photos.google.com. Users can download the "automatic downloader," from the site to add photos shot on digital cameras and imported into the computer to live with the smartphone snaps.
Google's idea is that with the information that comes with each digital photo, and its own facial and place recognition software, you won't need to do anything. You'll find the photos by going to the people associated with the image--say your mom, via a visual search.
Or via an automatic place or "things" setting--Venice, Italy, weddings, beaches.
As with all things automatic, sometimes it works really well, other times, it misses the boat.
I uploaded my month of May to the Google Photos app, which includes tens of thousands of snapped images, as well as scans of older photos as well. Google's visual search missed many of them.
It picked up some of my mom, but only a handful.
The "Place" setting put photos of a birthday party into a "Wedding" category. It created a section for my hometown called "Manhattan Beach," and used 1950s photos of my father growing up in Indiana.
The connection? The photos were scanned in Manhattan Beach.
Google wants you to let the visual, place and people search manage your collection.
If you use the app, you need to be involved and help the computer learn the real you.
My advice: go in there and manually create albums from your photos, to give Google more information to find your stuff. While automatic is pretty accurate, you can be more precise.
To create an album, find a selection of pictures, hold your finger down on one of them in what's called a "long select" and then drag it across to the selection of images.
Then click the + button, and choose the "Album," setting.
Now, when you scroll through the app, you can choose "Collections," and find your album, and titled images, there.
Let's take a quick look at the competition.
Two new startups came out recently with similar goals to Google Photos--Lyve and Mylio. They both want to collect all your images into one place. And Apple has a similar offering as well, iCloud, to make available everything snapped on your iPhone and iPad.
Unlike Google, which offers its automatic backup service for free (but with a catch*), Apple offers 5 gigabytes of free storage, and then 20 GB for 99 cents a month, or 1 terabyte for $20 monthly.
If you're a user of the Apple iPhone, you know what it's like to wake up every morning to a nag message, rightly or wrongly, that your iCloud storage is out of room, and you need to buy some extra space.
And like Google Photos, Apple's Photos app is also a monster, with potentially hundreds and hundreds of photos that can only be found when scrolling forever, unless you tame it by selecting images and creating albums.
So with the advent of free uploads, Google Photos has the potential to get way bigger image collections.
Now for the fine print: Google's unlimited storage comes with a price: images that are "slightly" compressed, but still at high resolution. Google says you won't notice the difference.
Real world test: a file that was originally 6.8 MB got compressed down to just under 1 megabyte in the app, while another original was at 10.8 MB and downgraded to 2.8 MB.
I decided to see what I lost by uploading both to online print site Shutterfly, which usually tells you that your image doesn't have enough pixels if you try to order a big print. However, it said the resolution to both uploads was good enough for prints up to 20x30 in size.
So no resolution issues here.
Beyond the albums, Google offers several auto tools that are fun.
--Google makes automatic collages from similar photo clusters.
--Animated GIFs and movies are created by similar pictures shot in a row--little clips that string a bunch of your pictures together.
--Editing tools (lighten, darken, "pop") enhance the image, similar to Instagram filters.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information. Now, it moves on to taming our photo collections.
For the price of free, Google Photos is a great deal, and worth checking out.
Just be ready to get very involved in the process with manual override, to start labeling images and creating albums, and it will be a more enjoyable experience.