In addition to Android M, Google unveiled another brand new product during its I/O conference. Google Photos was designed with three big ideas in mind: to provide a home for your photos that's available from any device, to help you organize and bring moments together and make it easy to share what matters the most.
For starters, the service automatically backs up images from your phone, tablet, computer and even your standalone camera's memory card. It can also sync all of these images to your Google Drive if you wish.
As Photos Director Anil Sabharwal explained, Google Photos relies heavily on machine learning and intelligence. It automatically sorts images by days, months and years through a simple, pinch-to-zoom UI. Google Photos goes even further as it can organize photos by people, places and things.
To demonstrate this, Sabharwal searched for "snowstorm in Toronto" and immediately, the app was able to locate the photos he was after. Everything seemed incredibly snappy, especially considering that none of the images are stored locally.
As you'd expect, the service includes a collection of built-in editing tools as well as the ability to seamlessly share your memories with others. Google Photos features a photo assistant that can even suggest creative ideas about what to do with your photo collection and will perform the hard work for you.
Speaking of sharing, you can simply press on a photo and drag to include others in a selection. From there, it's easy to send them out to social services, text, e-mail and more.
Best yet, Google Photos offers unlimited, free storage for all of your photos and videos at up to 16-megapixels and 1080p quality, respectively. Note that Google compresses content at "near identical" visual quality. This will be more than sufficient for all but serious photographers that can't afford to lose any quality to compression.
Google Photos is rolling out starting today for Android, iOS and web users.
