Google rolls out standalone Photos app with unlimited free storage

Today, the Terrabyte disk is at prices just anyone can afford. A 2 TB external drive cost you 120$, so why the heck would anyone load his pictures to a cloud drive where the owner of the cloud drive can do with them what ever he wants? Beware of Google, it's selling your soul to the devil.

...and of course Google provides this just for fun and humanitarian reasons. And to make your life easier. They get nothing in return, they have no monetary reasons, they did all the work to develop this app and their photo recognizing abilitys in their free time. Just for you.

If you are so stupid to believe this, then nobody can help you anymore. Go ahead and upload all your photos, so you can be exactly identified, GPS tracked, behaviour-analyzed and linked to people you know.
Extra points if you have a google+ account to cross-analyze all the data with.

All CopyRights go to Google, Right ?

What is this obsession with giving big companies all your data?
What's wrong with backing up to a couple of hard drives which you keep at different properties? (eg one at home and one at work)

What are people doing that means they need immediate on the go access to ALL their images, rather than just the ones they're currently working on?

Why put any of your stuff up this way? Roll all of your pics for a year into one far file, encrypt it, and cloud it. Simple.

I have just tried it I reckon it's a great app. Another good storage option with plenty to offer. I wouldn't mind Google using some of my photos it would get my images out to a wider audience.

taojonesphotographer.com

It sounds nice to have all your images in one place, but for now my "cloud" storage consists of many different sites, including Google+/Photos. It's very tempting to take advantage of this free storage as a primary backup to my external drives, but does this mean I'm a customer for life? It's just such a pain trying to future-proof my workflow and needs down the road since I'm all about standardization, even at the sacrifice of a little functionality.

Amazing how few comments have to do with photography.

Google is getting beyond creepy...

There are much better options, nothing is free. I work in the Silicon valley tech sector, and i can tell you stay away from Google if you want to maintain some sense of ownership of your images.

Neat feature: it automatically recognizes what's in your photos. I.e. if you have a prominent landmark in e.g. Tokyo, the picture will automatically be tagged with the name of that landmark as well as with the place. That's not to mention things like dogs and cats, etc. Very impressive. Tagging was the most onerous part of photo management. It doesn't tag _everything_, and it's not always exact (e.g. in one of my pics a rabbit was tagged as kitten, rabbit and mouse at the same time), but the mistakes are plausible for a human, and tagging coverage is great.

For the first time your image collection is searchable by keywords without you doing any tagging at all. I should also mention that you don't see the actual tags the system assigned. You merely see the pics when you enter search terms.

As noted below, there are once again concerns about whether Google can use the photos you store for their promotional purposes. To me it sounds very ambiguous which means that Google will push to the limits and a little beyond.

Executives in Silicon Valley are actively hostile toward the property rights of artists and photographers, so I'm going to wait a little while before I start uploading to this service.

Here's what the user agreement says:
"The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."

"promoting" is the operant term here. Sounds to me like they can use your pix to promote their service without paying you.

I tried it on my PC; my main complaint is that there is no user control, once it has started uploading; when clicking on the program in All Programs, it sometimes starts without telling you, there is no indication on your screen. I found it impossible to stop it uploading unless I resorted to Control/Alt/Delete and stopped the Process from there. I have uninstalled the Uploader and deleted all my photos. I don't think I will be using this program again, unless I get some control.

That interface, like Google+'s, is atrocious. Google's relentless drive to dumb down its products so that a 2-year-old can easily use them means that only 2-year-olds may eventually want to. Also seems no practical way to control the presentation/organization of the photos to your intended audience. All that gimmicky combination of photos into movies with crappy music is annoying. The whole thing seems kind of useless, except maybe as a photo backup service for people who don't really care whether their photos are backed up anyway.

submitting your pictures to this service means you say goodbye to your copyrights. Maybe this should have been mentioned in the original news item.

free service and many warm greetings from NSA

Wow, Google just did an Apple! Removing functionality and increasing compression isn't progress in my book.

I've always said that 16Mp is the sweet spot for sensor size. So I can upload unlimited full-res 16Mp photos to Photos. Sweet.

free....doublethink.

Yandex Disk 10Gb, Sync, mobile app. since 2013

"You don’t have to tag or label any of them, and you don’t need to laboriously create albums. " I *like* tagging photos and creating albums - it's called "managing my photos the way I want"
I've actually been using google plus photos because of the free storage, but the more google go down this road of "we do things automatically so you don't have to" the more I decide I'd rather just pay for the service I want.....

"...and they're saved privately". LOL!

Google,

If you want to do something for photos on Android, how about letting other apps edit and save them?

Thanks for making my favorite editing apps useless.

Just give me back PicasaWeb.

It would have been helpful if the writer of this story had actually said the official name of the app in their story. It is called "Google Photos".

Those 3 words are like magic to the masses:
Unlimited
FREE
Storage
.
.
.
Speak no more...

.

The animations look cool. But I don't think I have the Brooklyn hipster cred required to download it. And where's the desktop version?

I played around with it a little. The 16MP limit isn't affected by the image aspect ratio; it's always 16MP total. It also seems to recompress JPEGs smaller than 16MP.