Confirming rumors from earlier in the week, Google has announced its new Photos app - a standalone service that separates the photo component of its Google Plus app. It's available now for Google and iOS and comes with unlimited free storage of 16MP or smaller images.
The app will automatically sync and backup photos and videos from your computer and devices, by way of mobile app, web interface or desktop uploader, and they're saved privately. The 'Photos Assistant' will automatically create collages and videos from uploaded images. Within a few minutes of uploading my photos, it put together a short animation of three images I'd taken of Mount Rainier from a plane. Any of this creations can be saved, edited or discarded.
Images saved to Photos can be shared to various social networks. Sets of images can also be shared by way of a download link, which provides a simple way of sending groups of photos to friends. Some basic editing tools are also included to tweak brightness and color saturation, as is an 'Auto' adjustment option.
Taking advantage of the unlimited storage option means that files greater than 16MP will be downsized and saved at 16MP. For those looking to save higher resolution images, the app offers an 'Original' storage configuration that will maintain original files without compression, but will count it toward the 15GB of free storage associated with the user's Google account.
The Photos App is available now for Android and iOS.
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.
"Go ahead and upload all your photos, so you can be exactly identified, GPS tracked, behaviour-analyzed and linked to people you know."
Some of us understand that cost and find that acceptable for what we receive in return.
I have a home office with a window that faces the street. I leave the window open. People outside can watch me. See what I am doing. Somebody from a distance can use telezoom to take pictures or video of my office and me. I accept that exposure of my privacy in exchange for the view.
What Google offers may not appeal to everybody. But it certainly is acceptable to me and people like me.
sounds like facebook, instagram, flicker etc etc...only difference is that on those sites you do all that hard work yourself whereas google automate that sh*t for you! :) ..big bro is watching you too! ;)
@bill bull: Yes, Facebook is almost the same, yet Google takes it one step further, because they also have profiles about what you search for in the internet or what sites you visit PLUS a social network. They even work on apps that will scan how your appartment looks.
Sorry but no thanks, I dont wanna be a glass human being. I don't want that somebody else knows which porn I watch, when I'm watching it, what I'm looking for in the internet and whats in my bathroom and under my bed.
@Cheema: Thats not like leaving your window open, thats like living in a darn house of glass for enjoying the view. And everybody who wants can watch you using the toilet.
This is a great service, only now that I've backup up all my iPhone images to Google Photo, I've still trying to figure out how to "select all" images and make a 2nd backup to my computer ! :)
Any help here is welcome as did not find this in Search
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?
I don't think you understand that Google Photos is offering.
A site like Google Photos is mostly for casual photographers. It helps them curate, edit, and share, and organize their photos like having a personal photo assistant.
First it starts with curating/filtering... Google photos actually recognizes famous landmarks and your close friends and family member (ones that appear in lots of your photo) and can create a "highlights" album that reduces your 300 photos to 14-20 "best". It can actually detect people smiling, and eyes open (versus blinking) and non-blurry photos and pick those out of the set of similar photos.
It also has uncanny search capability. Without tagging any of your photos. It can search and find photos of "dogs," "sunsets," "snowstorm in Toronto" if you type it in. It also can do facial recognition of people can find other photos that they are in (demo showed it finding a photo of a girl on the day she was born based on photos from when she was 11 years old).
That being said... it is not for enthusiasts like you and I. Like you, I have an external hard drive that I keep at my office and bring home once a month to sync. Of course that 1TB hard drive costed me $80 and I have to remember to sync it. While Google Photos is free and can sync immediately.
I personally spend a lot of time curating, editing in Lightroom and Photoshop, and tagging photos for future reference. That is a lot of money (hundreds of dollars a year) and hours of time... that most people don't want to use.
Some of us work at home so we need an offsite source. Granted, giving your images to Google is probably a bad idea especially the way that they have pretty much abandoned or killed every other product they've come out with. But that has to be balanced with its convenience. Can't be any worse than iCloud.
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.
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.
It's auto-tag like Flickr ? IAll my 1000+ photos on Flickr are now auto tagged, and i must review all my collection to check the usefullness of this tagging.
It isn't auto-tagging so much as "uncanny" image recognition. For instance, if you type "dog" in the search... it find photos of dogs in your collection without even bothering to explicitly tag it. It will also group photos by person... and is actually good enough to identify photos back in time (the demo showed identifying a person from when they are 11 years old, all the way back to a photo of the day they were born).
So basically what Flickr (e.g. former Google search exec Marissa Meyer) wanted to do... but a lot better.
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.
Personally I think Amazon prime seems the best for *storage* of photos. Unlimited photos for $11.99 per year. They don't apply random compression or try to tell you how to tag and organize your photos, and because Amazon makes its money from storage they have less incentive to come up with creative ways to make money from your photos too. Doesn't handle *display* of photos very well though, you still need flickr or smugmug or whatever gallery site you prefer for that. I guess the fact that dpreview isn't pushing Amazon as a better service is a reflection of editorial independence : -)
Read the section "Your Content in our Services." While paragraph one says you retain ownership, The Big G can use your content for whatever it wants. Takes Ownership to a whole new level. I'm down with the OP.
You don't give Google "ownership" of your photos - they can't sell them or give them to anyone - you just agree to let them view and analyze the photos and data mine the contents.
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.
It will likely be tagged with all those tags and come up in search for "eiffel tower", "louisiana" and "train station". But there's really no way to tell without trying.
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.
That is also how I read it - Google can use your photos to promote their products in any way they see fit. And as far as "operating...our Services" I extrapolate that to mean that they can, for instance, publicly display your geocoded photos on Maps as well, include them in public Image Search results, etc. I don't know if there are any privacy settings to preclude this.
I do not read it this way. And I have serious trouble believing that Google would just take your photos and sell them without your permission.
They have been offering photo storage for years and have never done that. Nothing in their agreements makes me think that they will do that.
My mind's capability to wander and start imaging all the nefarious possibilities is limited. I usually try to stick with facts. And so far Google has not done anything to cause me concern.
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.
"dumb down its products so that a 2-year-old can easily use them means that only 2-year-olds may eventually want to."
The best comment ever. My thoughts exactly. Picasa was (still is until it shuts down) much better that everything else in Photo management Google ever tried (not very hard) to do.
+1 see the involution of gmail, and recently Maps: Perhaps the 2-yr-olds like them now, but we all lost something i was willing to pay for... While we have solid alternatives to gmail (also private), google's maps and streetView were hardly matched by Bing - this gap has no OS substitute yet.
Picasa is going down the same road, but as with gmail, no worry here - we have plenty of alternatives.
I uploaded a 4898x3265 file. I can see the photo properties when I click on the information icon on google's site. But when i download it, the file is only 1775x1183.
It's not a good backup option, if this is the case.
@sevenfoot: Make sure you've set your settings to "Original". When I did that, and then uploaded a Raw file, I was able to download the original file. Granted, it counted against my 15GB limit.
Have you read the TOS? Can you point out the passage or passages that document this? If you can't, then you're just some angry little man with an ax to grind.
AGB Und da steht dann, dass du Google jedes recht einräumst, die Daten (hier dann eben Bilder) zu jedem beliebigen, auch kommerziellen Zweck zu verwenden
When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works etc
Pretty disingenuous to leave out the very sentence prior:
"Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
It gives Google a broad license, yes, but you retain ownership of the material. That is substantially different than what you suggested.
Google needs this license, otherwise they would be sued by you (or other users). It doesn't mean they can sell your pics to a third party or use it in advertising. You are in control of the permissions.
By rpm40 (2 hours ago) quote:"Pretty disingenuous to leave out the very sentence prior:" that was never my intention I included a link to the terms but can not completely include them in my post. I just want to be sure of the legal position you're in once you submit you pics and there's nothing on that in the original Photos app.
basale, nothing in the TOS affects copyright. What you posted isn't about copyright, it's about licensing. And if Google does not include that language, your photo can't be copied to the CDN or backed up ("reproduce") nor can gallery thumbnails or phone-sized versions be made ("create derivative works"), nor can it be shown to anyone outside the USA ("worldwide"). In short, no photo hosting service can function without this language.
The problem is that like a lot of other companies, Google is terrible at telling users that usage will be limited to those types of needs. Some companies do a better job of saying "we won't steal your photos."
All photo hosting companies use similar TOS. But has there been a documented case of one of these companies stealing our photos? (The one about Flickr selling user photos doesn't count, because they only sold the ones that were licensed to allow it.)
1. If you think NSA does not have access to your photos at other storage services then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. 2. NSA is welcome to look at my pictures.
Actually, they *decreased* compression. First of all, you can choose to save your images with no compression at all, so compression is only your choice, if you want UNLIMITED and FREE storage. Next, with the previous version images were compressed to 5mp, now it's 16, so they are way less compressed than before.
I uploaded a 16MP 4898x3265 file. I can see that when I click on the information icon on google's site. But when i download it the file is only 1775x1183. They did resize them a lot. It's not a good backup option if this is the case.
How are you downloading the image? Are you using the dedicated download button or are you just downloading the image that your browser is showing you (like with right click->save image or something like that, depending on the brower)?
I remember a few years before that, everyone saying 8mp was plenty. As sensor tech progresses, there will be no reason to artificially limit your resolution. I think what you're getting at is that 16mp is a good compromise between resolution and the rest (noise, dynamic range, etc.) for now, and I pretty much agree with you on that, but don't worry, time marches on!
@rpm40: that was precisely what I was getting at. Also the downside to ever-increasing sensor resolutions is the cost of disk space for RAW files and any processed lossless files produced from those RAWs (3 x the RAW file size!). For most folk, the need for 24MP sensors is questionable; sure, a larger file provides more opportunity for heavy cropping but that really only works if you shoot with very sharp lenses and have a steady hand or tripod.
It's pretty slick. The app collects photos across devices, and I can view, search, share, edit and delete them from the comfort of my desktop computer. Very nice interface, too.
"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.....
I can still access Picasaweb using: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1 I still use picasaweb for tagging, adding Creative Commons license and more... But I wonder for how long I wil be able to do that ? :-/ (... and haven't tested yet if new uploads from Google Photos are available in picasaweb or if it's only the old stuff)
Thanks, Stig. I have been accessing it there too and do see my albums added via Google+. However, some of the functions such as Share now take you back to Google+. It was so simple and strraightforward, and I too am concerned that they will now eliminate it completely.
"Desktop" (i.e., web browser-based) version doesn't yet have feature parity with the mobile version - like the collaging and animation features. AFAIK, at this point it's pretty much just a re-skin of Google+ photos (aka Picasaweb.)
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.
Oh im sure there is unlimited storage. Google definitely wants you to store your entire life, one photo at a time, on their servers. Yep, move along people, no spies here, just honest government workers....
It’s not the government I’m worried about (though I probably should be, long-term). It’s the total usurpation of privacy by ever-shrewder advertisers.
We lost the war on privacy about the time that DARPANET became the Internet. Looking back, that was the inevitable, and probably, the only outcome of digital communications possible.
Now? We are negotiating the terms of surrender. Trying to get the best deal we can in exchange for our lives. In that light, this is a pretty good deal.
Well, to be fair, it isn't as benign as merely looking at your photos. They do a deep analysis of them (That is what the auto categories are for) it allows them to better target the ads and offers they send to you. It IS a part of their monetization plan.
And THAT information about you becomes THEIR property which can be sold or traded away (or seized by the government).
Now it doesn't really matter that Google does this. They ALL do it. Why do you think Flickr has added auto categories as well? And Amazon and Microsoft offer cheap online storage? Google is merely reported to be the best at it, though no one really knows for sure. (No one talks about fight club, not anyone who know anything anyway).
Like I said in a previous post, we lost the war on privacy. This stuff is going to happen anyway. We need to make sure we get the best deal out of it.
Isn't it a good thing if the ads I see are more relevant to me, anyway? I know I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, but I guess I am struggling to see the long term drawbacks for me personally. I don't have much to hide. I suppose the things I do want to hide- well, I just need to be more careful with those...
I think this way a little too, I sometimes wonder hey maybe it's actually helpful. But then part of me likes the idea of privacy too. The more info that is out there, the more potential hackers have access to. That may sound paranoid but it's true, Sony's online gaming network got hacked a couple years back, much credit card and personal info was accessed. I think as an overall rule of thumb, the less of your personal info there is recorded on some database, the better.
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