Here's Why Google Photos Should Be Your Default Photo App

I am in love with Google’s new Photos app. It has been less than a day but I’ve already decided it is now my default photo/video organization app. Yesterday at Google I/O, the brand new Photos app was one of the big announcements the company made. With the announcement Google also one-upped pretty much every other photo service out there with unlimited photo and video storage for free.*

That asterisk is there because it’s only unlimited for photos up to 16MP and videos up to 1080p. But really, at the moment, that should be fine for most people. But yeah, don’t expect to unload your entire RAW photo collection onto Google (at least for free).

You know me, I’m an Apple guy. I have an iPhone and I wasn’t sure how well Photos would work for us iOS users, but as it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised. The integration is very good, it auto imports all your photos and videos from iOS and lets you easily upload them to Google all at once. Then once everything is all synced up, it just stays that way going forward. You can also access your photos/videos online at photos.google.com.

With Photos, Google also introduced some neat little features such as swipe to select (select one photo, hold down, then swipe to select a bunch of others you want as well). That’s nifty and useful. How much time have we all wasted manually selecting multiple photos one by one? Too much.

There is also this great way to quickly scroll through all your photos with what I like to call the “Super Scroller” that sits on the side of the app. With the Super Scroller you can drag down and it’ll tell you exactly where you are (date wise) so you can quickly find the photos you want (assuming you remember when they were taken).

But it’s not just these little features and the unlimited storage space that I love about Google Photos. What I’m loving most is how smart the app is — let me explain. So the app can identify photos that go well together and create little animations, collages, or movies. It’s so cool! Sure, I could explain some examples, but I’d rather just show you. Check out what Google Photos created for me (without any input on my part).

Let’s start simple. Here’s a collage the app made for me when it saw some photos of me that go well together:

Now let’s ramp it up a bit. Here’s a neat animation the app created from my brother’s band playing a live show.

Ok, here’s another animation (I actually created this one myself to test it out).

And lastly, the app created this neat little movie from when I went to Lion Country Safari in Florida a few months back. Sorry I couldn’t figure out how to embed it.

Clearly Google spent a ton of time refining the photos experience and it shows. The app is polished in every sense of the word. You can do essentially everything you can in the Apple Photos app plus everything I just mentioned in the new Google app. I’m sure Apple will make updates to its photo app to compete, but right now I’m in love with Google Photos and I don’t see any reason to switch back anytime soon. Google Photos is the company’s best product in quite some time and I think the app now has a permanent place on my home screen.

Have you tried Google Photos? What do you think? Will it become your primary photo/video organization app? Let me know!