The first day of the Google I/O conference has come to an end, and the Mountain View giant used it to the fullest to deliver new announcements. From mobile platforms to the Internet of Things, little was left unaddressed, but the star of the show was Google Photos, a new service separate from Google Plus that stores photos and videos in the cloud at very high resolution, without storage limits.
There is always a "moment" in the year when any company must review strategies and reposition its pieces in an attempt to understand and conquer a dynamic market that often borders on chaos. Google sits almost at the center of the whirlwind. Its position as the number one in web search and advertising is indisputable, but the other fronts it fights on give no respite. That "moment" when the future of the Google universe comes into debate is the I/O conference. Technically, it is an event designed for developers, but in recent editions the Mountain View giant has also used it to present new initiatives to the public. The core of the announcements was made up of Android M, the successor to Lollipop, the official introduction of Brillo, a brand-new operating system aimed at the complex Internet of Things, and Android Pay, which seeks to position itself as a direct rival to Apple Pay. However, there is something that stood a step above the rest: Google Photos.
History tells us that Google bought Picasa in 2004. Its technology gave rise to Picasa Web Albums, which in turn was absorbed by Google Plus Photos in March 2013. As we have tried to explain to Google over the years, nobody uses Google Plus as a whole, and it is more useful for users if services are separated... as they were in the beginning. That is how we arrive at the new Google Photos, with a polished web version and dedicated apps for Android and iOS. One of the most impressive aspects of Google Photos is its ability to recognize what is in the photos. For example: If you upload an image of the Eiffel Tower without geolocation tags or anything similar, Google Photos can detect the Eiffel Tower and determine that the place is Paris. According to David Lieb, the leader of the team responsible for Google Photos, the system takes into account details of time and space, so that if the photos before and after the Eiffel Tower shot were taken within a reasonable timeframe, Google Photos concludes that they also show Paris.
If that is not enough, Google Photos offers something more: Unlimited storage. This allows the service to put pressure on its direct competitors, although "unlimited" comes with a few asterisks. If images exceed 16 megapixels in resolution, Google Photos will apply an automatic "recompression" (of very good quality, from what we have seen), and the same applies to videos above 1080p. The user has the option to keep the original size, but the excess will be deducted from the general storage space in the Google account (15 GB free, $2 per month for 100 GB, $10 for 1 TB). Google Photos is already available in its web edition; however, some users may have to wait a bit to access it.
