Apple And Google Both Released “Photos” This Year, And Google Won The Pulitzer
Well by “Photos,” I mean separate apps both named Photos: Photos for OS X and Google Photos.
A photo is everything now, because if something can speak a thousand words so easily, why would we waste our saliva when we have phones that can do that for us with ease, and filters to boot? With smartphones, and Instagram, and GIFs, and the moment our parents learnt the word “selfie” and thought it was so hip that they took it to a new level with the selfie stick: we've all become photographers in our own way (some more skilled than others, thank you very much). Apps have been created to make everyone feel like an editing, photo-filtering pro, and more importantly the space to store all these memories has quintupled thanks to cloud storage, which has never really been 100% free to enjoy... until about a week ago! And yes I will get to that and share with you the goodness of free cloud storage, but first we must acknowledge the title of this article and talk about the two newest (and biggest) photo apps so far this year (Or you can just skip down to Google Photos, that’s the good stuff!).
Hoping to revamp their below-par, native photo-editing desktop app, Apple released Photos with the latest update of OS X Yosemite earlier this year, replacing iPhoto on your Mac’s dock with the iPhone-esque Photos (Spoiler-alert: iPhoto will still lurk among your computer’s apps, refusing to be forgotten).
If you’re like me, iPhoto was nothing more than that annoying app that popped open any time you plugged in your iOS device to your Mac. It’s interface wasn’t very pleasing and the one time I hoped to use it for some basic photo editing it underwhelmed. It actually made me miss Windows for a while. Scary. Photos promised a smoother editing and sharing experience, and continuity between your Mac and your iOS devices, and for the most part it lived up the hype.
Photos’ interface is pretty much your iOS Photos app on a desktop, and that’s ok, that’s an improvement. It brings some simplicity to the app and really helps with navigating and looking for time and location based photos. As for seamlessly connecting your Mac and iOS devices, you will need to make sure iCloud Photo Sharing is turned on on all your devices, something which literally took me about 3 weeks to figure out because in all it’s simplicity Photos doesn’t really give you any indication on how that works, I had to open the app’s Quick Tour for that one. Of course dealing with Apple and iCloud means nothing comes cheap, so you are only entitled to 5GB of free cloud storage and the price goes up from there.
One of Photos’ stronger features though is Faces, it’s face recognition album that analyzes your photo library and makes out the individual faces in each picture, and can match that face with a name on your contact list if you already have a picture of that person. Face recognition isn’t a new thing of course but Photos actually made sorting through my photos and matching names with faces a fun activity, and it automatically saves the faces as contact pictures for your contacts. Why this isn’t a feature on iOS devices is what Apple needs to explain.
I haven’t gotten to try out photo editing on the app yet but Apple promises a comprehensive set of powerful but easy-to-use editing tools, and from what I’ve seen it’s basically your choice of filters with advanced knobs and gears and I’m not kidding it starts to look somewhat complex after a while. The way I see it though you’ll probably get by with just choosing a filter for your picture and maybe adjusting saturation if you want to feel like a pro.
Photos probably won’t do you much good if you’re a hardcore photo editor/graphic designer, but if your the simple, give-the-picture-some-panache type of person, it’s aii.
Google Photos... & Free Unlimited Cloud Storage!
All right, the good stuff!
So last week was Google I/O, Google’s developer conference in which it unveils new ideas and concepts for the future of the company and the world at large, and this year Google officially launched Google Photos on Android, the web, and iOS, with everyone in the world at mind.
... I don’t even know where to start. I guess I’ll just say it now: Google Photos comes with free unlimited cloud storage. Yes. No catch. Sorta. Let me explain...
Today, we take more photos every 2 minutes than everyone, everywhere took in the 1800s. #io15 pic.twitter.com/jxAMLdtOMx
— Google (@google) May 28, 2015
An early incarnation of Google Photos actually existed as a side feature of Google+ which I knew as Google Auto Backup (Yes, I’m on Google+, don’t judge me). This feature backed up all the photos on the Android phone that I had at the time, and stored them in Google Drive. With the exuberant amount of photos we’re stockpiling these days though, Google decided to create Photos off this concept, but with NO LIMIT, ABSOLUTELY FREE, “for high quality photos and videos.” That *high quality* simply means photos up to 16-megapixels and video up to 1080p HD, but no need to panic, this is no problem at all! iPhones can only take pictures up to 8-megapixels, and most Android smartphone cameras peak at 16MP, so you will most definitely be backing up ALL your smartphone photos to Google Photos for free, and with this Google hopes that you can store all your photos for lifetimes! The only real drawbacks are that photos only backup while the phone screen is active and the app is open, but this shouldn’t be a problem after your initial backup (which will be your longest), also higher quality photos and videos would have to abide by the basic Google Drive rates: 15GB free for startsies, and the price goes up from there.
Even though unlimited storage is its main selling point, Google Photos still has some pretty impressive features up its code. Its layout both in the app and online look good and are easy to navigate, and searching for a photo brings the best results when you’ve got the world’s #1 search engine involved. The app makes use of some “smart” technology (which isn’t facial recognition) that can detect all sorts of things in a picture and categorize each picture into “People,” “Places,” and “Things.” You can then search with keywords such as “dog” or “rain” or “West Virginia” and you get a picture from your collection with whatever or wherever you searched for. It works almost too well, and honestly it might blow your mind.
Google Photos’ best feature though is the Assistant. Asides from the basic photo editing tools you can expect to find in the app, Google added an “Assistant” that auto-detects similarities between photos or certain features of photos that it can use to add amazing effects.
Google Auto Backup silently had this feature, and I knew I would miss it once I switched to an iPhone, but as my photos slowly backed up to the cloud through WiFi, the app notified me that the assistant had created effects to some of my pictures...
In honor of this award-deserving app, this week on here will be #PhotosWeek. All my posts on here will be Photo-themed, with a #PhotoOfTheWeek to be revealed at the end of the week.
Have you downloaded the app yet???