Google Photos. The company's reinvention of their Photos section from Google+ as it got separated from the social network back at I/O. The photo app does a lot cool things that you may or may not know about.
To refresh your mind about it, Photos supports RAW images up to 16MP along w/ video up to 1080p for the free unlimited version and are stored as compressed versions online. You also pay for full resolution as it would count towards your 15GBs of Google storage. You can pay for it additional storage as well as create GIFs too. We've been using since Google I/O back in May and wanted to let you know why you should be using it too.
1. Cloud-Based Photo Album
Being based within the cloud, all of your stored photos can be accessible on any device your logged into the Photos app with. So you can have it on your smartphone as well as your tablet and home computer.
This also means this can free up some space on your device, especially iPhone & Galaxy S6 users by utilizing Instant Delete. When running out of storage space, this feature will suggest photos to delete on your device that were already backed up on the service. This can easily free up GBs of storage on your device. So microSD cards need not apply here (unless your storing music locally).
2. Free, Unlimited Option
We already mentioned above the breakdown of how its stored w/ 16MP for photos & 1080p videos for free. This may sound like a bad deal but the 16MP photos are still pretty close to the original resolution. This still allows you to print out 8x10 photos are your local Walgreen's or Walmart.
The paid option applies for those of you who prefer to upload your photos/videos in their true resolution. Google will charge you $2 monthly for an extra 100GB and $10 monthly for 1TB. That's still not bad as Apple's iCloud Drive only offers 500GB for $10 monthly. Only serious photographers would care about uploading RAW photos to the app and would require the paid version.
3. Assistant=Auto Awesome
For those of who actually used Photos as a part of Google+, you'll remember the cool features like generating GIFs & making 'Auto Awesome' versions of your pics. It has been brought over from their social network into the Photos app via Assistant. It creates auto-created collections, Stories are based on photos within the time/date to create a digital photo book, collages, and GIFs. The app recognized similar shots and turns them into a GIF - especially if you take lots of photos in burst mode. You also have the option create your own GIF as well but only on the mobile app as desktop app was left out of the party.
It isn't perfect by far but keep in mind, it is a version 1.0 of the product since (in the sense of it being no longer apart of Google+). You don't have robust or even Instagram-style photo editing or even minimal video-editing abilities. But it is off to a great start and already a better photo backup solution than Apple's built-in Photo Stream as that only caps at 5GB. Google's Photos solution gives you free unlimited storage or the 15GB paid version.
