Google Wants to Store All Your Photos and Videos for Free

At its annual developers conference Google I/O on Thursday, Google unveiled a new standalone service that will store all your photos and videos for free. Google Photos is now available for Android, iOS and the Web.

(Also see: Google Photos With Free, Unlimited Storage: 10 Things You Need to Know)

Once you have Google Photos installed on your Android or iOS device, photos and videos will automatically be uploaded and stored on to the cloud. Photos and videos are stored in the cloud at full resolution, with limits on maximum quality - 16-megapixel for photos and 1080p for videos. If you want to store higher resolution images or videos, you can use your Google account storage that offers 15GB of free space shared between Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos. Users can buy 1TB storage at $9.99 (Rs. 650) per month, or 100GB at $1.99 (Rs. 130) per month.

Google demoed the service on stage at I/O, and even though all images are stored on the cloud, browsing and scrolling through images looked pretty seamless. Google Photos also automatically detects people and places, without you needing to enter tags or any other types of categorisation. You can also use natural language search to find all photos that match a criteria (for example 'food in Hawaii.')

Google Photos comes with a built-in photo editor and collage maker. You can of course share images with others - even if they don't use Google Photos. Simply dragging your finger around selects multiple images, eliminating the need to tap every image individually.