The current incarnation of Google Photos was not Google’s first image management platform, but it’s been a big success. Ten years on, Google Photos remains one of Google’s most popular products, and it’s getting a couple of new features to celebrate its 10th year in operation. You’ll be able to share albums a bit more easily, and editing tools are getting a boost with, you guessed it, AI.
Google Photos made a splash in 2015 when it broke free of the spiraling Google+ social network, offering people supposedly unlimited free storage for compressed images. Of course, that was too good to last. In 2021, Google began limiting photo uploads to 15GB for free users, sharing the default account level storage with other services like Gmail and Drive. Today, Google encourages everyone to pay for a Google One subscription to get more space, which is a bit of a bummer. Regardless, people still use Google Photos extensively.
According to the company, Photos has more than 1.5 billion monthly users, and it stores more than 9 trillion photos and videos. When using the Photos app on a phone, you are prompted to automatically upload your camera roll, which makes it easy to keep all your memories backed up (and edge ever closer to the free storage limit). Photos has also long offered almost magical search capabilities, allowing you to search for the content of images to find them. That may seem less impressive now, but it was revolutionary a decade ago. Google says users perform over 370 million searches in Photos each month.
An AI anniversary
Google is locked in with AI as it reimagines most of its products and services with Gemini. As it refreshes Photos for its 10th anniversary, the editor is getting a fresh dose of AI. And this may end up one of Google’s most used AI features—more than 210 million images are edited in Photos every month.