Google Photos - Store & organize photos

The app called Google Photos serves as a central hub for all your photos and videos, arranging them automatically and facilitating easy sharing. Referred to by The Verge as "The best photo product on Earth" and by Wired as "Your new essential picture app," the official tool is tailored to the modern approach to photography. It offers features like shared albums, automated creations, and an advanced editing suite. Each Google Account provides 15 GB of storage with options to back up content in High quality or Original quality. This enables users to access their media across various devices or through photos.google.com.

Key benefits of using the official Google Photos app include:

- 15 GB OF STORAGE: Allows backup of up to 15 GB of pictures and videos with effortless access from any device or photos.google.com.

- FREE UP SPACE: Safely backed-up photos can be removed from the device's storage without space concerns.

- NO ADS: Assures user privacy by not selling images/videos or utilizing personal data for advertising purposes.

- FAST AND POWERFUL SEARCH: Enables searching for media based on content without manual tagging requirements.

- GOOGLE LENS: Offers diverse functionalities like text copying/translation, object identification, event scheduling, online shopping assistance etc., directly from images.

- ADVANCED EDITING SUITE: Provides quick transformation tools such as filters adjustment techniques for enhancing photographs easily.

Additional offerings involve automatic generation of movies, collages, animations, panoramas among others; intelligent sharing suggestions; live albums feature; ability to create quick photo books; instant photo-sharing capabilities; shared libraries availability; potential storage upgrades via Google One subscription plans starting at $1.99/month for 100GB in US regions.

Navigating the Google Photos App

The Google Photos app has three main tabs at the bottom: Photos, Search, and Library.

You’ll notice the app looks ever so slightly different depending on whether you’re using an iPhone/iPad or Android device.

Let’s take a closer look.

The first tab is Photos. This is where you see your past Memories and most recent photos.

The next tab is Search. This is where you can look for your photos by person, category, map, or things. You can also view your creations: animations, collages, and movies.

The third tab is Library. Here you’ll find your Albums, Favorites, Archives, and Trash. You can also make animations, collages, and movies through the Utilities option.

You view an individual photo by tapping on it. This is also how you access the options for editing and sharing a photo.

The image below explains what all the icons on a photo mean.

This is what the icons surrounding an individual photo mean:

- Cast to: Allows you to stream your photos from your phone to your TV using Chromecast. If you don’t have a Chromecast, you won’t see this icon.

- Favorite: Adds the photo to your favorites folder.

- More Options: Lets you add to album, archive, delete, and edit photo information. You can also open the image in Snapseed which is a photo editing app.

- Share: Used to easily share a photo with others. The icon looks a little different on iPhone/iPad but is in the same position as the image above.

- Edit: Used to apply filters to your photos; adjust light, color, or pop; rotate or crop the photo. If you want more complex photo editing tools you’d go to More Options (…) and then Open in Snapseed.

- Google Lens: Image recognition software designed to bring up relevant information using visual analysis. We explain this tool more further on.

Note that certain functions such as face grouping feature may not be accessible in all countries. Available additionally on Wear OS compatible devices including Google Pixel Watch which enables setting favorite pictures as watch faces."