Google Photos Has It All
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Google Photos is a spectacular product that has helped to rekindle my passion for photography. Since the launch in May 2015, I’ve uploaded 39,524 photos, created 117 albums and enjoyed countless “aha” moments, all while benefitting from a steady rollout of new features. Google Photos makes it a joy to share and find my photos taken on both my DSLR and smartphone, and doesn’t stop me from keeping a hard disk backup or photoblog.
Prior to the launch, I was stuck. I was managing my photos on an external hard drive with Picasa, which was a pretty good workflow for DSLR photography, but merging in photos from smartphone and sharing them was extremely tedious. I love sharing my photos and quickly adopted Facebook photos as they were rolled out. (I remember celebrating the end of the 60 photo limit on albums.) My photos became out of sync, because Facebook captions didn’t sync back to my hard drive.
There was no single place to store all my photos in cloud. I was price conscious and I wanted as much control as possible.
//TODO insert gallery of favorite features
//TODO describe offline flow
Basics: free, unlimited, cross-platform, compression and more.
Search: date, caption, labels, type, people and places.
Albums: add, edit, share, collaborate, comment, descriptions, sort, and maps.
Edit: description, date, crop, rotate and color.
Assistant automation: labeling, estimated location, and creation of albums, collages, movies, animations, rotations and panoramas.
Assistant notifications: rediscover this day, comments and shared albums.
Drawbacks: lacks bulk edit, lacks bulk geotag, export omits descriptions and estimated location, flattens directory structure