Google Photos is the home for all your photos and videos, automatically organized and easy to share.
– “The best photo product on Earth” – The Verge
– “Google Photos is your new essential picture app” – Wired
The official Google Photos app is made for the way you take photos today and includes essential features like shared albums, automatic creations and an advanced editing suite. Additionally every Google Account comes with 15 GB of storage and you can choose to automatically back up all your photos and videos in High quality or Original quality. You can then access them from any connected device and on photos.google.com.
With the official app, you get:
15 GB OF STORAGE: Back up 15 GB of photos and videos and access them from any device and photos.google.com—your photos are safe, secure, and private to you. All photos and videos you back up in High quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward your Google Account storage.
FREE UP SPACE: Never worry about running out of space on your phone again. Photos that are safely backed up can be removed from your device’s storage in just a tap.
AUTOMATIC CREATIONS: Bring photos to life with automatically created movies, collages, animations, panoramas, and more from your photos. Or easily create them yourself.
ADVANCED EDITING SUITE: Transform photos with a tap. Use intuitive and powerful photo editing tools to apply content-aware filters, adjust lighting, and more.
SHARING SUGGESTIONS: With smart sharing suggestions, giving your friends the photos you took of them is painless. And they can add their photos, too, so you’ll finally get the photos you’re actually in.
FAST AND POWERFUL SEARCH: Your photos are now searchable by the people, places and things in them — no tagging required.
LIVE ALBUMS: Select the people and pets you want to see and Google Photos will automatically add photos of them as you take them, no manual updates needed.*
PHOTO BOOKS: Create a photo book in just minutes from your phone or computer. You can also see suggested photo books based on your best shots from a trip or period of time.*
GOOGLE LENS: Search the hard-to-describe and get stuff done, right from a photo. Copy and translate text, identify plants and animals, add events to your calendar, find products online, and more.
SEND PHOTOS IN SECONDS: Instantly share photos with any contact, email, or phone number.
SHARED LIBRARIES: Grant a trusted person access to all of your photos.
You can also upgrade storage for your Google Account, used for Original Quality photos and videos by subscribing to Google One. Subscriptions start at $1.99/month for 100 GB in the US. Pricing and availability can vary by region.
– Google One Terms of Service: https://one.google.com/terms-of-service
– One Google Pricing: https://one.google.com/about
For additional help visit https://support.google.com/photos
Google Photos is also available on Wear OS for the Google Pixel Watch. Set your favorite photos as your watch face.
*Face grouping, live albums and photo books are not available in all countries.
It’s been ok. Would love to see better and easier duplicate picture removal tools. Would like better control of where it pulls photos from and then where they are stored. Not happy that locked folders do not move contents automatically when you buy a new phone, lost a bunch of pictures then. Lost a ton of pictures when Drive and photos divorced and went their own ways. Would be nice to have a higher level of photo editing built into the app. Recent edits/photos folder can miss pics.
Try downloading videos with four or five scenes. It can’t keep them in order especially when you’re uploading to OneDrive and Verizon Cloud at the same time. Some end up out of order on all of them. One scene shows up on OneDrive another in Photos. It’s disaster.I guess I have shut one off so that all parts get uploaded to one service. Otherwise it’s good way to save video.
Still think you should add a delete option to the archive suggestion! Love the collage and canvas ideas. Something they are difficult to locate them again. A place to save these would be awesome. Just because we don’t want to order them at that moment, doesn’t mean we are not wanting to at a future date. So a save/save for later option is a win for us both!
Super frustrating trying to save photos and videos. Says “saved” and it’s no where to be found. It would be much better if you could select where you’re saving to and if it would actually save. Despite having full battery and trying multiple connections, no improvement on that function. Also, not all videos and photos come up when entering a simple date or year in the search box.
1. Bad December update – there used to be an option to take snapshots while taking a video, but it’s gone now. There’re no options or setting on the video screen now while the video is being recorded. 2. Why do I have to jump through a 1000 hoops to get a picture marked up? The editing options are laughable – the pen or marker size is fixed, which makes them useless on a phone screen. Each markup is saved as a separate copy without giving an option, and I end up with dozens of pictures.
Notifications are intentionally difficult. For example, you’re telling me to turn on photo backup and that I need to buy more storage. So where is that seeing? You tell me – It’s buried somewhere in the 50+ Google Play Services notifications settings. This is far from acceptable. EDIT: New version is not improved. Markup functionality is a huge step backwards. It’s pretty clear that Google is good at acquiring companies but very bad at writing their own software. Terrible.
Great app, save for the inability to identify duplicates for deletion. I mean, c’mon! Yer Killin’ Me! The ability to search photos with keywords, (even color), and the interactive map are fun ways to browse forgotten memories. Also the editing features are sufficient for most editing jobs. If you can get past the fact that you are a willing and eager participant in helping Google map every aspect of our reality in preparation of…of…
As someone that has a TON of photos that I’ve gathered from online and my own personal collections, I need a place to store and organize them all in one spot, and Google photos fits that bill perfectly. It’s not PERFECT, I’ve noticed a issue where some photos show up by the date they were originally taken instead of the date I downloaded them, but it’s not the end of the world and I can probably fix it in my settings somewhere. No major issues with it thus far
I’m honestly getting annoyed at this app. For this being the default app for my phone, it’s lacking some key features such as sorting my albums. And within those albums you cannot sort either. And upon updating, they have once again cleared my bookmarked photos. I could find a better photo gallery app in my toilet. The one positive is that you can look at your photos. But good luck finding a specific one in a timely manner or doing anything beyond that.
It really is the best out there. I’ve tried other photo/gallery apps and they just don’t compare. The ease and the flexibility of capturing, backing up, modifying and reaccessing just can’t be beat. My only glitch is I’m not a fan of having things out in some ‘cloud.’ When I find something that can outperform Google photos and regain my full privacy I’m gone.
It appears there is a problem with the latest update. I keep getting the message “photos keeps stopping” repeatedly. It is very annoying! Just received a new update yesterday and now it appears that photos is working properly again. Thank you for whatever you did. The only little issue that I still have is that you cannot select and download multiple photos for Facebook or Instagram. You have to choose them one at a time and download them to your file manager first.
There are several things that should be easy to do that are either hard or impossible. After so many years in existence, I expect a better product. Examples: 1) if there is a small photo, in slideshow mode what is the point of showing it as small? At least give the user the option of resizing the photo, 2) there should be the option to control the speed of a slideshow – e.g., what if there is text that takes time to read?
I don’t know what happened with this most recent update, but ever since my app updated a few days ago, I haven’t been able to see ANY photos that are added to shared albums. I get plenty of notifications saying photos were added, but I can’t see any of them when I click the notification or go into the app. It’s pretty irritating how buggy it is, and since I use the shared album for work, I’m *really* hoping it gets fixed soon.
It would be nice if Google would quit changing the formats on all of their apps and then they decide to eliminate them for a newer app that doesn’t work nearly as well, like Google Gallery, it sucks. But this app needs fixing still. If I am placing a photo into Archive folder why does it still appear with the other photos? There is no need for a photo to appear in multiple folders, if I put it into a specific folder, it shouldn’t be in any other folder it’s a waste of space.
Its really good, everything, the backup, the way its organized, the fact that you can see photos from your devices all together. However, I would like for it to maybe have an option that makes the photos deleted on the device get deleted in the Photos app too so I don’t have to delete them manually which takes time and sometimes is a struggle
Overall this is a great app. I’m lucky to have extra storage through Google one. If I didn’t, I would probably have to buy additional storage which in my opinion should be free. Also would love to see more editing options to keep up with other free apps available. I love that I can have all my Google apps connected and synced on all my devices.
Edit: app is worse than last edit. Will be leaving, when i get time to swap files. I despise that instead of displaying the dates or saying “on this day last year” it now just gives vague descriptions of seemingly random unrelated pictures. . Why did anyone feel it was necessary to do this when it was perfect exactly how it was ?! Revert back to an older version and fire the team working on this
I actually rly like google photos. It is kinda bittersweet at times. When you’re looking at some items the app creates for you like the “from _____ year(s) ago today” pictures. It brings back memories and reminds you of certain events/people/things that you almost let slip past your memory. Also i wouldnt be surprised if you’re actually able to turn off these features (like the “moments”) etc. Personally, I like the things the app makes generally. Plus the app, at least for me, runs smoothly.
Hot take incoming – This tech company Google, makes good products for my life and needs. I really like having everything synced up amongst them. I think there are always features that could be cooler, or some of the UI might be improved in some ways. Ultimately I need my products to work consistently, and do what I expect them to do. Photos does that for me 100%. And IMO every UI that’s ever been created, has been one’s favorite thing, and another’s worst ever. Not a factor for my rating.
I’m not computer smart at all but the ease and clarity of using this app makes it easy for me to get things done. I especially like the ability to take a picture of something even if a screen shot and go shopping for it. Try it for this feature alone makes life easier and you might even get educated in the process. For further explanation you’ll have to try it!
I was honestly fine with the app and would have rated higher until the last 3 days. The app has been glitching and causing the screen to flash like crazy, then locks up the phone. I’ve rebooted the phone several times but it only happens when I’m using the Google Photos App. I also uninstalled and reinstalled the app and still have the same issues. Ran my virus protection again just to be safe and it shows no issues with the phone itself so it’s problems with the app itself.
This app has helped me to choose photos that are blurry and out of sync with my devices and that I have duplicates or multiples of that I do not need. It also helps me to utilize features like changing the light effects and making the picture brighter and easier to view. I would like to try the option of creating a GIF which does seem to be an option. The Google 1 storage is also a great value for storage of photos from Google.
I enjoy Google Photos! It’s a simple photo storage app but the thing I enjoy most is that is syncs with all of my devices whether they are Android or iOS. I have all of my photos from the past 13 years. Google has saved precious memories of loved ones who have died and I didn’t even know it until years later. This service is invaluable and priceless. Google Photos has a lot of amazing features under the hood also; such as their editing features, personally
This goes without saying but this is a crucial part of Android’s ecosystem that makes it one of the best in the world. With that being said, I’ve noticed a very interesting bug that has plagued the last few versions of this app and has not been fixed. When using the face grouping feature, I am unable to actually add or edit names of the individuals that have been grouped via the AI algorithm. I’m currently using the Pixel 7 pro but was using the pixel 4xl beforehand and had the same issue.Fix it
I love the peace of mind and convenience of having Google photos backup the photos and videos on my phone – and also the convenience of being able to pull up those photos on other devices. Saves me so much time from having to transfer photos from my phone to my computer manually with a cable to free up storage space.
I enjoy using Google Photos overall, but there is room for improvement. One feature I would like to see added is the ability to view all the folders I’ve got my photos organized in, and the ability to sort the folders in alphabetical order. I can get to my photos via the “Library”, but I can’t the folders are not sorry in alphabetical order. So I have to scroll through the list until I find the folder I’m looking for. It would also be good to be able to sort them in selectable date order.
The new update to memories is terrible. The photos now have some sort of dynamic zoom so the photo won’t stand still. Google now hides the Android navigation bar so that you have to use the unnatural vertical swipe navigation they’ve recently introduced, and can’t easily navigate out. The feel is unnatural because a timeline is intuitively horizontal, not vertical. And in any case Android is mostly a horizontal navigation scheme. Please change it back. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Most recent update jacked up my phone. Any time I try to edit a photo, it just spins and spins, and I end up having to force close. Cache and data clearing do nothing to fix it. Uninstalled the most recent update and it works fine. Once it decides to update itself again, it breaks again. Cool.
The app keeps playing random music over my memories and I hate it. I don’t need some sappy music playing, especially if I’m in public. At least give us an option to turn that off. I find the songs annoying too, super distracting when I’m remembering friends and pets that are no longer here. I used to look forward to reviewing my memories everyday, it was a nice bit of joy that has now been tainted by this unnecessary music. Let us turn it off.
The app gives you absolutely ZERO control over how you want to organize your photos. Automatically sorts them by date with no way to change it. Sorts albums into a single flat hierarchy instead of letting you group them into folders so you’ll have to scroll though hundreds of albums to find what you’re looking for. Trys to use AI to sort your photos but the AI sucks. Clearly made by a team that just wanted to deploy something and move onto the next project.
Trying to open up space, I deleted over 4000 pictures but it still says the folder is full. I’ll be switching back to Samsung with my next phone. Saving/downloading a picture doesn’t have it show up in my pictures for texting, Facebook, smartframe, etc. So sharing pictures of s a lot more inconvenient. My phone doubles as my camera so that function is a priority for me.
The photo suggestions are fantastic! Sometimes ill tale multiple photos of a landscape and stitch them together, but Photos will have that as a suggestion if I don’t get to it right away. I also like the slide show option you can add to your phone’s home screen. There are several settings so you can cycle through your most favorite photos and moments. There’s even frams and size choice. The editor isn’t too bad, either. Although I prefer photoshop or paint shop pro. 🤔 😁❤️
Please add an option to hide albums that are on the sd card. And an option to set a cover image for each album would be nice as well. This app came pre installed on my phone. So I don’t see ads but I also don’t get some options in the editing feature like “blur background”. Many items in the editing feature are paid options if you upgrade the google storage.
Update 01/2020- getting much better, bumped up a star. LOVE Google photos, and it’s fantastic when it works. Problem is, the app only works about half the time. Doesn’t hide photos you ask it to hide, won’t add names to photos you ask it to, locks up, refuses to manifest the keyboard when you need to enter text, and so on. Really wish it would work, because the concept is super useful.
Love that you can easily add photos to multiple albums. Wish there was a way to manually sort albums or quickly hide/unhide them. Also, the search functionality seems to have trouble finding text in dark backgrounds. (It seems to be successful only if there’s black text on a white background.)
I love Google photos but it needs more. I have to use multiple photo apps because the editing and movie making is limited at best. I don’t know if it’s possible to make an app like picsart, power director, and Google photos combined.. but if it was it would be the PERFECT photo video app. That being said, I still can’t go a day without Google photos..🤣
Every single time I try to edit a photo and save the copy, the app crashes and doesn’t save the edit. I’ve tried updating the app, clearing the cache, and uninstalling/reinstalling. Same problem. Update: I had already tried to all the suggestions in your article. I’m not gonna waste time submitting a ticket, I just downloaded a different app.
My trusty go to app for all my photos to backup to, so I never lose a precious moment! It’s super easy to find a photo your looking for with it’s search features, like grouping photos by location, things, people (each different face it recognizes you can name who that person is making it that much easier!) Plus they give you sooo much free storage space! They make you collages and show you memories which are always nice on gloomy days!
This is the only Photos app I’ve ever used because it meets all my needs. I love that I can gather different photo categories into individual albums and that I can edit the albums in order to organize the photos into various groupings, as I paint as a hobby and I like to download pics from Pinterest and save them to the albums so that I have something to use as a model when I start a new painting. I organize by color or type, depending on what my next project is about. Plenty to love here!
Disable cinematic photo memories. I have android version 12. I enjoy the “looking back” photo memories it shows me multiple times a week. But recently they added a “cinematic” feature where each photo slowly zooms in or out slightly with no way to disable it. It’s distracting and made the experience way worse. Disable the cinematic photo view. ALSO when scrolling through the memories, I used to swipe up to dismiss the feed. Now I have to press the X, less intuitive. Can I roll back this update?
Easy way to archive photos, edit, crop, etc., and even experiment with colorization, and if you make a mistake, you simply revert back to the original photo. Fascinating! I just wish all of the features available through membership were available to everyone. One last thing: Who was the “genius” that thought it was a good idea to rate everything, no matter how innocuous, AND, as if that’s insufficient fodder, have to tell you how we feel about it? Mind-boggling, and a HUGE waste of time!
This app has forever improved technology. I work for a wireless company, and while setting up/backing up customer’s phones we run into a lot of issues when things don’t quite go as planned. Let me tell you, in more occasions that i can even remember, google photos has saved the day, allowing me to provide the excellent customer experience that I strive for.
App works pretty well, storage is meh, and shame that the Pixel Pro uses this instead of an actual gallery app, but some of the editing features are pretty nice at least. Still learning to adapt to it as I had an S10 prior, but it’s alright. Not great, not terrible; gets the job done, basically. Grateful for the storage space that allows me to remove things off my phone, but the folders and moving things around can be a bit complicated, unfortunately.
I use Google photos to back up the photos on my phone. My new phone doesn’t have an SD slot, so the internal storage filled up pretty quickly with the number of photos I had. I backed them up to Google Photos and then used the free up space utility, only to discover that Google Photos doesn’t save them into the albums I had them sorted into. YEARS of photos, disorganized in a matter of minutes, with no way to undo it. Thanks a lot, Google.
Simply the best. I don’t 500 characters are enough to say about this app so I’ll make it short. Not only easy great for organizing my photos and easy to share, it fixes my photos, automatically creates panorama pictures from individual pictures I took, automatically creates collage from related photos. The feature I like the most is it often shows me old pictures so I can relive the moment.
I like this app except your written part, needs more options, color control, variable fonts needed, with various background plates. And better organization of photo options, I would like to see for instance….the ability to pick up a photo and place it with another in sequence, like a dated photo next to another before or after a particular date…thanks for listening, Jim in Jamestown California.
Poor interface. Very cluttered layout and poor aesthetics. Should adopt a more minimalist design, and make navigating the app a more streamlined process. Too many features (i.e. Archive, share, albums, folders.) The ability to move pictures between album and camera roll seamlessly as well as a multiselection picture function are to be expected in any decent photo app but is somehow lacking in this one.
I don’t know how but it’s good to see some of my old photos from my old phone that maybe saved up in the cloud appear on my Google photos. I have no quite a few albums at a good price. I just wish that they can add a feature to LinkedIn videos that’s been taken. And although I got the six before the seven came out by the way the little longer I would have to seven with her the photos are immaculately beautiful.
Love Google photos, easy to share family photos with family and friends. But I do wish on the phone app (for Android) that you could search for the album by typing the name is the album when adding photos to albums. I have many many albums and scrolling is not easy. Also would be nice to be able to have the option to search albums as a list without the album cover pic to find albums faster. Thank you!
This app could be great. It’s simple and the editing and organization features are great and in the right place. Unfortunately, the app fails randomly to do the simplest tasks such as moving an image to a different local directory or to edit a locally stored image for no rational reason whatsoever. This has been the case for many years now and is worse than ever in 2023. For a company with the talent and engineering power of Google, I find this inexcusable.
Worst photo manager I’ve ever used, would prefer one with zero frills. Doesn’t remove duplicates, just hides them. If I try to delete the one photo showing, I delete them all, though. Files often don’t show up for over a day. I can see them in other apps so I know they’re there. Can’t open folders if there’s 8 or less images inside, which means I can’t move photos to other folders for some arbitrary reason. Can’t delete empty folders.
Deleted around half the images on my old phone, including the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT image I’ve ever saved, instead of showing when an image was taken it shows when it was added to a folder, shuffles images so when they need to be in a certian order they aren’t, you have to go out of your way to find where something is saved because you can’t search by day and it only shows photos and not downloads, screenshots, etc. Can’t hide albums, and so many more issues I don’t have nearly enough space for.
They want you to help them train their face recognition software by labeling all your friends. If you try to post a pic somewhere you can’t do it from the site, and you can’t open pics from Photoshop, you can’t browse photos on your computer. It came with the phone along with the very dumb, bad listening, short attention span, confused “assistant”. Photos, the Annoying Folder, try to open it today. Folder, album… mystery
I love Google photos. The app itself does really cool things, such as put together specialized albums of the people places & events you photograph. But most important to me is that you never have to worry about losing your photos forever if you happen to lose your device you took them on..because they’re all backed up to the app itself. So if you lose your device, you just download the app onto the next device you get and all your pictures are still there safe and sound, giving u peace of mind.
This is by far the worst photo app ever. It doesnt have a save feature, the ways you can select photos is horrible, and it takes up all of your storage on google. To fix this, you either have to manually delete all your photos, or pay for more storage. I went to delete my photos off the app and then it deleted photos from my phones storage, Very important photos that now there is no way to get back because this app apperently has the right to delete photos from your phone outside of the app.
This app tries to do too much, and most of it I don’t want at all. I use Gallery from Google LLC. It’s much simpler and makes it easy to move things from actual folders to other folders. And it doesn’t pop up in your face with “let google do this or do that,” because it doesn’t have unwanted fluff.
Great app, not much to complain about except I wish they offered a way to change the pin to my locked folder from my phones pin… like if someone breaks into my phone all of my sensitive photos and documents are available. Also considering we have to pay for storage I would hope more options for editing would be available but over all pretty cherry app.
Great features. I only wish it were more automatically accessible for outsiders who use phones other than Androids. Some people out there straight up don’t understand Google accounts. I also dislike how backup quality was lowered by default. A lot of my older media is horribly compressed because I didn’t know I could backup in full quality. I also wish I could rename individual shared media links instead of displaying only the date.
This app stinks. It is so hard to keep everything organized, and my phone does this weird thing where when I delete photos from my other gallery, they don’t delete in Google photos. It makes everything super messy and hard to manage. There were a lot of other problems with it too, like when I freed up space in google photos, it still kept the photos I wanted to delete, but those photos went to trash IN MY OTHER GALLERY! It makes no sense and is super confusing and hard to organize and manage.
Photo editor hasn’t been working properly for a while, I just updated the app and it still won’t work. This app sucks, I’ll edit a picture, save it and then check the gallery and the photo reverts back to being uneditted. I’ll highlight a vertical portion of an image, save it, then go to the gallery and it either didn’t save or it adjusted the highlight to being in a different part of the photo. Absolutely Terrible App!! Do Not Download!!
I wish that markups would work. Whenever I do markups on my Chromebook, it saves the markup over a corrupted image. I have followed those steps, I attempted to access the second link and it is not valid. I have posted numerous requests on forums. The whole reason I got this Chromebook was to be able to use the stylus to markup photos since I would break a Note phone because of the curved screen. It is very disappointing that Google has not responded to a single one of my forum requests.
This app has helped me capture some of the most amazing experiences of my life! Great adventures almost every day! I love the ways I am able to edit and share my pictures and videos. I am only saddened by the idea that in order for me to KEEP my photos, I would have to BUY more storage. That is the deal breaker for me. Otherwise, the app is awesome.
I would love if you’re photos would not over take the camera storage in my Android with your automatic back up. I don’t want to use this feature as I shoot a lot of photos and i like to edit, delete and save to one of my Gmail drives in various folders. I was going through some photos via your program tonight and it started automatically backing up my photos to Google photos…. ugh…no I can’t turn it back off. This total integration is not what I want to use.