Google Photos
Most people
never delete any photos from their phone. Ever. I’ve never been able to understand
that: how do these people hope to find anything good in that dump later? Google’s
Bradley Horowitz doesn’t exaggerate when he says:
“You almost need a second vacation to go
through the pictures of the safari on your first vacation.”
Enter Google Photos. It just got launched and
the reviews sound great. Remember when Gmail was launched, it caused a wave
because it offered 1 GB of storage at a time when the other mail services
offered a few megabytes! Déjà vu: Google Photos offers unlimited photo and
video storage.
The other reason
Gmail was a game changer was because of what Google is synonymous with: search.
Gmail let you search through your mails effortlessly. Google Photos claims to
do something similar, with photos! Mario
Aguilar is blown over:
“It’s crazy how well this works. Creepy
even…where Photos really wrecks your brain is when you start searching for
random things in your collection. Beers? It finds photos of beers. Bars? It
finds photos of bars. Ugh, I am going to regret this, but type in selfies, and
it finds selfies!”
So what’s the
catch? Sean Hollister lists a few:
“It’s hard to ignore that Google is in
the business of turning gigantic data streams into personalized advertising and
services…And at some point, Google might have enough of your photos and videos
that it won’t be easy to opt-out…(At a later date, if you don’t like their
revised privacy policy) you’ll need to go buy two hard drives and download a
giant collection of photos and videos that—again—you’ve never bothered to sort,
categorize or tag.”
I’m guessing
most people will do what Hollister ends with:
“I’m hooked, and there’s no turning back.
This tech is here to stay…whether you eventually pick Google, Yahoo, Amazon, or
some other company which upgrades its service to match.”
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