Google Photos cuts out Plus to make the app we really wanted

The most striking part of the just released (on the web, iOS and Android) Google Photos is how familiar it feels if you've already been using Photos in Google+, or before that,Picasa. The biggest change I noticed early on is that by separating Photos from its attempt to launch yet another social network, Google is starting focus on stuff that both benefits its users, and that it does well: cloud storage and using information to narrow down searches. Now, it's a perfect fit for how most people use cameras everyday, from the ones in their phones to point-and-shoots (but maybe not your DSLR). With unlimited storage and machine learning that can link photos by the people in them or where they were taken it's ready to make sense of your massive image library..

The tagline is "organized by what matters" and it refers to Photos ability to pull together geotagging information (if available) or just look at your pictures and figure out where they were taken by the landmarks in them. Most importantly, this information is private -- Photos is a private library where you can curate and edit your pictures, and then share as needed. That said, it is creepily good at identifying people (you can turn that off in the settings), even if it doesn't know who they really are. With my photos, it tracked pictures of my nieces as they grew over several years and still identified them accurately. According to the FAQ, it uses "face models" to group similar photos together. Its ability to ID objects wasn't quite as good -- apparently many of my shoes register as cars or buildings, but it was mostly on point.

One element I liked was its ability to create a sharable link to a picture, which you can then go back and kill later without deleting the photo, or just track which links have been created. Of course, it's also ready to share pictures directly to services like Twitter and Facebook (or Google+) without a problem. A Google Now-like "Assistant" feature tips you off when the app is ready to build out a new collection or collage, and even has the familiar cards setup.

Many of the features that were introduced on Google+ are here too, like Auto Awesomethat quickly tweaks images to look their best and highlight faces, create animations from a series of successive shots or automatically create Stories from a place or event. By pulling these features out of Google+, it makes them more logical to use even if the friends you'll be sharing them to are on a different service. The usual light photo editing tools are also included, like cropping or adjusting levels.