Google Photos is the standalone successor to the photo features previously embedded in
Google+, the company's social network. Google launched the social network to compete with
Facebook, but the service never became as popular as Facebook for social networking and photo sharing. Google+ offered photo storage and organizational tools that surpassed Facebook's in power, though Google+ lacked the user base to use it. By leaving the social network affiliation, the Photos service changed its association from a sharing platform to a private library platform. Unlike the native Photos service within iOS, Google Photos permits full resolution sharing across Android and iOS platforms and between the two. On February 12, 2016, Google announced that the
Picasa desktop application would be discontinued on March 15, 2016, followed by the closure of the Picasa Web Albums service on May 1, 2016. Google stated that the primary reason for retiring
Picasa was that it wanted to focus its efforts "entirely on a single photo service"; the cross-platform, web-based Google Photos. In June 2016, Google updated Photos to include automatically generated albums. After an event or trip, Photos will group some of the photos together and suggest creating an album with them, alongside maps to show geographic travel and location pins for exact places. Users can also add text captions to describe photos. In October, Google announced multiple significant updates; Google Photos now surfaces old memories with people identified in users' recent photos; it occasionally highlights a subset of photos when a user has recently taken a lot of images of a specific subject; it now makes animations from videos as well as photos (photo animations have been present since the start), displaying specific photos intermixed with short excerpts from longer videos in videos; and it now attempts to detect sideways and upside down photos and prompts the user to accept or reject a different orientation. For all of these features, Google touts
machine learning does the work, with no user interaction required. In November, Google released a separate app – PhotoScan – for users to scan printed photos into the service. The app, released for iOS and Android, uses a scanning process in which users must center their camera over four dots that overlay the printed image, so that the software can combine the photographs for a high-resolution digital image with the fewest possible defects. Later that month, Google added a "Deep blue" slider feature that lets users change the color and saturation of skies, without degrading image quality or inadvertently changing colors of other objects or elements in photos. In February 2017, Google updated the "Albums" tab on the Android app to include three separate sections; one for the phone's camera roll, with different views for sorting options (such as people or location); another for photos taken inside other apps; and a third for the actual photo albums. In March, Google added an automatic white balance feature to the service. The Android app and website were the first to receive the feature, with a later rollout to the iOS app. Later in March, updates to the service enabled uploading of photos in a "lightweight preview" quality for immediate viewing on slow cellular networks before a higher-quality upload later while on faster Wi-Fi. The feature also extends to sharing photos, in which a low-resolution image will be sent before being updated with a higher-quality version. In April, Google added
video stabilization. The feature creates a duplicate video to avoid overwriting the original clip. In May 2017, Google announced several updates to Google Photos. "Suggested Sharing" reminds users to share captured photos after the fact, and also groups photos based on faces and suggests recipients based on facial recognition. "Shared Libraries" lets two users share a central repository for all photos or specific categories of images. "Photo Books" are physical collections of photos, offered either as softcover or hardcover albums, with Photos automatically suggesting collections based on face, location, trip, or other distinction. Towards the end of the month, Google introduced an "Archive" feature that lets users hide photos from the main timeline view without deleting them. Archived content still appears in relevant albums and in search. In June, the new sharing features announced in May began rolling out to users. In December 2018, Google doubled the number of photos and videos users can store in a private Google Photos Live Album. The number increased from 10,000 to 20,000 photos, which is equivalent to the capacity for shared albums. In September 2019, Google Photos introduced a new
social media-like feature called "Memories" similar to the Stories feature in
Instagram and
Facebook which highlights past photos to give their users a nostalgic feeling. On June 25, 2020, Google Photos introduced a major redesign to the mobile and web apps, accompanied by a new, simplified logo. In March 2024,
The New York Times reported that Google Photos was being used in a facial recognition program by
Unit 8200, a surveillance unit of the
Israeli Defense Forces, to surveil
Palestinians in
Gaza amid the
Gaza war. Intelligence officers told the Times that the unit uploads databases of known faces to the service and uses its search functions to identify individuals. A Google spokesman commented that the service is free and "does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs." == Features ==