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Google announces unlimited picture and video storage with new Photos app

Google announces unlimited picture and video storage with new Photos app

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Google is making a big play for your photos. It's releasing a revamped Google Photos today that offers unlimited storage of images and videos entirely for free. Resolution is limited to 16 megapixels for photos and 1080p for videos, but that's not much to complain about (if you want to store a higher resolution file, it can also tap into Google Drive storage). Photos is being made available on iOS, Android, and the web, and it includes a number of other helpful features that may make you want to pick it up.

Photos automatically organizes all of your images

The other big feature present in Photos is around organization. Google will analyze your images and automatically sort them into groups. On stage, Google showed how it could sort out photos of skylines and beaches — it's a lot like what Flickr rolled out earlier this month. It'll also identify people, so that you can scroll through images of them over time. It can even track them as they age.

Google Photos in photos

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That organization allows Google to put its search skills to good use. Google demonstrated how you could search for specific moments in photos, looking up "snowstorm in Toronto" as an example, and receiving images of snowy days in that location.

Google is also trying to make sharing photos a bit easier. With the new Photos, it'll allow users to share groups of images without requiring the recipient to have the app — it'll just make a web gallery. That's not a particular unique feature, but it's still a big convenience when you're trying to send someone else a set of pictures to download.

The release of Photos also seems to be a sign that Google is finally breaking out Google+'s strongest points. It was always excellent with photo storage, and now people can get that without signing up for a new social network. That means that with today's release, Google just became one of the biggest players in photo storage.

Check out our Google I/O Live Blog for the latest updates and our Google hub for all the news!

Google I/O 2015: Introducing the new Google Photos