Google Photos

Google Photos is a photo library that syncs to a Google account. The app itself is free; what costs money is the storage behind it, which is shared with Gmail and Drive across the same account.

The storage question comes first

Free accounts get 15 GB shared across all Google services. Photos backed up at “Storage saver” quality are compressed and still count toward that quota — the era of unlimited free backup ended in 2021. Work out roughly how much you shoot before turning backup on, because filling the quota also stops Gmail from receiving mail.

What it does well

Search is the strongest part. It indexes what is in the pictures, so you can find things by typing what you remember rather than by date. Face grouping works on the same principle and can be switched off if you would rather it did not.

The editor covers the common cases — crop, exposure, colour — and a few computational ones like blur and background removal, some of which are gated behind a paid plan or particular hardware.

Things worth knowing

• Deleting a photo in the app deletes it from every synced device.
• “Free up space” removes local copies of already-backed-up photos; the originals live only in the cloud after that.
• Downloading your library back out is done through Google Takeout, not the app.