Google’s new Photos app seems pretty great, with a consistent experience between the web and its native Android and iOS versions. The way your photos are organised is better than in Apple’s app, but the clincher is that they give you unlimited online storage if you're willing to have them compress the originals. Given that (for me) this is just for family snaps, that is fine.
My iCloud storage has been full for weeks, and a combination of not being bothered enough to get round to it and not being sure I want to pay for the service (5GB feels tight, given I recently spent £ hundreds on a new iPhone) has led me to leave it like that. So goodbye iCloud Photo Library.
And as a it happens you can still post photos to iCloud shared libraries (which are, confusingly, separate from the iCloud Photo Library) direct from the Google Photos app.
Anyway two days into using it a couple of things are eluding me:
- A lot of people are tweeting about how impressive the facial recognition is, and the feature was demonstrated in the Google IO Keynote, but my Google Photos app (and also on the web) has no mention of faces anywhere and no apparent means of manually tagging faces - despite my library being full of photos of my family. Perhaps they're rolling it out incrementally.
- Google has rather cleverly tagged and grouped a load of objects and things such as cats, cars, trains and food. However these collections contain some notable mistakes. A photo of one of my cats sleeping has appeared in the 'food' set, for example. Oddly there seems to be no way of untagging these things. Surely if you could then this could theoretically help its learning algorithm.
I'm guessing these things will be sorted out in due course, but there's a chance I'm just missing something obvious. I've searched Google and Twitter but can't find anyone else with the same problem (I mostly care about the face recognition).
Anyone else?
Google Photos – great but no faces? http://t.co/16pXoIZkcJ http://t.co/quX7duERpT