Twelve Steps to Make Yourself a Google Photos Master Step 1 – Share and Unshare No new accounts! Just sync everything you take on your phone and this stuff all works like magic. Plus, you’ve already got a Google account.

Google’s real accomplishment here is stringing everything together more or less seamlessly. Flickr can identify content in your photos and place them in broad categories. It’s also worth noting that all of this has been done before in some form or another. I had to download in increments from SmugMug (55 zipped files in all) and then unzip and upload folder by folder to Google Photos. For example, migrating 50GB of my photos from SmugMug to Google Photos was a headache. We still have a lot of exploration to do, and some pain points are already evident. Google Photos promises to turn the haphazard collection of images you generate daily into sortable batches of meaningful photos. The appealing features include unlimited storage for photos and videos, some neat user-interface tricks that make the thousands of photos that we all now take easier to navigate, and, perhaps most importantly, smart image recognition technology that makes your library of photos almost endlessly searchable.

The paid version is inexpensive (100 GB is $1.99/month. If you use the free version, Google will compress your photos (down to 16 megapixel – still quite large). I also knew that I would probably never look at Amazon Photos again. Within minutes of playing with the free product, I knew I was going to cancel my SmugMug account. To put it simply, Google Photos – even with its quirks – is a revelation.

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