10 Years Ago, I Gave Google Photos A Chance And I Haven’t Looked Back

Joe Maring / Android Authority

I barely remember what photo management used to be like before Google Photos, or maybe I’ve wanted to erase that bit from my memory. There were microSD cards, hours of transfer to-and-from computers and hard disks, and even more hours spent renaming photos, creating folders for different events, topics, people, trying to keep the metadata accurate, and bundling every remaining pic in a mish-mash of a “misc” folder.

Finding a particular photo in that setup took minutes, if not hours of digging, and that was back when my life was boring and I took a few hundred photos a year, max. Imagine what it’d be like with my new photography hobby and multiple thousands of yearly snaps now! No, just no.

Google Photos sounded like a cool idea when it launched, 10 years ago to the day. And despite the app experiencing some fails, the wins far outweigh them, and it’s fair to say that it’s been a resounding success overall. It saved my sanity and the thousands of memories I’ve accumulated since 2015.

Goodbye folders, hello albums!

The organisational freak in me was really dubious about trusting Google to manage my albums when Photos launched. I wanted folders, subfolders, naming, and exact structure. I was so used to the one file belongs in one place computing ideology, and letting go of that was an exercise in frustration at first. For a few months, I used Photos as a secondary image library, still doing the whole manual folder organization on my computer.

Soon, though, it became clear that Photos was a superior system. Albums became tags, in my head, instead of folders, and that meant that one pic could belong to several albums at the same time. That was freeing. If I went on a hike with my friend, the photos could be in a standalone album of that hike but also in the album I dedicated to my friend. If took a nice landscape picture on a trip, I could keep it in the trip album and also add it to my wallpaper album.

My life got chaotic and a photo library in a folder structure would’ve never kept up. Google Photos’ albums saved my sanity.

This freedom came at the perfect time for me in 2015. Shortly after Google Photos launched, on June 10, I met my now-husband. I didn’t know it at the time, but my memories were about to become a lot more complex to manage than what a simple folder structure would allow. More friends, more events, more family members, a wedding, a new apartment, a move to another country, a new house, dozens of trips, a job change, and more. Life is chaotic, and manually managing that chaos would’ve driven me insane.

In the last decade, Photos went beyond simple albums and cemented itself as the best album management tool. Shared albums are fantastic for events and gatherings. I’ve made automatic albums for several friends and relatives and shared them with them, too. And my husband has full access to my library through the shared library feature. That means my best friend no longer asks me to send her this pic or that pic; she has them all. And when we’re shopping for furniture or anything else, really, and I take a pic, my husband can see it and go back to it many months down the line without asking me to send it over each time. Perfection.

Facial recognition revolutionized my memories

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

If you had to ask me for one standout feature, though, that was a complete game-changer in Photos (and there are many!), it’d be the facial recognition. It seemed cool and magical at first, but I didn’t know how human and amazing it would end up being, 10 years down the line. The first photo of my husband is in Photos; he’s lying on the tiny couch of my pharmacy’s stock room after an exhausting day at work. Photos has our entire relationship’s evolution since then. Searching for “Me and Marcel” brings back memories from all over the place: birthdays, hikes, trips, our wedding, but also random silliness, haircuts, clothes tryouts, and more.

It isn’t just him, though. I met new people, I lost many loved ones, and the fact that Photos has all of their faces catalogued for me without having to dig into individual dates or events means so much. The last pic of my grandma smiling, my late father-in-law holding my hand before my wedding, and silly memories with my two deceased cousins; they’re all easily accessible if I search for their names. As I age, and as more people I love leave this world, I realize how precious the memories I’ve had with them were.

Photos has (nearly) perfectly organized my pics, my husband’s, and our families, friends, and pets without me lifting a finger.

On a happier note, dogs and cats! It’s just hilarious when Photos groups photos of my short-term foster, my friend’s cute puppy that I saw grow up to become a majestically derpy Samoyed, the neighbors’ cats, the stray cat that I took care of for a couple of months near my pharmacy, and the two dogs whose company we enjoyed at one family Airbnb; all there.

On top of that, I love that Google Photos surfaces all these pics randomly through Memories. It’s one of the best “interruptions” I get from my phone, the one that always makes me stop, click, and relive those sometimes-forgotten moments. The simplicity and authenticity of that feature is very understated.

The best search, bar none

Robert Triggs / Android Authority

A couple of days ago, I needed to rent a small cargo van. I remembered I had taken a pic of one with a website link to rent on a specific street in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t remember anything else about the photo. I opened Photos, went to the Places view, zoomed in on that street, and found the pic with the rental website.

That’s the most manual search I’ve ever done on Photos. The rest are just done by using the search bar and describing details about the pic. “Tree and boat at night in Dbaye” to find the marina spot where I used to walk, “silhouette” to find my husband’s cool sunset pics in Meteora, “me and Kailig smiling” to unearth that hilarious pic with my friend’s Samoyed, “Riddhi Siddhi” to find that store sign in Nepal, “sofa” to look at all the sofas we checked out before deciding the one to buy, “pinball” to find that cool pinball museum in Budapest, and so on.

If a photo is on Photos, odds are it’s a simple search away.

Google Photos’ search has been amazing for me over the years. People, places, documents, specific moments, things, food, furniture, decor — it helps me find anything and everything I’ve ever snapped a pic of. And I can’t imagine ever going back to manually sifting through my pics to find the one I need.

Google Photos is not a backup solution, but it’s the best photo library

Andy Walker / Android Authority

There are many more Google Photos features that made fall in love with it over the past decade. Archives, photo stacks, non-destructive editing features, automatic fun creations, collages, manual face tags, location and time editing, and the amazing compatibility with Chromecast and Nest Hubs to display my photos on the screens in my home. No other photo service offers this level of easy display across multiple screens.

But I’d like to end this personal retrospective on one note. I know that Google Photos is one of the best photo backup services, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good backup solution. Plus, it’s a Google service, so who knows what its future will be like — many were burned by Google shutting down services here and there over the years. I highly doubt this would happen to Photos in the near future, and I don’t think it’d ever happen without ample warning, but if you treasure your memories, don’t trust them entirely to Photos. Get a NAS and use it in conjunction with Photos — maybe even get another storage solution that you keep in a different location, too. Keeping full control over your photo files means that you can always migrate to another solution like Ente without losing anything.

Having both has given me the peace of mind of knowing my photos are still mine while benefiting from all the perks that Google Photos has to offer. I don’t imagine I’d move to another photo solution anytime soon, though, because Google has its claws entirely on my heart. No other Google service is this personal; no other comes close. I love Photos because it’s my life, with all of its ups and downs, and I’d find it hard to forge a similar emotional connection with another app.